Girt by Sea (revelations about my nation and nationality)

As I write this, my third post, the all-conquering D.I.V. has been on-line for about -- oh, I don’t know -- an hour.

Given this, you will (assuming there is indeed a "you" and not just me trying to see whether the damn page loads properly) perhaps not be too surprised that my present readership extends no further than myself and one other if you count my ever vigilant super-ego as said "one". The latter, of course, hasn't actually READ any of my posts; she’s seen me vomit before (quite often actually) and she definitely doesn't want to see it again.

So: given that my current readership extends no further than myself, I have, of late, become exponentially less reticent about giving away personal information then I was during that Age of Innocence in which my "Welcome" cried havoc and unleashed the dogs of drivel. (This was about an hour ago.)

Ah, youth. Heady, halcyon days of yore and all that. "All in all it was an epoch of roselight" (Patrick White). In other words, you had to be there.

Men were men back then. They had mutton chops and everything. They could fly spitfires and quote Pindar in the orignal. As Douglas Adams said -- small furry creatures from Alpha centauri were REAL small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

And my dewy-eyed, taut-buttocked self? Ah. I was young, wild, hormonal and full of thoughts of coming, seeing and conquering (although not necessarily in that order). And the means for doing so, my mighty Army of the Potomac, was (to be) my bloggy monolith.

During those innocent years (which I, like Stefan Zweig refer to now as “The Golden Age of Security” or with the French as the 'belle epoque') I had an idea that I should not perhaps divulge too much about myself. Basically, I was concerned that the legions of adoring fans would start to stalk me too quickly. "Goddamn it. I thought. I've only been online an hour. Do I really want to take all those calls from Paris and Milan?" Could I really deal -- to give you my thoughts one hour after my initial post -- , with the dizzy roller coaster of vacuous celebrity and the new job editing the Times Literary Supplement? Could I conscience so many nubile young things mad with lust anticipating the next diamond-like apothegm from my ever fertile brain?

No, dear reader I could not, especially given what I'd said in my first ‘welcoming’ post. Such craven kudos-craving is anaethema to every principle of the (still forthcoming) Invisibility Manifesto &c. &c.

At the risk of giving a spoiler the invisibility manifesto is really about reiterating a truth universally known (under the assumption that people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught) namely that the society that we live in would collapse in on itself, if everyone thought that they were okay the way they were, such that there was nothing that they could meaningfully gain from a new haircut, a new-style, a shiny new education or a shiny new circle of friends.

Furthemore, the manifesto also takes its cue from the curious fact that we live in a curiously Epicurean age (an age that prides itself on its emancipation from irrational fear -- as the very idea of the Enlightenment) but nonetheless an age in which we are more often than not, scared mouse-like beings, desperately seeking approval, as if we thought ourselves ceaselessly invigilated by gods and monsters who demanded a constant quota of sacrifice in order to stop from rending us into so many salt 'n' vinegar chips.

But, to come back to the issue of personal revelations: in the time it has taken me to change my font colours a couple of time (as well as to construct four or five fantasies involving the Anglophone population of the planet elevating me to the status of a GOD out of sheer, breathless awe at my literary élan); I have become progressively less concerned with protecting my identity.

It is a testimony to my new found sense of freedom that I now dedicate the rest of this post to a topic that will reveal the following fact about myself:

I’m (ahem.) Australian. I.come.from.a (sigh). Land Down Under. I’m an Antipodean, an Aussie (I like to think of it being pronounced “Ossie” by some first world war British general.) The word certainly isn’t pronounced like this, but I hope my vast international readership continues to pronounce it this way, just because pronouncing it that way in Australia is a sign that you are the Old Imperial Class Enemy returned to get vengeance. And we Ossies hate that.)

Thus I come to the point of this post. I have many complaints about the land of my nativity, but I will confine myself to two at present.

1) I am immensely annoyed at Baz Luhrmann for not casting me as the Hugh Jackman “Drover” character in his soon-to-be-released epic “Australia.” (a film that looks far, far too execrable to actually SEE.)

