Most Valuable Patriot

What made you feel patriotic on the Nation's 250th?

Reese Witherspoon’s impossibly symmetrical bob shakes a little as she winds up and punches Mr. McDreamy’s mother, the Mayor of New York, landing her flat on her back at the altar of the would-be southern-bumpkin wedding, as Reese’s father, still adorned in his Confederacy reenactment regalia, steps up and exclaims, “The South has risen again!”

That is an insane sentence.

Also, the climactic moment of the 2002 blockbuster romcom, Sweet Home Alabama. This was one of two specifically American movies that I watched on the nation’s 250th birthday—my first Fourth of July abroad.

As a young man, I, like many other college freshmen, read The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn and have since carried that directionless shame about celebrating this holiday—each year that shame disinfected by the chlorine of crowded swimming pools and ultimately drowned out with BuzzBalls and Coors Light.

The early hours of this holiday were spent at LAX, for I, a traitor, was flying to England. It is uncanny how well the Delta terminal serves as a frenzied little simulacrum of our country. And as I questioned my patriotism in line at Jersey Mike’s, I glanced past the family of six to the girl who’d just ordered her Gabagool & Ham on Wheat. She wore a tight white T-shirt with bedazzled red & blue letters that read,

MOST VALUABLE PUSSY.

Well, there really is no place like home, I thought to myself. And from some distant recess of my brain, I heard, America, fuck yeah???

Half a turkey sub later, and I was hiding my face from the two British fellows seated next to me so they wouldn’t see that I, the American, was crying… TO LINCOLN.

“Yes, lads, of course it’s sentimental; it’s Spielberg. But when does patriotism ever feel valorous instead of gaudy?”

As I tried to keep pace with Daniel Day-Lewis’s soft-spoken elocution, I imagined trying to explain to the 16th president the implications of gender empowerment imbued in the pussy shirt. Would he deem it American?

Would President Lincoln ask me if my leaving on the holiday felt American?

I might tell him about the most gratuitously American I’d ever felt. The time I sang at a millionaire’s private Fourth of July party in Malibu, where, upon request, I crescendoed our set with a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as his hired pyrotechnician lit commercial-grade fireworks from a barge 100 yards offshore.

I’d also tell him about my 97-year-old Grandpa. A retired Army Colonel who texts daily reports of Florida storm patterns, swimming pool temps, and fact-driven laments over the reproachable nature assumed by the country he devoted his life to.

His continual scholarship is bewildering and impressive. His anger is sincere, and his fervor is the most authentically patriotic thing in my life. And as I lay there at the end of my long travel day, cozied up in a flat in East London watching the credits roll on Sweet Home Alabama, I think about:

…how I love Reese Witherspoon, but feel gross when I see the Confederate flag toted proudly in a movie made in the 21st Century.

…how I love Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg, but feel gross when I see the idiocratic AI photos the Cheeto Puff King posts to ‘Truth’ Social.

…how I love Jersey Mike’s and am stoked for the girl in the MOST VALUABLE PUSSY T-shirt—we should all be so proud of something—but feel gross when I see videos of rich kids in Newport looting a Pavilions Super Market.

When I think of this crude satire storm, I feel dismay—which is acutely different from rage. But when I think of my Grandpa sending messages to three generations of his family and how badly I want him to live to see a shift in a positive direction, my dismay resembles real anger. And in that anger, a whole ocean away from the USA, I feel patriotic.

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A Pastry Abroad and other photos by Tiffany Tyson