The Stories We Make Up About Home

There was such an interesting Longreads on the myth of Britain, which I would argue is not a myth insomuch as a facet. The author starts with two accounts of the country:

Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

The second Britain is our Britain; a place we love to visit and feel dreamy about. We talk a lot about taking a trip there every year during retirement, both because we suspect at least one of our children will end up living there and because it’s a storybook happy place.

We, of course, also know about the first Britain, mostly because we—like all of you—live in a place with two stories. We’re America, leading the world in COVID-19 cases and drowning in racism, and we’re also America!—the storybook land of Hollywood and Harvard and Hamilton.

The article is about Britain, but it also points out that “Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.”

Other people believing your country’s myth—positive or negative—is uncomfortable because you exist in reality. And that reality is also a fantasy. The author admits:

I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency. I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery.

Is reality the ugly truth or the beautiful lie or something in the middle, which is neither ugly nor beautiful but is a complex story that changes every single second. You can’t sell that, of course, which is what you need to do when you’re project a country’s narrative. You can’t say, “These are the things we’re proud of and these are the things we’re not proud of and the reality is that humans across the world all think they’re unique but are really more alike than we’ll admit.”

I love stories, and it’s easy to reduce things into stories. To tell ourselves and others stories. It is so much harder to not only love something complex but to explain to others why you love it, too, warts and all.