American patriotism after 9/11 gets dressed up in strange rituals, and this film catalogs them: bars pouring perfectly good French wine into gutters because France opposed the Iraq War, restaurants renaming their fries "freedom fries," and shoppers waving American flags stitched together in Chinese factories. A scholar and a social activist walk through these gestures one by one, asking what actually gets expressed when a boycott or a flag purchase stands in for political conviction. The film's argument is that the two impulses, patriotism and consumerism, have become hard to separate, so that buying the right products starts to feel like a civic act. It stays light in tone, treating the contradictions as absurd rather than sinister, but the examples it collects, wasted wine and imported flags among them, are meant to sit with the viewer longer than the joke does.