Recently, I was Pub-Talking to an acquaintance, an American guy who's been living in New Zealand for a few years now. One of the things that really struck him about New Zealand was our lack of patriotism. You see it on ANZAC Day, he said, but where is it the rest of the time?
I mulled this for a while after I staggered home, because I think it's a more interesting question than it seems on the face of it. Stripped of its jingoism, patriotism is 'pride in your country'. I think it also extends to an idea of a national character, and pride in that.
Our pride in our country isn't militaristic, and why would it be? We've always gone into wars as followers. When we do talk about our military history, we concentrate on defeats. This is both a tipper to our national character, and part of the reason our patriotism is invisible to an American lens. Those days when we're told we should be celebrating our country, ANZAC Day and Waitangi Day, are days many of us find complex and conflicted, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That doesn't mean we don't have a strong sense of national pride, most visible when it's offended. Try telling anyone my age that Split Enz is an Australian band. Leave us off maps. Pavlova. Flat whites. He might have had a point when he said, "The things you do get upset about are so stupid."
Here's the essential conflict, I think. We're pretty proud of our national character, mythological as it is. But part of that character is being Humble, so we can't ever mouth off about how great we are because part of being a Kiwi being great is not mouthing off about things. Not like those fucking Aussies. This tweet of Stephen Judd's from the Cricket World Cup about sums it up perfectly for me.
To be honest nothing makes me feel more patriotic than a decent, dignified defeat. It is our natural state.
— Mr Salteena (@saniac) March 29, 2015
We're not those arseholes abusing batsmen when we get them out, and we don't want to be.
This also comes with a sense of fair play, the idea that if we're going to kick someone, we kick up. We're proud of punching above our weight, after all. We were the first country to give women the vote (technically), and no matter their politics people seem proud of that. So too the nuclear ships ban, majestically giving the fingers to a world super-power. Not everybody cried all over their faces at the singing in Parliament after marriage equality passed, but give it a few more years, and it'll be one of those things almost everyone is proud we did.
These are not, still, my favourite things about our national character. A couple of years back, I took great pride in doing something that to me epitomised what it means to be a New Zealander. I had a conversation, on Twitter, with the leader of a major political party, about giant robot dinosaur vaginas. (There are no prizes for guessing which leader it was.) We live in a country where she could have that conversation, publically, with no repercussions. We also live in a country where she could be the kind of person who would have that conversation.
So, with the flag debate comes a discussion of our national character. Standfor.co.nz was supposed to provide a forum for that discussion; who are we? In a way, completely unintentionally, it's done that. In typical New Zealand social media subversion, the site is now displaying hundreds of messages basically saying that changing the flag is a fucking stupid idea. The flag design submission process has been similarly undermined, because that is who we are. As a country, we are giggling up the back of the class because we think you're a dick. I love that about us.
In the end, though, I'm just another middle-aged middle-class Pakeha shaping my view of New Zealandness through the filter of my own experience. Does the way the internet allows us to group in communities of interest rather than geography undermine a sense of nationhood, or highlight national differences? Is our major source of recent pride that we've made John Oliver practice his New Zild accent? Are we too divided for there to be any point in having this conversation?
Also, America? We are way better at democracy than you. Sorry.