I watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech tonight. And you know, I was deeply moved. Seeing her on that stage acknowledging the 18 MILLION people who supported her throughout this primary season…was it simply the spectacle, the scope, the drama of it all that evoked my emotional response (I won’t lie, I’m a sucker for that stuff)? No, there was more to it than that. Throughout her speech, I kept thinking to myself, “What an extraordinary time this is: the woman and the black man; the galvanized youth; the renewed excitement for politics and public service.” For the first time in a while, I feel (should I say it?), well, uh, proud to be American! It appears that “Americanism” could once again be equated with that which is progressive, diplomatic, ethical, international, instead of isolationist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual.
I will admit, I’d been kind of subscribing to the famous Samuel Johnson quote equating patriotism with the “refuge of scoundrels”; interestingly though, a 2003 New York Times article cites 18th century Scottish lawyer and Johnson biographer, James Boswell, as writing that he [Johnson] ”did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many . . . have made a cloak for self-interest.”
So maybe it’s okay to say that I like my country after all. Maybe I don’t need to go all Fitzgeraldian, smoking at some Parisian cafe trying to repress the memories of my “former life.” Maybe I can travel to Berlin this summer and not make false claims of Canadian citizenship, and I can sing the national anthem and mean it again; maybe we will finally see a black man in the white house come January.
Beyond this, however, I felt as I watched Senator Clinton tonight, a more general sense of renewed optimism and resourcefulness. A sense of in-the-now living, an immense gratitude that as a woman living in America I was able to pursue a professional, independent life, not to mention one in the arts. Maybe this is narcissistic to say, but I can’t help feeling it is my duty to sing – for the sake of art and feminism and patriotism and globalism and humanism and……..enough 
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