Patriotism is a bad habit, and I should knowPeople bemoan the patrioti...

Patriotism is a bad habit, and I should knowPeople bemoan the patriotic fervor which pervades our society, but my own experience is that that love for one’s country is rather more selective than most people think.For example, I came to the United States, for a sum total of around a dollar in cash, from a small backwater town in China — Zhongzheng, in fact. And I was no exception to the local custom of watching — we call it “shaming” — one’s neighbors’ business transactions in order to determine whether or not they were carrying cash, and I watched the activities of everyone I met on the streets of