Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers.

Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.

In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. . . No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of "mourn together, suffer together." City on a hill, though -- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we ARE Ronald Reagan.

I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those people are kind of old.

The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.