Happy Birthday America - There’s No Place Like Home

It’s been said that you can spot an American from a mile away. Travelers to Europe are advised to adjust their attire to blend in with locals and avoid looking so … casual. The French think Americans are loud and rude, and Europe has a long tradition of sneering at how classless we all are, even before Trump.

I spent a month in Italy, and it’s a beautiful place. The slow living, the long naps when all the stores shut down for hours during the day, the tiny cars, the laundry drying on the balconies, the fresh food at the Farmer’s Market. I feel lucky that when I came back from Italy, I was pregnant and having my baby is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. But I’m also glad she grew up in America.

I used to travel to France to cover the Cannes Film Festival, and again, I admired their way of life, the food especially. But every time I stayed too long, I began to miss my home in America. There is something thrilling about living in a free country that I’ve never felt anywhere else.

It seems to me that if you are born here, you make up your life as it goes along. It is not planned out for you, necessarily, although in some cases, I guess it probably is. In my case, it wasn’t. I knew I could invent myself any way I wanted. And if I didn’t like that version, I could reinvent myself. We’re like our country, a work in progress. It’s always there for the taking, that promise of opportunity.

Donald Trump is all of America’s freedoms wrapped up in one imperfect man. He broke through the thick layer of oppressive thought and speech and showed the world that here, you really can say anything you want - as long as some crazed totalitarian doesn’t try to shoot you.

That’s the country I want to live in. It isn’t that the greatest writing or art has come from a place like America. Plenty of great works have come from places that don’t center freedom as their main objective. But once you’ve tasted it, you can’t give it up.

In his speech last night, Trump said:

The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people, like you. You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future. Not going to let that happen.

They’re trying to tear down the great American character to destroy the people who declared independence, who crossed the Delaware, who settled the West and conquered the skies. You know who those people are. But we will never let that happen.

In America now, two stories are competing to claim the right to rule the future. Trump is telling the better story, the one America was founded on and the one we’ve all believed, at least up until recently, when a new wave of progressives decided that the better story paints America as a corrupt, rotten, white supremacist empire that has to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt.

They must be terrified about the 2030 Census because they’ve decided to die on the hill of illegal immigration, which is fast becoming their most important issue. That, alongside Democratic Socialism, is a recipe for disaster.

This was Bill Clinton’s bummer message on the Fourth:

I always thought Bill Clinton was a good president, but reading that just now makes me think he wasn’t. All he’s ever been able to do is point the finger at the other side and never offer any real solutions. He’s not the man in the arena. He’s the man on the sidelines.

What I love about Trump and his supporters is how much they love America. They love it so much that they plant flags all over their homes. They admire the Founding Fathers. They call themselves Patriots. We didn’t have that kind of pride on the Left when I was growing up.

And even now, so many see the American flag and the love of country as dangerous, racist, bigoted, fascist. Whoever told those people that is what MAGA is about lied. They’re protective of America’s laws and its border. That is out of love for the country.

The Left has taken almost everything from them. They’ve locked them out of culture, forbidden them from participating in any of their major events, dehumanized, demonized, and disenfranchised them.

But the one thing they couldn’t take was their citizenship. They hit the jackpot just by being born in America. To think it would be so easy for people all over the world to come here illegally and claim that prize or to come here and attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be devalues the one thing they treasure most of all.

I’ve always been a proud American. I’ve always preferred this country over any other, but only in the last few years have I understood what it means to be a Patriot, to be ready to fight for the country I love. And that is because of the people I’ve gotten to know on the Right.

This country is worth fighting for. I might not agree with all of the policies on the Right, or even Trump himself, all of the time, but I’d rather have the future of this country in the hands of people who love it the way Trump does than people who hate it, the way so many on the Left do, just because their candidates are weak and their policies are toxic.

I wanted to write 250 things I love about America, but it got too long, so this will have to do. Here are just some of the things I love:

I love the interstates as part of the great legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I love the Pacific Ocean because it stretches along the state.

I love Catalina Island off the California Coast, where I spent many a summer with my best friend.

