From The Pain Comics:

I am now called on to experience emotions that have become unfamiliar and confusing from disuse, like pride in my country, and faith in my fellow man. My colleague Sarah Glidden told me she was thrilled to see a spontaneous crowd in the streets of Brooklyn unfurl a giant American flag and chant, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”--a spectacle that has previously only repelled her, since for the last eight years it’s generally meant that someone, somewhere in the world, was getting killed. Last night I was walking through a rain-sheened Union Square and found myself thinking, I’m pretty sure for the first time ever: “This really is the greatest country in the world.” Watching Obama’s speech Tuesday night, hearing him talk about America as a beacon of hope, an example to the world—and knowing that the rest of the world really was watching, and that maybe just this once, it was really true--I realized that some part of me never stopped believing in all that crap. I am reminded, embarrassingly, of the one scene I found moving in the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the Pevensie children meet the earliest and greatest of childhood myths, Father Christmas himself, looking like some splendid medieval lord, and Lucy, the youngest, smiles with quiet vindication and says: “I told you he was real.”