I may have sounded a little harsh in my Fourth of July post. I went on and on about how little the flag means to me and how, when I was cutting my teeth on political thought back in 1968, the United States was about as admirable as a two-bit loan shark and his muscle.

If you caught the idea that I hate this country, then I pitched the wrong idea.

I can't deny that this great land was - and still is, although to a lesser extent - racist, sexist, violent, xenophobic, homophobic, materialistic, and suspicious of intellectuals. Not exactly my kind of land.

Then again, it is an amalgam of 300 million souls and, according to the laws of probability, there must be a hell of a lot of five-star assholes within that stewpot. Shoot, occasionally we put one in the White House.

Anyway, there are assholes in every nation on the planet. Pick up a newspaper on any day of the week and you'll want to run out of the room screaming for all the sins committed in the name of god and country from Iran to the United Kingdom to Myanmar. Nations as a whole are neither definitively bad or good (save for a very few like Kim Jong Il's little East Asian snake pit.) That's because people are both bad and good. If there's any lesson you want to teach your kids or grandkids, it's just that. People make up nations, religions and economic systems. As such, those gangs can occasionally elevate the species and then, the next day, screw their brothers and sisters without so much as a thank you.

But I believe the United States is a little different. No kidding. The men who created this nation were slave-holders and ruthless businessmen but their thoughts were strongly influenced by the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. They clung to the benighted past by acknowledging the existence of some kind of god but a scant few of them actually belonged to any church. They took great pains to reserve rights and liberties for white male landowners yet they agreed to proclaim All men are created equal.

The truth is, it might have been too much to expect them to embrace women, Africans and sodomists. Take what you can get, and in the late 1700s if you could get a powerful group of moneyed, armed men to propose that none of them was better than another by dint of birth or decree of god, then hell, you were riding the wave of the future.

The history of this country, as Molly Ivins once opined, is really nothing more than the extension of that egalitarianism to everybody else.

That's why black men and women, who once were bought and sold like Ford Escorts, still are loyal to America. They've realized that the Declaration of Indepedence and the Constitution of the United States of America were written for them, even if the writers didn't know it at the time.

You want to know how much I love the United States? I keep a hardbound book containing the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution in my bathroom. I read from it almost every day. I'm still blown away by the fact that a pre-Industrial Revolution, pre- high tech, pre-global gang of men could have passed into law the First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Yow! That was enacted in a year, 1791, when Frenchmen by the hundreds were killed by the national guard for demanding an end to the royal succession, when British mobs rioted because some fellow citizens didn't hew precisely to the dictates of the Church of England, and when the Pope was still the boss of a fairly muscular empire.

I can choose to be pessimistic and say the First Amendment has resulted in the lunacy of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck or I can celebrate the idea that anyone who despises the president can shout it from his or her rooftop. Today, I choose to be an optimist.

So yeah, my neighbors who marched in Murray Hill's Independence Day parade love, love, love their country, I guess. But do any of them have a copy of the US Constitution in their bathroom?