Fast-Food Nationals
ANOTHER AUSTRALIA DAY, another cacophony of flags; a rage, a noise, a litany of tacky little flags attached to car aerials, printed on hats, t-shirts, towels, balloons, stuck out of windows. Am I the only true-blue Australian who finds the whole thing highly offensive?
Bob, of Maleny, writes to the local newspaper of his outrage when someone stole his $2 flag from his mailbox. If only this parasite had come to the door and asked, he tells us, they’d have given him the money to buy his own flag. What this mongrel did in taking that flag was down-right un-Australian.
Doing my very best not to make any comment about cheap Chinese-manufactured flags – going right past that one -I am nevertheless brought to ask if it really is possible that I am the only dinky-die Aussie who flinches every time he sees or hears the word un-Australian, who feels, in fact, dismayed when Nationalism raises its head in any form.
Am I the only person who wondered if someone hadn’t removed Bob’s flag because they regard this new-found boasting of love of country as ugly, tendentious, even dangerous? Who senses in the bandying about of labels like un-Australian a whiff not just of McCarthyism, but of the sort of breast-beating allegiance which gave rise to all the worst conflicts of one of humanity’s worst centuries, by which I mean the one we’ve just escaped?
When did we start having to prove our love of country by ever more prominent waving of flags?
Clearly, ever since the end of World War Two, we’ve seen a growing secularisation of our society. The role of the church, which, as all those who were alive in the fifties will recall, was more than simply significant, has been greatly diminished. It is not just that the religious holidays of Christmas and Easter have become no more than that: holidays, ruthlessly exploited by the market for its own purposes; but that the voice of moral authority has dissolved in a sea of indifference and cynicism fuelled by revelations of the Church’s own hypocrisy.
A vacuum has been created in the social fabric, and in the absence of any voice of moral authority we have come to the point where few people seem to know how to place value on the belief of one thing over another. Or whether to believe in anything at all.
This shouldn’t necessarily be a problem; it could be a moment for celebration, an opportunity to determine what sort of nation we want to be, free from traditional prejudice. The difficulty is that it is not Nature that abhors a vacuum, it is people, and as soon as there’s a space – a quiet reflective moment – we seem to have to rush to fill it; we grasp for the quickest and easiest thing, which in this case happens to be a sort of fast-food nationalism that we consume without noticing it is, in fact, rich in saturated fats that will inevitably eat away at the body politic.
I was curious at the way the word aspiration came to be used during the last election. We heard a lot of talk about aspirational voters, which we must assume referred to those who wanted to increase their income stream.
I wonder if there isn’t out there in the suburbs and the cities, in the country towns, a whole bunch of Australians who actually aspire to something quite different, who would like Australia Day to be a moment when we can -instead of throwing another snag on the barbie, a can of beer in the hand – use it as a moment to consider how we want to live with our past, our present and our future, who are hungry for a deeper association with their land than just the flag, and search, desperately, for a way to express this need. But then, by now you’ll have figured out that I’m an optimist.
Hanrahan
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