Thread by @geofflemon

Imagine trying to pretend that you’re deeply moved by Advance Australia Fair, objectively among the Worst 10 national anthems worldwide.

Imagine proposing that patriotic passion should be inspired by a limping dirge of a song, instituted in the culture vacuum of Australia’s 1980s, voted in by about 20 people who sent in a card off the back of a Weet-Bix box or some shit.

As if anyone who mumbled through the pretentiously ornate sentence structures and dull misguided virtuousness of that song at some school assembly in 1992 said “Yes! This represents me and my people and all we stand for!”

When I started primary school, I thought the anthem began with:

“Australians all are ostriches.”

No one corrected me for two years.

Because no one really cared. It was a half-hearted ritual. We had to have an anthem because that’s what countries do, so it might as well be this dross.

Then imagine fast-forwarding 30 years and trying to claim the filler is sacred.

Imagine being a professional, highly paid politician, and using your platform and your wage to publicly attack and insult a nine-year-old kid. For anything.

Imagine being a professional, highly paid politician who incites nutcases to further attack a nine-year-old kid, and who says that kid should be kicked out of school, while you hold power over the school system they’re in.

Imagine complaining about political correctness and outrage culture, then pretending to lose your shit because a kid didn’t stand up during a song.

Imagine trying to import some rancid American insanity that links an anthem with military vets because it worked on Fox News? Performative plastic patriotism, manufactured overseas along with the lapel pins.

And imagine trying to fake all this over a song as uninspiring and untrue as Advance Australia Fair. Where even the title channels some sort of Onward Christian Soldiers mediocrity, and we have to leave off the second verse because it kinda jars with our prison camp policy.

Imagine trying to act mad about not standing for the Australian anthem.

I’d be more offended if people sat through Whitney Houston‘s I Wanna Dance With Somebody.

Just like saying people should be inspired by an Australian flag whose most prominent feature is literally another country’s flag.

Our national symbols are mediocre. They don’t mean much inherently. So you can’t project meaning onto their lack. Maybe if we had a flag and an anthem that actually represented what Australia is, then they would come to mean something rather than be placeholders.

You can love your country without having to jump through designated hoops to prove it. No one should have to be judged for not engaging with that shit.

You can love your country and be critical of its failings. One sign of love is caring enough to want something to improve.