The heart of the Dream

It was a long, hot summer day, many years ago. I stumbled up the steps to my apartment and fell in through the open door, reeking of sweat and bad wine. A few weeks previously I had signed up for another tour of duty in the Armed Corporate Youth League and was preparing for this mostly by getting drunk on the beaches of Brisbane. I had paid some cash to attend another of their Reinvigoration Camps which pop up randomly around the country. But my purpose for going to this brainshit was different from that of the other glassy-eyed freaks I associated with. I had some Serious Business to attend to – getting to the heart of the national character. Equipped with the contents of five or six Hunter S. tomes, a cheap polyester Australian flag and an assortment of drugs and booze, I was convinced I could find the answers on the road. One thing the Corp. was good for was an ever-ready invitation to get the hell out of town, so out of town I got.

American literature is a poor primer for getting to the heart of the national experience, unless the national experience you are looking for is American. The end result of this bizarre quest was several near-death experiences, a week-long hangover, an impressive sun-burn and Roo Hell, which was a six-hour sojourn right through the heart of the Australian Dream. Either that or it was a 120 kmph death-drive through a drought-plain littered with the corpses and soon-to-be-corpses of thousands of kangaroos in a shitbox crammed with some of the worst criminals I have ever met and a very, very fucking scared Brazilian. After playing the long odds and counting myself lucky to only be a few hundred dollars down (and not, for instance, dead), I had failed to draw any conclusions about the national character, except that the country itself probably wanted me dead. As I lay there in my own filth in that disgustingly hot oven I called a home, I gave up thinking on the topic for the time being, and committed myself to surviving God’s own hangover. The flag had somehow survived, also.

There are some questions that merely getting drunk and generally wasted and piling into a car can’t answer, but those weren’t the kinds of answers I was equipped to find back in those fine old days. If anything, I’m even less equipped to find them now, but as I sit here drunk off the incomprehensibly cheap wine that I’ve managed to replace my blood with over the last three days, the readings and thinkings on this subject wash over me in uncontrollable waves. At least I’m suitably crushed to not bother standing against what I’ve come to realise.

Not all that long ago, I was a patriot. Patriotism is fun. You can wave flags around and watch movies about the Nipponese and jeer at the Indonesians and so forth. The police are your friends as they march by in carefully practiced cadence, and the state holds the sky up for you. Flowers bloom and children smile and you’re mates with everyone at the pub as long as you’re a patriot too. But, if you’re in the habit of not trusting even your own motivations, a voice can be heard in the back of the brain. “Bullshit”, it says, quietly at first and sporadically, but building in frequency and volume as time passes, “BULLSHIT”. It’s a well known voice. It’s the voice that you hear when you watch commercials or listen to the radio or read anything by Ann Coulter. Something is amiss. I began wondering – what do I really owe these people? What do I have in common with them? Suddenly my compatriots at the bar became strangers, their smiles cruel jeers, their jokes and hollered exhortations to patriotism crude racism and stupidities. I had to get away, and drunk, and quick. So here I am, drunk.

What’s wrong with nationalism? In short, it’s bullshit. Nationalism is defined as a group of people who occupy a territory who have a shared culture, history and ethnicity, etc. People get pretty riled up about it. It’s basically tribalism taken to an extreme level, and that chummy feeling of commonality you have with your fellow mouth-breather while you watch the world soccer or barrack for an ally in a war is one of the major factors that caused France to boot so much arse during the Napoleonic Wars and hastened the utter collapse of the European dynastic governments. The problem being, of course, is that exactly what territory, culture, history and ethnicity actually is is open to a huge amount of interpretation, and woe betide anyone or any group of people who find themselves outside the most popular interpretation of the day. In order to foster the commonality of which I spoke, a national myth has to be fostered in which certain personalities, attributes and events are glorified or demonised. This myth must then be accepted by everyone in the nation. The people who accept this myth are patriots. The people who do not are traitors, or worse, foreigners.

Every modern country has a national myth that is so heavily drilled into the heads of the humans who dwell in the country that it usually goes unquestioned. This is what I found when I dug deep enough for the essence of the national character – not what it actually is but what it is composed of. By and large nationalism, patriotism and flag worship is a waste of time and energy that no serious person would concern themselves with. I apologise for the lateness of this essay and its general crumminess and length, but I have been very drunk lately.