Terrible news: if Obama wins, you have to love America! That's right, New Yorkers have given the game away—all the hipster Obama gear and unconcealed excitement at his candidacy means no longer can we hide behind our secret glee at the utter rejection of our values and lifestyle by "Real America." If it's a landslide, we're screwed. Do we really want our smirking appropriation of the gung-ho patriotic vernacular (America—fuck yeah!) to suddenly become... sincere? As Doree Shafrir writes in today's Observer, some New Yorkers are becoming dangerously proud of their country.

He added: “So the frame of patriotism in the Obama campaign holistically is oriented around openness and inclusion and the American dream, and the American ideal that there is a place for everyone in our society.” That’s usually the sort of thematic turf taken up by the purebred liberals who run in primaries but don’t actually win. But with an Obama presidency so close to becoming a reality—promising an unprecedented experiment, following the Bush years, in global image reclamation—it’s all dovetailing nicely with how the new patriotism might play out among the kids. “I think people will see Americans differently,” said 19-year-old Cindy Morand, a student at the University of Buffalo who grew up in the East Village; she contributed an essay to Red: The Book, an anthology of teenage girl writing, and has also blogged for the Huffington Post. “They can see we’re getting over our own social problems. We’ve changed as a country.”

Even our elite liberal media is getting into the act, with decadent metrosexual magazine Men's Vogue sending out flag lapel pins. Fellow godless liberals, we've just spent seven years defining patriotism as the right to find flag pins tacky and stupid, are we really turning our back on all that just because our guy's probably going to win? Shouldn't we be taking this opportunity to engage in a grand "I told you so" moment, not encouraging that "No Red America, No Blue America" garbage? If we give in to loving America, it will just hurt us again.