It’s true – the title says it all.

To set the scene allow me to mention that in Australia we have a national broadcaster supplied by taxpayer funds, which is of course the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And yes I had to go and check that was what it stood for. The ABC also has offshoots like SBS, the Special Broadcasting Service, which concentrates on a World viewpoint with many non-English speaking programs, and in my not-so-humble opinion provides the best news service by light years, in this country at least. Also we now have NITV, which is National Indigenous Television, which I’m more than happy to have around even though I’ve hardly ever looked at it. Not the target audience I am but still I’m glad it exists to give some perspective to an indigenous audience, the original owners of this continent.

Ok, scene is now set.

Our current Prime Minister heretofore regaled as “the Mad Monk” as that is the nickname I prefer to use rather than polluting my page with more mentions of his actual name, has come up with the great statement that our national broadcaster is “unpatriotic” in its news reporting. Now let me just say here that I swear. More than I should but rarely in front of the kids. When I read that a fairly lengthy barrage of expletives exploded from the back of my throat and may have caused people within a kilometre or two to have vague feelings of unease from the telepathic backlash of my utterances. Patri-blanking-otic I most likely shouted. (The blanking bit you may need to use your imagination for) Why the blanking blank should our national and INDEPENDENT news broadcaster be blanking patriotic? Ah, well you get the picture of how I felt.

Now having watched a few thousand episodes of World News Australia on SBS from the days of Mary Kostakidis through to Stan Grant, Lee Lin Chin and the utterly professional Anton Enus, I can say I’ve seen plenty of patriotic newscasts shown as news stories. And they generally come from North Korea or Zimbabwe. Or some of those rippers that Hugo Chavez, and even Fidel Castro in the real old days, used to do. They were what I call patriotic. One sided, generally no different to propaganda. Broadcast made to brainwash the people. Actually I’m being a bit harsh to Hugo Chavez there – his were at least entertaining and passionate, though hours in length mostly – most of the others were wooden and staid in the extreme. But that is my main whinge/whine about the whole patriotic crap. I believe it is propaganda, setting an agenda for control of the populace.

Patriotism is in my view just an excuse for xenophobia of one type or another. I’m an Aussie. Born here, lived here all bar a few months while travelling about our little world. So far it’d be a tossup between here and New Zealand for best place to live that I have seen so I’d say I mostly like the country in which I was born. Apart from Sydney but that’s another issue altogether. But. Patriotism – and make allowances for my impersonation of our current Environment Minister here for a moment by quoting Wikipedia below – is:

…generally cultural attachment to one’s homeland or devotion to one’s country, although interpretations of the term vary with context, geography and philosophy. It is a related sentiment to nationalism. Source – Wikipedia, 30.01.2014 @ 2142hrs EDST.

Devotion to one’s country? Um, why? Why is my dirt, with apologies to my soil science lecturer who promised to hit anyone using that word, better than someone else’s dirt? I haven’t lived on any patch of dirt for longer than 20 years. I feel no specific affinity for a particular patch of it except for the trees I planted there. But my civilisation lives in a built environment, so it means diddly squat where I am surely. We see immigrants or colonists try and construct a place in the image of where they were, like the English did to Australia bringing their rabbits, foxes and other rubbish out here to ruin what already existed as it wasn’t English enough for them. I can understand an affinity with a culture, anyone should feel free to supply me with a definition of Aussie culture by the way, built up over many generations. Like my father who showed me Stockholm when I was 8 and explained to me that the following year that city would be 775 years old. And then told me there was “no history in Australia” except Aboriginal history. I can understand why Aboriginals are proud and devoted to the longest continuous active culture on Earth. But that is culture, and that can be far smaller than a country. What about some of the patriotism we see in Europe with clashes between sports fans from some of the Balkan nations in particular at the football? Madness is what it is. Really it is just nationalism, as alluded to by Wikipedia there. And how that is in any way positive is probably an issue for another article at another time.

I suggest a different type of patriotism. And I know I’m far from the first to say it. Patriotism to our planet, and the critters that live on it – including people. It’s where we live. It is a dynamic system so huge and complex that we do not understand it, and most likely never will. But a line on a map will never fill me with pride and devotion. I will never dislike a person because of where they are from or where they live now. I may well dislike them for their points of view, their philosophy, their different tastes, their excesses – or in short WHO they are. But never for WHERE they are. And I suggest the Mad Monk extracts his head from his largest sphincter and says something more like “Journalism should never be tainted by special interests including patriotism and I am proud to be the elected leader of this nation who has a fine, independent and unfettered national broadcaster able to report the facts, safe from political interference”.

I won’t hold my breath though. I expect an “I was misquoted” or “taken out of context” addendum any minute now though.