idiotic flag waving

Here is an interesting article from The Australian.

Dangers of whipping up cheesy patriotism
BEYOND SPIN
David Salter
22mar07

THE jingo is out of the bottle. Ostentatious displays of the flag and unabashed appeals to so-called Australian values have moved to the midstream. The Coalition's spin doctors first blew on these coals of nationalism for political gain but the media has been close behind, enthusiastically pumping its mighty bellows.

Only a decade ago Anzac Day was allowed to pass with appropriately restrained coverage. Today, each new April 25 is hyped with ever more mawkish newspaper supplements and protracted dollops of sentimentality on that night's television news.

The media whips itself - and the public - into a froth of emotion that plays more like crass jingoism than respect for the fallen.

The same news and current affairs programs that feign outrage at any attempt to restrict the display of Australian flags at pop concerts wallow in its heavy symbolism when flag-draped coffins return from overseas. (Again, these choreographed rituals are a new development, appropriated from the potent showmanship of US military ceremony.)

No politician now chooses to make a formal announcement without the national flag in the background. Even Menzies, no slouch when it came to stirring nationalist instincts, would have eschewed such overt displays of cheap patriotism.

The line between nationalism and racism can be perilously thin. Some of the drunken young thugs who draped themselves in the Australian flag while bashing "people of Middle Eastern appearance" at Cronulla in 2005 have now been before the courts. The repeated screening of news footage from those ugly days makes uncomfortable viewing, particularly for those who believe our national emblems have no place in the incitement of hatred.

Yet, in his sentencing of one of those rioters last week, the magistrate himself fell into the trap of thoughtless nationalism. Unwisely adopting talkback argot, he described the offender's behaviour as "so un-Australian". So un-Australian as the violence against Chinese on the goldfields? Equating nationality with decency creates a false syllogism.

This same streak of unthinking racism emerged in The Sydney Morning Herald's reporting of the March 7 plane crash in Indonesia, which killed, among others, a group of Australian police, diplomats and a journalist. The SMH ran its biographies of those who'd died under the headline: "True Australians who carried their values and dedication into foreign service". Who, pray, are the false Australians and what can the Herald tell us about their values? We should not be reading loaded cliches on the news pages.

(Media Watch finished its program that week with a brief visual tribute to The Australian Financial Review correspondent who died in the crash. Fair enough, but were similar marks of respect shown to the many journalists of other nationalities who've been killed for what they wrote rather than by wretched luck?)

Meanwhile, the Nine network clearly believes there is a ratings advantage in branding its output with glib patriotism. Its locally produced shows are garnished with an end graphic that declares them "Proudly Australian". Presumably this pride does not extend to the rest of Nine's transmission schedule, which includes dinky-di material such as three distinct iterations of the CSI franchise, Cold Case, Days of Our Lives and Good Morning America.

Less obvious, but equally obnoxious, is the use of tax revenue to fund socially engineered nationalism. After a decade spent trying to curb the ABC's independence with death by a thousand budget cuts, the Coalition has learned how to come through Aunty's back door. It has given Film Australia an extraordinary $7.5million to make a flag-waving 10-part historical series for showing on the ABC. Money was clearly no object for this project: $750,000 an episode is twice the budget for a standard 55-minute documentary. (This is the same Government that hectors the ABC about waste and the need to find more efficiencies.)

The premiere episode screened last Sunday and dealt, in overblown style, with the building of Sydney's Harbour Bridge. Its first few minutes were so heavy with cheesy re-enactments and melodramatic overstatement ("emblem of a divided country", "battleground for Australia's future", "hopes and dreams of an entire nation") that it was difficult to take anything that followed seriously.

But the most offensive aspect of this galumphing Australianism is that it is so often underwritten by ignorance. Outlining the theme of the next part of Film Australia's series, its executive producer, Alex West, asked rhetorically how our nation could have sprung from "a few boatloads of witless, illiterate, half-starved Poms".

If that's his informed opinion on the achievement of Governor Arthur Phillip and the First Fleeters, then he should not be in charge of an infant's school history class, let alone a landmark documentary series.

I agree with a lot of this (but disagree with some points). This form of patriotism that we seem to be appropriating from the Americans is rather shallow.

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I miss Keiser laying on my lap.