I have a strange habit when I am bored. It involves Ricky Gervais. Or rather, some video clips of him on stage. I must have watched him hosting the Golden Globe Awards a dozen times. The film stars are in their tuxedos and gowns, knowing the camera is panning across their faces. Ricky expresses shock at being invited to host again, then takes a sip of beer at the lectern, and tells his audience they shouldn’t try to lecture us on anything, as “most of you have spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg”. He then cracks a joke about Jeffrey Epstein, and as the groan spreads, tells them: “Shut up. I know he was your friend.” The camera cuts to shocked faces in the audience – rather prophetic editing, in retrospect.
When I watch it, I don’t just smirk. I don’t just recognise it as familiar. I also feel an involuntary pride. That mockery of pomp, deflation of status, and saying what’s uncomfortable. It is a comedy directed at the powerful, and I instinctively place that as something I call “British.” Which is a bit odd, if I think about it. Because it isn’t the pride of seeing a sibling succeed, or a friend flourish at something I helped them work on. The pride arises from my imagined common identity with the kind of attitude and behaviour Gervais is engaged in. It is a story about an “us” that I feel is being embodied by him. But the emotion arrives without analysis: a flash of identification with a national characteristic I like. I know other Brits don’t feel the same way and share an identity around completely different characteristics. And that’s what’s so malleable about our common identities and, therefore, national pride. This got me thinking about ‘patriotism’ today, as someone who emigrated from the UK and now looks back at the country during an era of economic decline, ‘metacrisis’, and even systemic breakdown, which I outlined in the book Breaking Together.
Continue reading “Make Patriotism Great Again: some ideas from a British guy abroad”