I am a patriot—of the 14th Ward Brooklyn, where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn’t exist for me, except as idea, or history, or literature.

Miller’s line compresses his characteristic anti-nationalism into a fiercely local allegiance. By calling himself a “patriot” only of Brooklyn’s 14th Ward, he rejects abstract, state-sized identities in favor of the formative neighborhood that made him. The rest of the country, he says, is not lived reality but a mediated construct—known through “idea, or history, or literature.” The remark also hints at the modernist expatriate stance: distance from the nation-state can sharpen attachment to origins, but as memory and myth rather than civic duty. It is both a critique of patriotic rhetoric and a declaration that identity is grounded in intimate geography.