The wingnut brigade is falling over itself today because Michelle Obama is proud of her country. They think it’s a bad thing. Specifically, Obama said:

[F]or the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.

They can’t stand the implication that she hasn’t had much to feel proud of in the past. Naturally they think that’s her fault, and naturally they’re ginning up their slavering noise machine, complete with screaming Drudge headlines and oleaginous crap from repulsive loons like John Podhoretz and Michelle Malkin.

But, really, what is questionable, or even surprising, about such a sentiment? What decent American hasn’t been frustrated and disappointed by the country’s many inequities, its many failures to make good on its own promise, and the repeated disasters engendered by lack of decency among its leadership? Who hasn’t been hungry for the chance to claim the birthright of true equality, true freedom, and political and material largesse that America portends, without making excuses or sweeping historical travesties and abuses under the rug? And for black Americans especially, who but a fool would imagine that the American dream and promise has been anything but a mockery of partial fulfillment and cynical denial? If you have any decency or sympathy at all, how can you not feel unsatisfied with America’s halting and incomplete fulfillment of its promise?

[more after the jump]

Langston Hughes said it brilliantly:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed –
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where
Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”) . . .

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

Obama has said nothing more than Hughes - and she is just as right as him, and, sadly, America’s dream is almost, though not quite, as much deferred today as it was for him. But Obama claims that she sees what Hughes could not, and that America is now seeking the change that Hughes vowed would come. That is a bold statement of faith in the country, and a remarkable affirmation - that America has now earned the pride of living up to its ideals. Frankly, I don’t know that I’d go that far - but the wingers explode into shrieking rage at the mere suggestion that pride even has to be earned. (I suppose a lifetime of smug self-satisfaction and unearned privilege will do that to you.)

To the right wing, the mere suggestion that there is anything to improve about America is, literally, treason. The idea that there are Americans who have been left behind, let alone ill-treated by design and by neglect, and still more that they should have the “audacity of hope” for better treatment, is likewise a blasphemy. And so the fact that some can take pride in the coming of better days for America is hateful to them, because it rightly implies that the former days of exclusionary, triumphalist indulgence by the right wing are less than an American apotheosis. They hate Obama for demanding that America live up to its ideals, and earn her allegiance; really, they hate those ideals, and anyone who would take them seriously.