The Partly Cloudy Patriot

This collection of personal essays by Sarah Vowell blends memoir, history, cultural commentary, and political observation. Covering events from roughly 1999 to late 2001, the book uses the contested 2000 presidential election and the September 11 attacks as anchoring events. Across 19 essays, Vowell examines what it means to be a critical, informed American who loves her country without being able to silence the part of her brain that knows its history of contradictions.

The collection opens with "What He Said There," in which Vowell visits Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the 137th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. She tours the battlefield where 51,000 men were killed, wounded, or went missing, then visits the house where Lincoln polished his final draft. She identifies with Lincoln as a fellow procrastinating writer and reflects on the Address's simultaneous purposes: eulogizing the dead, redefining the nation's founding ideals, comforting families, and implicitly campaigning for reelection. At the annual commemoration ceremony, a Lincoln impersonator reads the Address, after which an eight-year-old boy observes that the impersonator is too short.

In "The First Thanksgiving," Vowell's parents, who have never been east of the Mississippi, and her twin sister Amy, who brings her infant son Owen, visit her in New York City. The family avoids talking about politics, religion, and Vowell's personal life. They visit Ellis Island, where their great-grandmother arrived from Sweden, triggering unspoken memories of their own family's migration from Oklahoma to Montana. On Thanksgiving, Vowell takes charge of the cornbread dressing for the first time, a symbolic transfer from her mother that fills her with dread about aging and mortality. She describes periodic episodes she calls the "Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy," a shared family trait of claustrophobic introversion that both binds and separates them. The visit ends on the Empire State Building observation deck, where everyone silently wishes they were home.

"Ike Was a Handsome Man" is framed as a memo to President Bill Clinton offering advice on his forthcoming presidential library. Vowell tours the Kennedy, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon libraries, finding the Johnson and Nixon libraries her favorites because they engage with quarrelsome subjects. She catalogs Clinton's failures that should not be whitewashed, from the health care debacle to the Lewinsky scandal, and advises him to own those failures honestly.

In "God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass," Vowell explores her identity as a history buff drawn to sites of violence. On a French Revolution walking tour in Paris, she sees a street sign where the word "saint" was gouged out of the masonry, an image she finds a perfect metaphor for how history erases and revises. She visits Salem, Massachusetts, where 20 people were executed during the 1692 witch trials, and buys a souvenir whiskey glass while reflecting on the town's commercialization of its darkest chapter. She identifies Salem and Gettysburg as her favorite historical subjects because they embody the central American tension between individual freedom and community obligation.

"Democracy and Things Like That" investigates how a single misquoted word from Al Gore's speech at Concord High School in New Hampshire became a damaging media narrative. Gore told a story about a Tennessee girl whose letter about contaminated water led him to hold congressional hearings, concluding that the case "was the one that started it all." Reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post misquoted him as saying "I was the one that started it all," reinforcing the preexisting media narrative of Gore as a braggart. The students, who had videotaped the speech and could prove the correct wording, were shocked. Their teacher, Joanne McGlynn, provides broader context: the week before Gore's visit, her school practiced a lockdown procedure, and she feared the school violence issue Gore had addressed thoughtfully would become a joke. Vowell reflects on how media narratives about candidates become self-reinforcing.

"Pop-A-Shot" celebrates the pointless joy of an arcade basketball game. Vowell traces her shooting skill to her Oklahoma childhood and her Uncle Hoy, a basketball coach who drilled her on free throws, arguing that Pop-A-Shot's total lack of redeeming social value is precisely its appeal.

In "California as an Island," Vowell recounts managing an antiquarian map gallery in San Francisco for the flamboyant dealer Graham Arader. She becomes fascinated with old European maps that erroneously depicted California as an island, a metaphor for her own isolation. She describes the tension of selling American artifacts while silently thinking about their darker implications: showing clients maps of South Carolina while internally thinking "slave state," watching Arader celebrate Manifest Destiny while she thinks about the Trail of Tears.

"Dear Dead Congressman" is a letter to the late Oklahoma Congressman Mike Synar, written the day before the 2000 election. Vowell recalls handing out Synar's campaign pamphlets at a rodeo as an eight-year-old and describes her belief that the idea of American democracy functions as her religion.

"The Nerd Voice," the collection's longest essay, is divided into two parts. "The Nerd Israel" follows an e-mail group of Gore supporters who drive to Washington for George W. Bush's inauguration, where Vowell bursts into tears as Bush takes the oath. She grudgingly concedes parts of his Inaugural Address are not bad, then walks with her friend Jack to the Lincoln Memorial. "Nerds v. Jocks" analyzes the election through nerd culture, arguing Gore lost partly because voters perceived his intelligence as arrogance. Using the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vowell distinguishes between two nerd archetypes: the unapologetic intellectual who becomes the butt of jokes and the self-deprecating nerd who makes expertise seem fun. A Buffy writer identifies this second strategy as "the nerd voice," a form of preemptive mockery that Gore lacked.

In "Rosa Parks, C'est Moi," Vowell catalogs absurd instances of Americans comparing themselves to Rosa Parks, from a dairy farmer protesting milk pricing to rocker Ted Nugent calling himself "Rosa Parks with a loud guitar." She argues none of these grievances approaches the courage of a Black woman in 1955 Alabama defying segregation, getting arrested, and sparking the Montgomery bus boycott.

"Cowboys v. Mounties" compares American and Canadian national identities by tracing the founding of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1873, when Canada's first prime minister created a police force to establish frontier law and order before settlement, specifically to avoid the violence of the American West. Some Indigenous tribes called the U.S.-Canada border the "medicine line," believing conditions were better on the northern side. Vowell acknowledges she lives a quiet, Canadian-style life but admits the American cowboy ethic runs deep in her identity.

The title essay, "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," is the collection's thematic center. Written in December 2001, it explores Vowell's complicated patriotism after September 11. She describes the resurgence of flag displays and national pride while explaining her inability to join in once flags shifted from symbols of shared grief to endorsements of government war policy. She argues that skepticism of government is itself a deeply American trait. She reads Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis" and identifies as neither a "sunshine patriot" nor a "summer soldier," Paine's terms for fair-weather supporters who abandon a cause when times grow hard. She reflects on the distance between her grandmother, who picked cotton with bleeding fingers, and her own comfortable existence. She recalls singing the national anthem while crying at Bush's inauguration, then walking to the Lincoln Memorial to read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Her ideal picture of citizenship, she concludes, is an argument, not a sing-along, a lesson she learned from her parents, who disagree with her about nearly everything but love her anyway.

The collection also includes shorter pieces: "The New German Cinema" recalls Vowell's pretentious cinephile youth in Montana; "Tom Cruise Makes Me Nervous" analyzes Cruise's screen presence as deriving from the nervousness he provokes; "Underground Lunchroom" investigates a restaurant 750 feet underground in Carlsbad Caverns National Park that Congress mandates stay open despite the National Park Service's wishes; "Wonder Twins" reflects on being a fraternal twin; "State of the Union" offers rapid-fire aphorisms about American life; and "Tom Landry, Existentialist, Dead at 75" eulogizes Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry as Vowell's first introduction to existential dread. The final essay, "The Strenuous Life," follows Vowell and her sister to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, where she reflects on Roosevelt's transformation from sickly child to rugged outdoorsman and on her own opposite trajectory, from a western childhood to a New York apartment one block from Roosevelt's birthplace.