Of course, any reason to not go into work is, by definition, a good thing. Sometimes I think we should be honest with ourselves and just call the Fourth of July "Barbeque Day" or "Air-Conditioned Movie Day"?

Ever since I was a little girl wondering how they made those fireworks go off in the shape of the flag, I've always felt proud to be an American on July 4th. Yes, we're puritanical and heavily armed. But we also have, like, democracy and some junk.

If you'd like to remind yourself of that act of rebellion we're supposed to be celebrating, check out the Declaration of Independence, available from several sites, including MemoWare at http://www.memoware.com.

You show me a U.S. citizen who says "I don't much think of myself as American" and I'll show you an American who's never been abroad. You don't know how American you are until you go someplace else. Not only will everyone else immediately identify you as an American (before you even open your mouth -- how can they tell??) but you will be homesick for things like shopping malls and the right to free speech.

You might think you'd be homesick for food, but that never happens. No matter what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, McDonald's, of course, is everywhere -- but places like Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken are catching up. Recently I read that Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in China were besieged with protestors after our unfortunate accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia. And like you, my first thought on reading that was: China has KFC? And they say Sino-American relations are in the toilet. How can that be when they can get Original Recipe?

Original Recipe: American satire
You remember satire. Americans used to be good at it. Now it's pretty much limited to Michael Moore and Dennis Miller. But we used to be famous for it, and Mark Twain was one of our major exports in the satire arena.

Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad is still a funny, wry commentary on being American out among the people who live in the rest of the world. Twain's journalistic style makes this long work easy to read -- it's really a series of accounts of various travels, each one relatively stand-alone. When he was traveling the world, America was barely out of the dusty frontier stage and was certainly still a rough backwater. Twain wallows in his own American-ness, making constant sarcastic remarks about "natives" who haven't caught on to the joys of capitalism yet, and about old-world types who worship rather nasty ruins and don't wash often enough.