Shudder Flag

I’ve noticed recently that sometimes when when I see ‘my’ flag flying in particular settings I have a full body shudder.

Because: nationhood, always a violent concept predicated on dispossession of some over belonging of others.

Because: racism, fluttering, festering in my neighbour’s backyard, a finger on a flagpole to the non-white, read non-Aussie, neighbours that surround him.

Because: wilful self-interest that fails to see the continuum of discrimination, the critical need to exist in solidarity; the rainbow overshadowed.

Because: empire, the union jacking off the southern cross.

Because: colonisation. Invasion. Undeclared War. Under a corner of this flag.

Because: inkspots on the skin, a slingback on skinheads, a shorthand for hatred.

I think in part what I am reacting to is the tiredness of the nation state in a time when climate change, economic disruption and the information revolution make the cartographical markings seem pointless.

The nation state is not going to save us from climate change. Encroaching sea levels don’t give a flying fig about a brave little battalion of flags puffing their chests out at the shoreline. And yet, in our current system, it is the nation states who are driving the global response, and doing it in a way that maintains the fictions of independence rather than the reality of interconnection. The Australian Government’s new White Paper on Foreign Policy will undoubtedly position the extractive industries of coal and uranium mining as critical to our national interest, even though they make climate change worse.

The nation state has failed to protect their coffers and citizens from the plunder of capital seeking out cheaper-cheaper costs to reap greater-greater profit. The nation state has not been able to formulate a response to the changing economic model where scarcity is no longer the driving principle of price setting: our new economy is based on the production of information, and there is no scarcity of it. In part what we see in the US is the last protectionist gurgle of a slain economic giant, flailing its arms in the air to grasp back the jobs that have been taken off-shore in the hunt for shareholder return. It is the flight of capital and information disrupted economy that has ripped the manufacturing and tech jobs out of America, not immigration.

And yet, the cartographical markings are anything but pointless when it comes to defining who belongs and who doesn’t. I am so despondent about how easy it is to use the politics of fear, of schoolyard “I pick you for my team” emotional buttons, to define the limits of our citizenship and destroy lives. How easily we fall into racism when confronted with our own fears of not belonging. In Australia, our definition of national interest will continue to close our borders to refugees and asylum seekers, detaining them in sub-contracted despair. In the US, the Trump-led Republican Administration’s mandating of who doesn’t belong has sent shivers down the spines of some of us. The siren call of the Statue of Liberty echoed in our ears and we thought it was mostly true. Hearing the discordance of a new song from the White House has rattled us.

Part of what frustrates me is that, in this post-colonial age, the fiction of who belongs is the fraying edges of the once “great” flags of France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain. The empires took land, took resource (both natural and human), took self-determination and cultures and ways of knowing and imposed straight lines (from the beginning of empire, the straight-line roads of Rome still mark the face of the then known world). But there was nothing two-way about these roads. The xenophobia and racism of France and Britain, for example, is enacted on those who fell within their empire. The belonging was an illusion – you belong (to us, your bodies, your beautiful productive bodies) when you stay in y(our) land. But try and border cross, to belong to the green and pleasant land and it’s a different story.

Part of what fills me with fear is that we so easily go to war for this story of belonging. As a species, we are pretty unevolved when it comes to conflict resolution. I get, I totally get that ideas and principles are important. But why do we continue to feel frightened by someone else thinking and believing in different things? Why is it not possible for us to let the plurality co-exist? I know that this means that some people will live lives that I find perplexing and unjust. But so be it. I would rather that than spilling more blood in the name of a flag.

In the USA, the Women’s March on Washington used imagery of belonging to speak back to the racism, sexism and homophobia of the Trump Republican Administration. The American flag became hijab in one of the dominant posters from the organisers. A powerful assertion of belonging – our flag, my faith. I think this is really important. But, I also think that, if we are to survive as a human race, that our fluttering flags and drawn on border lines – none of which can be seen when you look at the world from space – need to be revisioned. That part of the answer to the information revolution and climate change catastrophe is not just new economic and energy models but also a new way of belonging that transcends the nation state.