Not long ago, Susan and I went to the Mountain Heritage Arts and Crafts Festival, which sprawled across an enormous field in West Virginia. There, I saw enough "Proud to be an American" t-shirts to hold me for a while.

Before we had even passed back out the gates and located the car in the gently sloping, beaten-down meadow that served as a parking lot, I was hunting for alternatives. Something must be done to wean my people off this dangerous addiction to escapist nationalism. It's a drug we're ingesting in increasing doses to take our minds off our collective troubles. But while we lie twitching on the bathroom floor with glitter-stars flowing in our veins, decades worth of progress in civil liberties is being heisted from the apartment by our smarmy landlords. To run with the metaphor.

After batting around a few variations of "Proud to be [Accident of Birthplace]" I spent an evening drawling up "Proud to be Appalachian," which I immediately sent off to be printed on a test t-shirt.

I had so much fun that I began considering the possibility of abandoning my regular paid work and building a t-shirt empire. That's kind of where I am with work right now. Being a designer can be a little hard when you actually have to listen to your clients and do what they want instead of what I know they should want. I need a little break and the shirt empire was like a sliver of daylight coming in under the exit door. I envisioned carrying the shirt around to various alternagear merchants who would see in it the potential for bazillions of dollars and a creeping tide of humorous reflection on the whole "American" thing. So being a traveling salesman seems like fun to me right now.

I showed the shirt to Jim, who felt that maybe the satire was a so muted as to be invisible to many people. He suggested something like a car up on blocks to grub things up. But I realized something funny -- I really do have a measure of pride in my rural upbringing and the perspective it forever provides on my urban life. I'm glad I'm not a real city person in much the same way that most Americans are pleased that they don't have to spend their lives in base poverty under a corrupt government someplace extremely hot. Proud to be [Accident of Formative Environment].

I actually slapped together a store through CafePress just in case anybody would like to get their own shirt.