Canada Day - Patriot Games

This year I had the good fortune to celebrate Canada day in Winnipeg. I thought it inappropriate to get in on the parade, so mainly I just joined them from the sidelines in thanking Canada for the fact that all the shops were closed and all the young people were drunk. I didn't get the impression that people were taking it all that seriously; a willowy adolescent called Georgia told me it was just an excuse to drink beer and paint their faces red and white. "What a quaint little people you are," I replied. "Imagine wanting to paint your face red and white." A grown-up man named Ned with a red and white face insisted that they only chose July 1 because they wanted a special day slightly before the Americans' special day. That isn't true; it's actually to commemorate the British North America Act of 1867, whereby the nation became a dominion of ours. I think Ned was engaged in his own little game of "lightly mock the foreign person". Which is fine with me.

While these two Canadians (who now, for me, represent all Canada) were blase about the historic day, various other signs large and tiny betrayed a certain tension about this nationalistic display. The tiny one first - a cafe that would normally have been open had a sign up saying: "We wish you a beautiful day off to reflect on nationalism, Canadianism and global imperialism." Naturally, it didn't direct our reflection, but I got a hunch that they weren't intending us to go, "Yay! I can't wait till the munitions shop opens again, so I can subjugate more countries!"

Canada's national paper, the Globe and Mail, chose the day to celebrate Canada's fine immigration record, tolerance and tireless fight against racism and prejudice of all kinds. They had an in-depth profile of a family of very successful Vietnamese migrants, a survey that found Canadians overwhelmingly (97%) in favour of racial diversity, and a leader celebrating both. It's a close call, this one - if the feature of themselves of which Canadians feel most proud is their tolerance, then what better day to celebrate it than Canada day?

But at the same time, nationalism is nationalism - you cannot make a statement of a country's greatness without tacitly implying its superiority, if not over all other nations, at least over some of them. Its values are coarse and random; trying to unite 28 million people under a flag can't be done with subtlety or consistency. Using a national day to celebrate tolerance is about the best possible use you can make of a national day, but it still lacks the humility and complexity with which tolerance might reasonably be associated.

You can get away with that kind of thing, though, when you live next door to America where, by happy coincidence, I arrived on July 4. They also have parades and paint their faces. They don't celebrate tolerance, as such; instead, they have watermelon-eating contests which, as a choice of activity to symbolise the core values of the nation, demonstrates a hitherto unexpected depth of self-awareness.

Most noticeable about these celebrations, on the streets and in CNN July 4 commentary, was the visible police presence. Newscasters reminded citizens hourly of the possible threat posed to them by al-Qaida. In one way, this dovetailed neatly with the central theme of the day - it's a relatively short trip from independence, through isolationism, to "everyone hates us". And plus, they're right, a lot of people do hate them. At the same time, I can't help thinking how much more stable the international community would be if they went back to using this special day for its original purpose - the celebration of how faltering, greedy and inadequate the British are. I think we could handle it. Instead, the upshot was a day dedicated to those natural bedfellows, jingoism and paranoia, with a watermelon adding up to an unlikely threesome.

That said, historical fidelity is by no means any insurance against the sabre-rattling patriotism. The Northern Irish Orangemen, marking their special day next week (I only hope I can get back in time), stick slavishly close to the historical event commemorated on July 12. It was the routing of James II by William of Orange; nothing about its antiquity seems to put a dent in its status as a good excuse to firebomb Catholics for kicks.

These three events are, you might have noticed, discussed in ascending order of badness. It is far worse to kill people than it is to paint your face and listen to some municipally sponsored funk. But even the yodelling patriotism engendered by football and such is tempered by its fleeting relationship with measurable sporting skill, is outward-looking and has its fortunes rocked by those of other nations. Both the Canadian disquiet and the American triumph underlined the fact that the celebration of nationhood in a vacuum is inherently uncivilised. The world is too old for stuff like this.