THE foreigner expects the razzmatazz of Americans celebrating their nation's birthday on the Fourth of July the parades, the eating contests, the fireworks. What you are not prepared for is the unabashed love for the United States of America that gushes out and envelops it all.
Admittedly, Washington is special as the floats, the high school bands and a giant Uncle Sam on stilts make their way down Constitution Avenue from the gleaming Capitol towards the Washington Monument and the White House in a sea of white, red and blue.
But that's what's happening on a smaller scale across the US as the children wave their stars and stripes and the adults forget their worries and relive a childhood when they were taught to love their country and what it stands for.
In Paris on Bastille Day, the parade down the Champs Elysees is about military might, as the tanks roll past the reviewing stand and the jets roar overhead. In Washington, it's the unity in diversity of a 220 year old country that is being celebrated as the parade and the festival of American folk life on the Mall display a dazzling cultural and ethnic mix the famous melting pot out of which the modern United States has been created.
This year the festival, organised by the Smithsonian Institution, portrayed the community life of the corn belt state of Iowa and the music and dance of the American South. Wedged between the Missisipi and the Missouri, Iowa is probably as American as you can get, but you could taste cooking that was originally German, Dutch, Danish, Jewish and more recently Hispanic.
You could learn Scandanavian American dancing, admire Czech egg decoration, listen to African American gospel singing, Mexican ballads and native American Meskwaki music and still be in Iowa.
In other tents there was southern music in all its diversity from the French influenced Cajun tunes to black freedom songs and the lyrics and rhythms from Tennessee and Kentucky. And the young, the middle aged and the old waltzed, square danced and quick stepped.
This was Americans having and it was nearly as much fun watching them. The climax was the fireworks bursting in the night sky around the tall, slender Washington Monument while the open air concert orchestra crashed out the 1812 overture.
Then it was "God Bless America" and the thousands who joined in were so clearly proud to be American, a foreigner could feel envious at such uninhibited patriotism. It made Irish squabbling over how to celebrate 1916 or whether to remember it at all seem petty.
The Washington Times editorial for the Fourth of July was the full text of the Declaration of Independence he ringing phrases about liberty and the pursuit of happiness". And how the United Colonies are and of right ought to be, free and independent states that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be totally.
Can you imagine an Irish newspaper on Easter Monday reproducing the 1916 Proclamation as its editorial? Yes, we have lost something, and the industrial floats of the St Patrick's Day parade are a poor substitute.
Perhaps it is too easy to get carried away about American patriotism listening to God Bless America on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July. In Los Angeles there was an ugly clash between immigrants and an anti immigrant group which does not subscribe to the melting pot theory.
The cause of the flare up is a California law which would refuse public education to the children of illegal immigrants. Congress is getting ready to pass similar measures.
Racism flares up increasingly with the burning of black churches in the South. The Supreme Court has just ruled against the affirmative action programmes to promote greater numbers of black students in universities.
Even President Clinton's symbolic gesture of releasing a bald headed eagle from captivity to celebrate Independence Day backfired when it was immediately attacked by two fish hawks and had to be brought back into protective custody by the coast guard.
It was still a great day.