Thanks to Mrs. M (who doesn't like being mentioned in blogs) for telling me about this site.

"I love my country. I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history. I particularly cherish its civic ideals -- social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy -- and the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice. I realize that patriotism, like any powerful ideology, is a "construction" with multiple uses, some of which I abhor. But I persist in drawing stimulation and pride from my American identity."-- Michael Kazin