Patriotism: Ur doing it wrong

I mentioned a while back that on my way down here I read an article on Patriotism in a Time magazine I picked up in the Airport. The cover of the magazine was simple, white with the standard, red, time border and a flag pin sitting in the middle of the cover. The article was an expository argument on the differing views of Patriotism between the two parties and how they're both valid. 

This coupled with Obama's speech on Patriotism the following week got me thinking about the subject and how absurd it is. Specifically, the side of patriotism that many see as a true love of their country strikes me as absurd, the "Republican" version in the Times article, the unwavering faith that our country is the greates on the planet. I'm going to take a quote from Thomas J. Scheff's theory of Runaway Nationalism, it's a little more current than Orwell:

The infatuation-trance of blind patriotism is like the naked trust that small children have for their parents. After 911, some of my colleagues were asking "Why do they hate us?" But if I answered by pointing to the machinations of our government over the last fifty years in the Middle East and the slaughter and mayhem that resulted, they rapidly lost interest. They didn’t want to hear, with no concern even with whether what I said was true or not.

I bought a flag pin the other day, and I'm wearing it on the lapel of my jacket. It might just stay there through the rest of winter, er... summer and into our winter. It's an Argentine flag crossed with Ireland's. I take it as an indication of my liberal form of patriotism: how much I  believe in what our government could achieve, what it stands for, and the countries to which I plan to emigrate as an expatriate when it falls apart from corruption.