Christopher Pearson, Tim Soutphommasane, and patriotism as the last refuge for scoundrel advertisers

(Above: err, can we just drop out the reference to King, Queen or bonnie Prince Charlie, aspirational tampon and future king?)

Patriotism, said Samuel Johnson, in a much used and abused quotation, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

And Christopher Pearson.

First he abuses the left and liberals and progressives (well whatever, y'all know who you are) for being internationalists. Worshipping forces outside the lucky country of Australia.

Then he goes into a swoon, worshipping the United States of America, which by happenstance, is a country outside of Australia.

And then he has the cheek to talk of cultural baggage. Yep, it's all here in Flawed effort to fire up Left's patriotic zeal. Yeah, that's what we need, more and more fresh patriotic zealots.

But then Pearson has a wonderful taste for tripe, with generalization so random and chaotic it defies a coherent response. How's this?

The Australian Left does indeed have an abiding tendency to self-loathing or indulgent despair when reminded of the patriotic talismans that middle Australia still holds dear. The history of a settler society's cultural cringe, angst over embarrassments such as the White Australia policy and vicarious guilt over indigenous issues and the post-colonial legacy have seen to that. The bohemian option -- feeling frightfully guilty, in a very middle-class way, about past evils for which you can't possibly be held to blame, while feeling morally superior to your grandparents -- still has a strange allure.

Yeah, why should we give a toss about the blacks, why should we care about the White Australia policy - never mind Tim, we don't mean you, and why should we give a stuff about anybody we fucked over. Hey, it's all good, and if you've got a problem, why not just fuck off. There, that feels so much better than the bohemian option.

That said, it would seem that Pearson has an abiding tendency towards loathing and indulgent despair about others. There's a strange allure in leftie bashing, all the more so when the bashed tend to exhibit a sensitivity towards others. Brings out the feral in Pearson.

But he has to go on hold about the total failure of multiculturalism and the Cronulla riot proclaiming philosophy of "we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."

Because happily Tim Soutphommasane, born in France to Lao and ethnic Chinese parents, lobbed into Australia, joined the ALP, began working for the Carr government, and now is bout to publish a book Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation Building for Progressives.

Wouldn't do in this context, I guess, to urge on the splendors of the white Australia policy.

But in his usual way, Pearson seizes on any negatives Soutphommasane might have to say about progressives, as Soutphommasane despairs of progressives for surrendering, or being supine during the Howard years, resorted to the easy option of calling Howard's cultural politics dog whistling, as if that were enough.

Soutphommasane says the Left needs a positive cultural narrative to underpin its various ideological and nation-building agendas, including redistributive social justice, climate change and a changing international economic order. "This requires a cultural change in how Australians understand themselves and their country and it begins with discarding 'the dog-whistle excuse', the default Left-liberal position when it comes to patriotic expression. The lazy conflation of patriotism and racism is a political as well as intellectual mistake, which has the effect of alienating the liberal Left from a middle Australia that takes pride in our national identity, history and traditions."

He makes no bones about an instrumentalist approach to patriotism, "now that a Labor government is in power in Canberra. It's important to take the current when it serves. It is time for progressives to reclaim patriotism. They must start by overcoming some shibboleths about patriotism and national culture. For too long they have viewed all solidaristic expression ... as an excuse for self-loathing or indulgent despair."

Well yes, and isn't it wonderful that Pearson indulges in just such an easy conflation, by mixing in references to the white Australia policy, as if it's somehow deluded to be a little bit embarrassed by the inherent racism in that policy.

But why am I not surprised? Why do I discover in Kevin Rudd the same cheap, easy patriotism, right down to the sauce bottle, that I found in John Howard? 

But then I come from an Australian tradition which was quiet and unostentatious in its celebration of community. Sure there was a photo of the Queen on the wall and a flag here or there, but there was none of the kind of rhetoric or display of flag that you find in America, where even the homeless bums trade on flag waving.

Mateship - in the Australian tradition described by Russell Ward (a notorious pinko) in his book The Australian Legend - was the go, and along with it larrikinism and irreverence and a quiet contempt for bureaucrats, politicians and preening ponces (why if they'd found Christopher Pearson in a shearing shed, the contempt might have been a little more than quiet, especially if he'd started blathering on about patriotism.)

People who carried on too much or were full of themselves never satisfied the laconic truculent spirit.

But it's typical of Pearson that he isn't satisfied with Australian traditions of patriotism, he wants the American brand.

When talking about Australian notions of patriotism, it's useful to compare them with the more full-bodied ways in which Americans approach it. In the US, politicians of almost every stripe take it for granted that the remaining global hegemon will sometimes need to use force overseas. It is a given that patriotism is a positive virtue and that America's armed might helps underwrite freedom everywhere. The main parties often exploit nationalist sentiment to ideological advantage, questioning the adequacy of a particular policy of the other side, but seldom calling into question their basic loyalties.

In the years when Howard was prime minister and Kim Beazley led the opposition, similar rules of engagement applied. It helped that Beazley had spent many years as minister for defence and was wholeheartedly pro-American. Unlike Paul Keating, his predecessor, he was decent and urbane enough to assume that no political party had a monopoly on patriotism, let alone on defining what constituted national identity.

Oh let me go barf in a corner. Beazley was a loser - he lacked the ticker - so let's not go on about his decency and urbaneness, and for the love of the lord, let's hope we avoid the American model of patriotism, which has ruined intelligent discourse in that country for decades as they seek to maintain their imperium around the world.

