When I was younger, growing up in Croydon during the late 80s, I didn’t feel particularly patriotic. As ever the reasons are complicated by the naive idiocy of youth along with a hefty dose of nihilism but one of the main reasons, or at least the reason that still stands up to scrutiny, was that people I didn’t like tended to be patriotic, ergo I wasn’t patriotic. Thatcher covered herself in the Union Jack for a start, and then there were footballs fans. There wasn’t some complicated socio-political thing going on – I didn’t like the Tories and I didn’t like football. Since the teenage way of expressing your distaste with something is to reject everything everything associated with it, I rejected patriotism.
Then when I was 16 I went to the States to visit my dad for the first time in years (messy divorce, ask me another time) and I remember being very aware of my Britishness, which isn’t hard as Americans, and particularly Texans in my experience, are endlessly fascinated by us. As, I should add, are we of them. But anyway, I started noticing things about me, things I liked and things I believed in, that could only be explained by the country in which I grew up. Did this make me patriotic? Is there any real difference between identifying with things this country had infused me with and loving this country?
Skip forwards a fair number of years and bring the internet into play. Since it’s inherently untrustworthy and full of errors, one has to develop a system of filtering in order to get the most out of it. Who has written this? Who linked to it? Who links to the person who linked to it? What else do they write about? What communities to they belong to? Why should I listen to them?
Another way of sorting it all is to make snap judgments based on appearances, just like in the real world. I’m guessing the what we’re looking for when we do this is someone who is kinda like us. So since I’ll be holding myself in very high regard when judging others I’ll be looking to see if they write well in a slightly self-depreciating, witty and insightful manner, read what I consider good books and comics and listen to what I consider decent music, have their own domain rather than a LiveJournal or BlogSpot blog, have designed their site themselves rather than using a default template and, this is probably the most crucial point, provide a well constructed full RSS feed for their blog. And then they turn out to be a twat, but I digress.
Possibly the most important thing in this woefully inaccurate judgment game is where they’re from. The areas of the web I tend to surf around tend to be dominated by Americans, usually from the States with a decent smattering of Canadians. When a British voice pops up on, say, MetaFilter, I notice it and pay attention. Conversely when I discover that some blogger I had assumed to be British due to their dry wit and effective use of sarcasm turns out to be a Yank I feel a palpable sense of disappointment. Similarly, when British bloggers win US-centric awards or get published by US based publishers I feel proud of them.
I even go so far as to consider some Americans honorary Brits which I’m sure would weird them out if they knew or cared about it. Maybe, if I’m not the only one who does this, we should start a directory or poll of honorary Brits from the western colonies? I wonder if they’d consider it a compliment or not…
It goes hopefully without saying that this is all very stupid of me. At the end of the day it doesn’t make any difference where someone is from as long as what they’re doing is good in some way. The beauty of the net is that I can have a communication with someone on the other side of the planet as easily as I can with someone down the road. So why, even though I know it’s idiotic, do I do this? Could it be the net has made me more patriotic than I would have been otherwise? Does exposure to a wider range of “others” make you more protective towards those who are more like you? All I’m doing is whittling it all down to something manageable, but why on this criteria?
It’s an interesting one, I think. Xenophobia and racism usually comes about in communities that don’t have any contact with or understanding of people outside their self-contained and self-sufficient little world. This is different to becoming more aware of people outside your physical community, but how different? I don’t think other cultures and countries are worthless but I do give people, ideas and notions from my country more weight and importance. How does this differ from the flag-waving BNP moron down the street?
What I think I’m driving at is can I be patriotic and not be a wanker?
I’ve thought about this a bit over the last few years. My upbringing, I think, was a lot different to yours. My father, to put it bluntly, is a fat racist bastard who voted NF in the 1970s and voted BNP in the last council elections. One of the worst things that happened to him when he was at school, he said, was having to go on the ‘paki bus’ when he missed his normal school bus. And they say apartheid never happened here. The north is a very racist place, though Preston is not as bad as the area between Burnley and Bradford. This has made me overly sensitive to race/nation matters and I’m worried that non-European British residents would think I’m racist (I’m ashamed to admit this, but as a child I tended to cross the road away from any passing Asian – I hope it’s something to do with my upbringing).
To anyone who’s even had limited contact with me, it’s obvious I’m English, and northern English especially (in Lancs we all carry our personal sarcasm tank to inject into normal conversation). I’m comfortable being English, inasmuch that England is where I feel least uncomfortable. As always I’ve gone to the dictionary to find the definition of ‘patriotism’. “Love and devotion to one’s country” it says. I wouldn’t go that far, emotionally speaking. But if I think of a list of all the good things and all the bad things about England, it’s just about equal. I have no great love for America, for example, but that country invented peanut butter and bourbon, so I can forgive it a bit.
As in a lot of issues, you have to walk the tightrope. As long as you’re aware of the good and the bad in your country and don’t claim it to be overly superior to any other land, then you can make sense of any ‘patriot’ stuff. Keep your eyes wide open, and react accordingly.