Above the fold

It seems these days online you can’t throw a tetris brick without hitting someone blogging about how Australia Day recently has been taken over by disquieting expressions of xenophobia.

Okay, okay, I get it.  Important point.  And unfortunately not many of these people seem to make the obvious point that a lot of it is John Howard’s fault.

But.

There’s a problem.

Australians like to think of themselves as a classless society, and I’ve heard nothing but favourable comments from overseas visitors.  But we’re not classless; instead we just imported our original class structure (the lower two thirds of Georgian London) into a new environment.

Seriously.  Even our accents are from the same place/time, which is why Australian English and Cockney are surprisingly similar.  Travel far enough north in England as an Australian, and you’ll find locals who assume you come from the south of England.

The point of this digression is that we have a similar social phenomenon here to what in the UK are called “chavs”, who are really just working-class youth exhibiting certain identified properties or behaviours.  They’ve always existed, it’s just that consumer society (there and here) makes them more visible and more easily distinguishable.

When people feel marginalised or otherwise “useless”, they tend to adopt certain practices as a distinguishing feature and as a form of social solidarity.

The whingeing about how people have “corrupted” or “misunderstood” Australia Day is just out and out plain social elitism and snobbery, and exactly the same description applies to people who criticise someone for having a Southern Cross tattoo, or for wearing an Australian flag in whatever configuration.

And here’s the thing: you can dislike the celebration of Australia Day on principle (like me), you can be quite unattached to the current flag (like me), without assuming that the way someone dresses or appears determines their character.

If you can show me that rich, well-dressed, embarassed-by-ebuillent-nationalism types don’t committ crimes or have horrible attitudes or behaviours, you might have a point.  But they do and you can’t.  So just get over it already.