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I’ve been failing to figure out how to feel about this strange thing that’s happened, but Rob McDougall’s essay comes the closet to helping me find the words, by quoting the Simpsons:

Bart: “Wow. I feel so full of…what’s the opposite of shame?”
Marge: “Pride?”
Bart: “No, not that far from shame.”
Homer: [quavering] “Less shame?”
Bart: [happy] “Yeah…”

Also this:
Barack Obama is “all about ‘change,’ but it’s change that reaffirms the traditional virtues of the nation. “In no other country on earth is my story possible,” he says, unwittingly paraphrasing that Simpsons episode where Lisa loses a patriotic essay contest to the Vietnamese boy who asks, ‘Where else but in America, or possibly Canada, could our family find such opportunity?’”

Read the whole thing.