Let’s hear it for those spacious skies and amber waves of grain, baby!

LOS ANGELES — Your faithful correspondent returns to the United States today, for a month-long vacation/family obligation tour. The Mexican school year is over, so it was a logical time to head back. But as it happens, this is also the week when we raise our glasses in honor of the 232nd birthday of this great experiment in representative democracy.

We are often at our nationalistic most when outside of the country, and since I’m no exception, I’ll be raising mine extra high this year.

Why? Because while our society is highly imperfect, as anyone who grew up around guilty liberals knows very well, the glass I raise will be half full. Our forefathers were responsible for the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans, the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians. More recently, we the living are all in some small way responsible for the commencement of yet another mostly pointless war, this one featuring the torture of foreign nationals. (No matter your opinion, some of your tax dollars went to Guantanamo Bay and to Baghdad.) Morale is low these days. Lots of people hate us, and it doesn’t quite seem like a flag-waving sort of moment.

But it is. This is still a country worth raucously celebrating, for two big reasons that set us out from the pack. They are reasons that are so subtle that they don’t often crystallize into reality without some unusual circumstance, like living outside the country.

First, thanks to many generations of anal-retentive government bureaucracies and competent leadership, we have the hardware for success. I’m talking about the stuff that functions so well that nobody ever thinks about it: The reliable electrical grids, the good roads, the efficient rail networks, the mostly incorruptible judicial system, the telephone lines, the fiber-optic lines, the schools, the universities, and all those millions of good-hearted people who issue business licenses, arrange lot-line adjustments, read water meters, guard prisoners, give out traffic tickets, manage campgrounds and assess property values without taking bribes.

Why are we filthy rich while many of our neighbors to the south live on less than $2 per day? Why do so many people have the problem of not having enough to eat, while we all have the problem of eating too much? You could write a very long book on the reasons, but here’s a big one: Over the generations we have evolved a tradition of delivering quality public services and good regulation that makes innovation and job creation not just possible, but easy.

This service doesn’t just translate into the luxury of convenience, for often these unheralded government institutions also keep us safe. The other day, as a friend of mine walked to work at 8:00 a.m., she witnessed an few men in masks stopping a car and kidnapping its occupants at gunpoint - not an unusual occurrence for Zamora. So what is more tragic? The fact that such a thing can happen in the first place, or the fact that nobody called the police. Why bother, after all, when they could take a half hour to arrive, and anyway might very well be paid off by the same organized crime figures who arranged the kidnapping in the first place.

And the list goes on. In exchange for some cash, building inspectors overlook the lack of rebar in concrete structures, and as a result lots of people die in the next earthquake. Paramilitary units, apparently accountable to nobody, torture their fellow citizens. These are ripped straight from the headlines of the local paper in Zamora, but they’re not even front page headlines, since these happenings are so routine.

Sure, Mexico is still a great country. After this U.S. visit I’m going right back. But anyone who has managed to spend time in a non-first-world country without developing a more nuanced appreciation for the United States was quite simply not paying attention.

Here’s another reason to join the cheer: We Yanks change, and we deeply believe in our collective gut that it - whatever it happens to be at the moment - can be done.

Those who followed the Democratic Primaries heard this line dozens of times. Obama’s early stump speech concluded with a rousing list of all the great things we have accomplished over the years. Clinton’s line was more to the point: “There’s nothing we can’t do if we start acting like Americans again.”

We have it in our power to make the world over again. The sentiment is just as true today as when Thomas Paine said it during the revolution. A cliche? Perhaps, but cliches can still be true.

Since the birth of this unlikely nation we have been a people that marched to the beat of a different drummer. We dream big, work hard, and make a lot of mistakes. We’re the world’s rebels, and it has brought us some big successes and some big failures. We got to the moon, but we also got to Vietnam. We built the transcontinental railroad, the Hoover Dam, and we invented the light-bulb, the telephone, the P.C., and the Internet. We also invented the atom bomb. We hosted the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the so far the gay rights movement seems to be going pretty well. But we also created the terrible conditions that necessitated those movements in the first place.

So we get in trouble from time to time, and thanks largely to the current administration, this is one of those times. But this too shall pass, grasshopper. It’s a good bet that one day we will again be that shining beacon on the hill.

It’s also a good bet that one day we will again be the embarrassed outcasts of the world, because history usually repeats itself. But this is to be expected from a country founded by rebels, and today populated by a tumultuous mix of unemployed factory workers, retirees, NPR listeners, immigrants, farmers, and Texans, all represented by an uncountable number of ethnic groups.

Our country. Often right, often wrong. But right or wrong, our country.