dumb shit on the internet round eighty
Hah all the non-Brits are very confused by this. Every time someone mentions a person from this country who, at any point in history, might have achieved something significant, the people who start shouting NO THEY LIED/CHEATED/ATE BABIES/INVENTED NOTHING/WEREN'T THAT GOOD ANYWAY are people from the same country. Doesn't happen so much with, say, France. Or Australia. Or China. Generally people who aren't British manage to cope with the idea that someone who shares/d an arbitrarily defined identifier with them might have done something good. What interests me about it is that it is still nationalism. Very much nationalism. A non-nationalist would say "so and so did a good thing", because the achievement and the person are what matters, not which country can lay claim to them. The person comes from the world, and gave to the world.
But not the British. We are extremely nationalist, one way or another. And so any achievement viewed especially by any of my fellows on the left has to be accompanied by a panicked, angry flurry of denial, lest someone think we are proud of our nation. Which, in turn, identifies the nation: because we're perfectly happy to praise the achievements of people who aren't British.
I am at least now after five years with Amanda attuned to her "what" response to me kicking my own country repeatedly in the face. Not just "we have problems and have acted like dickfucks and continue to elect idiots", which every democracy will own to, but a general "we are the worst human beings" moroseness that is a view NOT SHARED by the rest of the world. It's like talking to someone who is terminally depressed and therefore unable to see anything positive about themselves. A nation where the intelligensia is so filled with collective self-loathing that we'll declare Shakespeare a fraud rather than cop to the notion that not everyone who has ever dwelled here is a thieving idiot.
But not the British. We are extremely nationalist, one way or another. And so any achievement viewed especially by any of my fellows on the left has to be accompanied by a panicked, angry flurry of denial, lest someone think we are proud of our nation. Which, in turn, identifies the nation: because we're perfectly happy to praise the achievements of people who aren't British.
I am at least now after five years with Amanda attuned to her "what" response to me kicking my own country repeatedly in the face. Not just "we have problems and have acted like dickfucks and continue to elect idiots", which every democracy will own to, but a general "we are the worst human beings" moroseness that is a view NOT SHARED by the rest of the world. It's like talking to someone who is terminally depressed and therefore unable to see anything positive about themselves. A nation where the intelligensia is so filled with collective self-loathing that we'll declare Shakespeare a fraud rather than cop to the notion that not everyone who has ever dwelled here is a thieving idiot.