2) One of the worst and most common sophistries of my countrymen, is the belief that one’s commitment to egalitarianism is indubitably proved, not by, taking paths analogous to Orwell in the "Road to Wigan Pier", but by any behaviour that would upset a particularly prudish Victorian Aunt.

What I mean by this is that in other countries, political debates often concern things like differences in political ideas, different readings of nature, humanity, man and the state. I have met Europeans, and Americans from either side of Mexico, talk as if politics had something to do with competing ideas of community, of harmony, freedom, justice, the good life and so on.

In Australia, by contrast, one of the most unavoidable markers of our ‘political’ consciousness, is the belief that the nation was once ruled by people with plumby R.P. accents who were also extraordinarily uptight about sex. (Hollywood occassionally trots out this stereotype when portraying what they call 'Brits', but there is a weird kind of love attached to this idea as well as condescension.)

But according to the Great Austrlaian myth, said uptightness and said accent is what was responsible for a) the (very real and appalling) genocide of our indigenous people and b) every vice in the country from iniquity from our occassional meanness and vulgarity to our moments of slavish dedication to US foreign policy.

But it is not the fact of this (bizarre) assumption but its consequence that is truly appalling.

The consequence of this belief is one of the most pervasive aspects of the Australian landscape: namely, every single Australian exemplar of an elite, every privileged member of our (extraordinarily privileged) upper-middle class, considers themselves a super-egalitarian by virtue of any personal habit that might raise the eyebrow of aforementioned puritanical aunts.

Thus, if you are, say, the scion of an enormously wealthy family and alumnus of one of our prestigious private schools (the equivalent of English public schools), you are immediately placed (in your own mind) on the same social level as the average tradesman, simply by the fact that you like to get drunk/have sex/swear/watch football. And it is this myth that egalitarianism can be measured by such things as a shared fondness for squeezing our bodily appendages that sustains the class-divide in the country like nothing else.

So, it's not only the problem of actual inequalities, e.g. the marked disparities in the lives of people like (successful) writers, musicians, lawyers, politicians and so on against the vast majority of people who lack comparable wealth, public recognition, or other opportunities sustained for self-congratulation. This is indeed a problem, but it is a problem that is hardly endemic to Australia.

Instead, the moment where our national sophistry starts high-kicking to the soundtrack of "Moulin Rouge" can be found in the terrible way in which anyone who writes for a newspaper, or works in a university; every arts bureaucrat and every self-proclaimed “artist”, every studio executive, and corporate raider; every up and coming rising talent/would-be sommelier tends to preen themselves on being simultaneously unpretentious ("down to earth” as we like the say, while at the same time being eminently deserving of their various, glittering, constantly enumerated marks of distinction from the hoi polloi.

The most irritating thing about this feature of the national character, is that it somehow dresses itself up as a kind of ascetic renunciation of pretentiousness, instead of what it actually suggests which is the defintiive move from mere (forgivable) pretentiousness to full-blown narcissism. It is, after all, obviously MORE pretentious to claim that one is an intellectual arts-bureaucrat/academic/social commentator who is ALSO the same wild-party girl, wide-eyed sports lover et cetera you were before you knew the name of Hemingway, or had a bank account whose figures increased threefold every time you counted to twenty than it is to pretend to be ONE or the OTHER.

But the great national “let’s stop those Victorian bastards" myth gets in the way here, by suggesting that the drinking, the swearing, and the sex, takes the working-man's battle to the rentiers: as if no-one had heard of upper-class decadence. (But then, I suppose, reading Livy would be ELITIST.)

And for contributions to this Baz ("I guess I'm a bit like Shakespeare -- a people's auteur who is also a great genius" Luhrmann should (as he doubtless wants) be given the Order of Australia. No-one else is as bold-faced about the simultaneous claim that he is at once a man of the people (kind of like -- I don't know -- a drover) AND a great artist in the mould of de Chirico, Proust, Picasso.

He should also append a text to each of his films, taken from Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus:

My countryman, my desperately pretentious, appallingly mediocre, unbelievably self-regarding countryman: I absolve you.