Originally published at crisis magazine
Having lived in Austria for seven years, I have perhaps a keener appreciation of my native land than ever before, much as I have come to love the lands of the Habsburg monarchy. Another presidential election looms ever closer, with perhaps the bitterest atmosphere of any in my 63 years of experience. Whatever the result, it shall undoubtedly continue the process of national division and outright hatred that has become the hallmark of our life as a country. I shall not be on hand for it, but I shall be watching from my foreign home.
This bitterness is a tremendous pain to me because, to be honest, I love the United States of America. Not the idea of them—the “last, best hope of Mankind,” the “Shining City on the Hill,” and all the rest of it, for all that I was raised with that. I love the messy, incongruous reality of them. I love the flag—the “Star Spangled Banner,” “Old Glory,” the “Stars and Stripes”—not as a symbol of some abstract “liberty,” but as the emblem of the land I love, for which and under which thousands of brave men and women have died, and which my grandfather, great uncles,
