I’ll never forget the first day of high school history, senior year: Mr. Smith (I’ve changed his name for the sake of anonymity) entered the classroom, removed an American flag from the wall and hurled it to the ground.

“How does this make you feel?” he asked, stomping on the flag after every single word. The class was slack-jawed.
“Remember this feeling,” he said. “This is what 20th century history is all about.”
Patriotism.
It’s one of those words — like art, terrorism, evil, love and God — that I cannot define, except to say, “I know it when I feel it.”
And I felt a patriotic rage that morning watching Mr. Smith step on the Stars and Stripes, especially since he was a well-known socialist and draft-dodger. The feeling surprised me. I didn’t think I was the patriotic type.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many Americans who never thought of themselves as patriotic were suddenly overcome by a similar rage. Rhetoric changed overnight. The Mr. Smiths of the world — the self-identifying proud anti-patriots — joined the dinosaurs as an extinct species. The question, “Can one be unpatriotic and a good citizen?” fell away into thin air.
Now, the guy burning the American flag at an anti-war rally claims to be a patriot; that dissent is patriotic. The most unpatriotic legislation in my lifetime appropriates the word, along with a tortured, Orwellian title. And CEOs trip over themselves to market their product as the most patriotic brand of toothpaste or fabric softener.
The natural momentum of big words is to grow ever bigger and more inclusive, so inclusive that they become meaningless: Everyone is patriotic, everything is art, any act of violence is terrorism, everyone bad is evil, every good feeling is love, God is everywhere and everything.
I usually denounce these definitions as philosophically lazy, but, in the case of patriotism, I think it is a good thing.
We no longer need to ask, “Which is patriotic: Stomping on the flag or refusing to; questioning or listening; being skeptical or having faith; focusing on progress or tradition?” We should toss this question away because to ask it is really to ask, “Who counts as an American?”
We have yet to reach a consensus on that question. Arab-Americans have been made to feel more and more Arab and less and less American over the last few years. Even those who originate from other parts of the Islamic world — whatever that is — have felt this pressure on their identity.
In North Portland, for example, a group of South Asian immigrants began hanging American flags in the windows of their hotels along Interstate Avenue, not because of a sudden burst of patriotism, but rather as a statement of identity: It says to their community, “We consider ourselves American, too.”
In response, a few of the other hotel owners began hanging a new sign next to their flags: “American-owned.” It was an attempt to cut that word down to size, to keep it in line and in check, to keep the big word from getting too big.
For some, the A-word is near microscopic.
Once, when Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly disagreed with an African-American guest, he said, “You can go back to Africa if you want to. I mean, you could go and repatriate back.”
Repatriate?
And remember the oft-used response to anti-war protesters and liberals in general: “Go live in Iraq if you hate America!” I guess the logic is: Shut up and enjoy your freedom of speech.
It seems to me, as I reflect on patriotism and the enormous debt we owe our veterans — debt being the perfect word since it has gone unpaid for decades — the word American can never be too inclusive. It seems to me that the word American was originally created to be all-inclusive: to grow too big and become meaningless. For that meaninglessness could speak volumes about America’s most cherished ideals.
Who knows? Maybe one day the word will grow so large that it can include Mr. Smith as well.