Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers of sentiment about history and hymns, Shakespeare and lawn clippings, does it have a hateful heart? I ask because, as I’ve written before, I feel patriotic, and until recently I’ve considered this to be a good thing.
I felt particularly patriotic at a service in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria, last week. I slid in late and guilty, amid snippy Sunday stares. After the sermon we trooped outside and in the suddenly sunlit graveyard the vicar whipped a trumpet from his cassock and began to play. A pair of starlings began their electric warble, the motes and midges were bright against the dark church wall. Men stood suited, four-square, and everybody tried not to tread on the grass. My heart lifted with affection for this country, it lifted and then it paused, punctured mid-rise with doubt.
The trouble was this: I’d been to dinner recently at the Athenaeum club with a distinguished doctor: clever, interesting, urbane. Over decaf in the morning room, he insisted that to be patriotic was brutish, retrograde. He was thinking of football supporters, he said with a shudder, but cut no slack even for soft patriots like me, or the crowds tearing up over the poppies by the Tower. Sentimentality about Queen and country turned his stomach, he said and though I coughed a bit, like a coward, I laid low. Dinner was on him, and besides he spoke nine languages.
Since our chat I’ve heard a similar story from all manner of sophisticated types, even and especially Tories. They wait a while, till Remembrance day has passed, then say: patriotism is dangerous, it bleeds into supremacism and starts world wars.
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