"Why do you hate America so much?"

Among the many absurd linguistic artifacts of the now-delightfully-receding era of George W. Bush, the preceding question surely deserves the cocaine Christian cowboy duncecap as much as "Mission Accomplished" or "Freedom Fries." Who, indeed, can ever forget those halcyon months following 9/11, when any American citizen who dared to criticize the actions--overseas or otherwise--of the Boy Emperor was quickly bludgeoned into ridicule with the rhetorical sledgehammer of the aforementioned question?

Now that America has collectively chosen to trade in an appallingly anti-intellectual "president" for a head of state who not only can think and speak in paragraphs (as opposed to sentence fragments and malapropisms) but also--as anyone who has known the readerly pleasure of perusing Dreams Of My Father might attest--possesses a flair for printed prose all-too-rare among elected public officials, what ever in alleged Heaven's name are we to do with the prosaically pathetic aforementioned artifact?

I'll attempt here, articulately or otherwise, to answer that question shortly. But first, please allow me to indulge in a rhetorical reverie both Seattle-centric and--okay, I'll admit it--author-centric. Here we go.

Were you lucky enough to be on the corner of Pike and Broadway, ground zero for Seattle's Capitol Hill--surely one of the most unrepentantly liberal-and-then-some neighborhoods in Washington state, if not the United States of America--on the evening of Nov. 4, 2008? If so, you likely then witnessed the truly amazing sight of a full-size American flag waving wildly over a delightfully drunken victory celebration driven and populated by--dig this, dittoheads--an allegedly "America-hating" coterie of out-and-proud-thank-you queer folks, punk rockers, pot smokers, single mothers, liberal bloggers, anarchist yearners and all left-of-center points in between. Bill O'Reilly and his ilk must surely have been confused about the fact that Seattle's bohemian revelers weren't burning the flag that evening, but rather raising it high. After years of assuming that any American who is not a blind jingoist must have nothing in their heart for their nation but hatred, it's a miracle that Bill O'Reilly's head didn't explode live on camera upon learning on the evening of Nov. 4, 2008 that, yes, some of us lefties, ambivalently or otherwise, love our country too.

Let me try to explain why. While most, if not all, of us leftists abhor the venal nationalism that passes for patriotism among much of the American right, many of us still identify strongly with America's cultural heritage, even to the degree that, rather than fleeing US citizenship as some resorted to during the Bush era, we've been determined to stay and fight to balance out America's atrocities with activism aimed at making our nation what it has always had the potential to be--namely, a true democracy, a font of great works of art and literature, and a nation that takes care of its weakest as well as its strongest. Only one of these has been definitively achieved so far, but only the stubbornest anti-authoritarian could deny that our nation's cultural heritage is great enough to explain, at least in part, why Old Glory was flying over Seattle's most left-of-center neighborhood on the evening of Nov. 4, 2008.

Indeed, there exists a list, elite in the best way possible, of linguistically, musically, and/or visually artistic giants whose genius was and/or is inextricably linked with their identity, reluctant or otherwise, as children of American culture, both popular and political. Among the many of those of us who live deeply in awe of that list, we who have long been appalled at the America of Wounded Knee, My Lai, and Abu Ghraib have also long been enthralled with the America of Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, and Bob Dylan; the America of Susan B. Anthony, Billie Holiday, and Patti Smith; the America of Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington; and, now, yes, the America that has just taken a giant leap towards paying back our historic debt to Africa by electing one of her descendants to our highest public office.

It should go without saying that Barack Obama should not be viewed as a messiah, and we should all brace ourselves for the same gauntlet of lobbyists and money-friendly Congressmembers that Obama will have to run through in his first 100 days in office. But given the state of the nation in 2008, chances are that Obama's presidency will enable the realization of many long-deferred progressive dreams--with, of course, unrelenting grassroots pressure. Those of us on the left should never underestimate the power of the fact that, despite the delusions of the Dittohead Nation, this country belongs to us, too. In other words, to paraphrase the aforementioned Langston Hughes, from a poem in which he tersely, yet fiercely, refused exclusion by redneck assholes from the aforementioned Thomas Paine's lingering dream, "We, too, sing America."

To any among the American right who today still unrepentantly support the alleged US president who has profoundly wasted the course of the preceding eight years betraying Thomas Paine's lingering dream by wiping his ass (excuse my French, but I gotta keep it real!) with the document that remains both America's defining political foundation and one of our greatest cultural artifacts--namely, the United States Constitution--what follows is my humble rebuttal, as well as the potential redemption, promised in a preceding paragraph, of a once-absurd rhetorical fastball.

Why do you hate America so much?