But okay, love of America isn't internationalism, I guess just as love of the Romans wasn't internationalism in its day. But it does make a comical juxtaposition when Pearson gets to talking about the evils of internationalism, on the basis that two legs are bad, four legs quite lovely:

There is another attribute of the local Left that Soutphommasane may not have been around long enough to have encountered at close quarters: its internationalism. For many of the older comrades, the ultimate loyalty was reserved not for the country of one's birth or adoption but for the world's proletariat and its leadership. Where Jacobite Britain had "the king over the water", we had the far more potent figures of "Uncle Joe" Stalin and the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. It also helps to bear in mind that nigh on half of last century's Australian literary fiction was ideologically driven and written with a weather-eye out for paid junkets to the Soviet Union and the approval of literary commissars behind the Iron Curtain. Not surprisingly, it tended to leave many readers with a rather displaced sense of where home really was. A more recent English evocation of internationalism also comes to mind: the film of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, loosely based on the life of Guy Burgess.

Which, given we're into flip and shallow asides, reminds me of the good old days when in certain circles papists of the Pearson kind were denied the status of true patriots, not least because they kneeled before that legendary international conspiracy, the Papacy (which as we all know is the anti-Christ incarnate). 

But then that was because nigh on half of last century's Australian literary fiction was theologically driven, with a weather-eye out for paid junkets to holy roman places. And where would Quadrant be without James McAuley? An older English evocation of internationalism also comes to mind: the undying worship of Evelyn Waugh.

By golly, these flip fey comparisons come trippingly off the tongue, and we haven't even got to the time when Uncle Joe was reckoned to be a staunch ally of the west, or the days when the ALP, the unions and unionists were staunch loyal patriots and staunch defenders of a White Australia. Right up to Arthur Calwell.

Even among those who had no time for the various versions of communism or social democracy, there was among the generation now in their 40s and 50s the growing sense of being citizens of a borderless world. From that perspective, institutions such as the UN and projects such as world government sounded plausible, at least until the rise of militant Islam. For that cohort, nationalism often seemed at best an embarrassing parochialism, and more often an atavistic regression.

Well yes, the black helicopters of the UN are such a problem, and we were so much better off when nation states plunged us into two world wars. Bring on the third world war I say, and the quicker the better, as it'll take care of an excessively growing population and climate change. Speaking of atavistic regressions, and the need to kill people because they salute a different flag, how about we take on New Zealand? That's about the weight we can punch at. Oh sorry, we just go to war when Uncle Sam calls, in our very own internationalist way.

Of course a white Australia doesn't leave much room for Soutphommasane, so it's interesting to see Pearson do his usual dance around the question of all these people recently arrived to Australia's shores, despite John Howard's sternest injunctions:

To my mind, his (Soutphommasane's) endorsement of "liberal multiculturalism" as the best model for integrating immigrants ignores all the past practice that has made the term itself so problematic nowadays. Finally, his ideological slip is showing too brazenly for comfort when he talks about patriotism's "dark face", where love of country is used to justify "government restrictions on individual rights", for example, "and to support wars in foreign lands".

Oh only one sentence, and that to say multiculturalism is problematic. Quick, better get back to safe ground, and remind us that patriotism certainly doesn't have a dark face. How about getting on to the need for a Crusade?

Of course the phrase "wars in foreign lands" is a broad brush. But whatever his attitude to Australia's involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam, for that matter, Soutphommasane simply cannot have an adequate notion of patriotism unless it allows for the possibility of wars, defensive or pre-emptive, waged on foreign soil. In the end, it is patriotism that moves our soldiers to risk their lives to defeat the Taliban, along with a few other unfashionable, taken-for-granted values such as the Judeo-Christian ethos, which was the mother of Western civilisation and our freedoms.

What's that? We went into Iraq and Afghanistan to save Judeo-Christian values and mount a war on unholy Islamics? To save the ethos that was the mother of our Western civilization and our freedoms? Well thank the lord for our fathers, those Romans and Greeks who came up with all the ideas, including Christmas, that the Christians could rip off and call their own.

Meantime, I can't wait to see Pearson sign up for service in his crusade. Just count me out.

So it goes. I'm not sure who's more deluded. Pearson for maintaining his rigid, old fashioned ideological and cultural wars from way back in the days of B. A. Santamaria, or Soutphommasane for sounding - in Pearson's transcription - as if he wants progressives to end up like dead head patriots like Pearson.

In both ways lies madness. I'm reminded of a recent loon's use of the real estate term "quiet enjoyment" and suddenly I'm chastened. I reckon that's what most Australians want - quiet enjoyment of their lives, without the blather of ideological loons insisting that we stand up in the cinema when the dirge of a national anthem plays, salute the flag (with its anachronistic union jack in the corner), recite I love a sunburnt country, or talk about how we should remain a constitutional monarchy tied to Britain to salute the uniqueness of Australia.

Because when you play Pearson's game, you get into a slanging match. I'm the biggest patriot, no you're not, I'm the biggest patriot, how dare you my patriotism embraces everything about Australia and can't see the tiniest flaw, no you're not I think the Cronulla riots reveal everything wonderful about proud Australian identities, and so and so forth, until you end up spiraling down into membership of whatever is the latest local edition of the John Birch society.

Is there a moderate in the house? Willing to shout a pox on all their houses? And willing to update Dr. Johnson's quotation. Patriotism is of course now the last refuge not just of the political right, but of the desperate business, and the scoundrel businessman. (Yes, Telstra and Qantas, come on down and take your lashes).

(Below: my uncle refused to buy a Japanese car and who can blame him after what he endured in New Guinea. But how come I drive a Mazda, enjoy my Nippon Electric Company plasma television, relish my Yahama amplifier, and own so many other Japanese components my head spins. Just who won the war, and is this talk of getting along with our neighbors some kind of vast internationalist UN sponsored conspiracy? How did I end up enslaved, working as a salary person to pay the salary man wages of Japan? Is it time for the dark side of patriotism to show its face again? And by the way Beauforts were never the key to victory.)