I love seeing our history in the many cultures that came here, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Mexican food in LA, soul food in the South, Irish bars and pubs in the middle of nowhere. And yes, you can appreciate a nation of immigrants while still policing our borders now.

I love how nice people are in some places, like California, Ohio, and Iowa, where they smile at you on the street.

I love the weather extremes, from the dusty plains to the snowy mountains to hurricanes by the sea.

I love the historic monuments from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

I love the town squares that you can still see if you drive through the middle of America. Even though many are abandoned, they still look like hope to me.

I love how each town square has a church, a post office, and a school.

I love the many farmlands that blanket the Midwest.

I love the small mom-and-pop coffee drive-throughs, and even the convenience of a Starbucks in nearly every town.

I love Route 66 and how people still drive it and visit the forgotten places.

I love the absurdity of Las Vegas, how it sprouts up impossibly in the middle of the desert.

I love the American writers who helped shape our country’s sense of itself - Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Maya Angelou.

I love the musical traditions that started here: Jazz and the Blues. And became Rock n’ Roll.

I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the town that still remembers it.

I love diners and dive bars.

I love Gone with the Wind and how it’s still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.

I love The Twilight Zone and find it timeless, as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.

I love the footprints at the (Grauman’s) Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

I love the US military and its devotion to the country.

I love the wildflowers that bloom in California every year.

I love soft-serve ice cream at the DQ.

I love Levi’s.

I love New York pizza.

I love Solvang in California.

I love driving up the Oregon coast.

I love the songs of Bob Dylan.

I love the tap dancing of Fred Astaire.

I love how anyone can be a star on YouTube, no matter where they come from, but YouTube couldn’t have been invented anywhere but America.

I love how I could build a business as a single mom in a one-room guesthouse in Van Nuys, and that business would, five years later, become profitable because I worked hard and had a good idea.

And then, when my career went up in flames in 2024 because I voted for Trump, I could build another career on Substack because that is what America is all about - inventing and reinventing yourself.

I love the innovative spirit that built America in real life and online.

I love reading about the early settlers, the Puritans, and the homesteaders, how much they sacrificed to help make America a home. And I love the history of the Native Americans, too, even if so much of it remains a tragedy now.

I love high-speed internet and Wi-Fi that are available almost everywhere, and if they're not, I have a hotspot.

I love the old American cars that were not just exceptional but beautiful.

I love the tradition of baseball.

I love that people faithfully watch football, even if I don’t.

I love the tradition of sourdough bread all over social media.

I love that the best basketball players in the world are from here.

I love that every state is different from one to the next.

I love Harper’s Ferry, how it’s frozen in time.

I love that we found a way to move on from the trauma of our past with slavery and how we fought a bloody Civil War to end it.

I love that we were the good guys in World War II. We did the right thing in entering the war and helping the Allies win.

I love that you can be anything here. The door is always open. It’s up to you to walk through it.

I love that America is a Christian nation, and you can see that if you drive across it. But it’s also a country that stands for freedom of religion, too.

I love the American comedians: Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and Johnny Carson.

I love that the best films from the 1970s were American movies, like The Godfather, The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and Network.

But I also love more modern masterpieces by American filmmakers, like No Country for Old Men and Sideways.

I love that people play the lottery, thinking one day they will hit the jackpot. They never will, but they can still dream.

I love Thanksgiving and the way we celebrate it in America, which is to say, all together as one big dysfunctional family.

I love the tradition of Halloween and how every October, the pumpkins and costumes come out. I love the way the weather changes.

I love the Declaration of Independence and those who dared to build this wild, untamed, optimistic work in progress.

I love that America is always looking to the future to find a better version of itself and its people. I love that so many Americans still believe in the American Dream.

I love watching the movie Jaws on the 4th of July.

I love that people watch fireworks, even if I never do, because they traumatize my dogs.

I love that we have a holiday just to celebrate the day we became a country, a ragtag group of deplorable revolutionaries who set out to build a brand new country. Oh, the audacity of it.

I love living here and would not want to live anywhere else.

Happy 250th Birthday, my beloved country.

Happy 4th to you, dear readers. Thanks for everything. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend.

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