The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #124364   Message #2762672
Posted By: matt milton
09-Nov-09 - 08:16 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: England My England
Subject: RE: England My England
Taking pride in the arbitrary rock that your parents chromosomes happened to be located on is nonsensical - it's a bizarre contortion of common use of the noun 'pride'.

To feel pride in one's heritage is frankly weird: when you think about it, it's feeling good about yourself because of things that other people have done. Other people. Not you. It's like a sketch that Mitchell & Webb did, which took the piss out of the insistence of couch-potato football fans that "We" won the match 4-nil, that "We" scored a blinder of a goal...

Generally speaking one takes pride in something that one has actually done. I can neither be proud nor ashamed to happen to have been born in England.

The only example I can think of, when this kind of pride-in-the-collective would have any kind of sense would be if, say, you felt proud of some courageous foreign policy decision taken by a government you had voted for. (Or, probably more likely, felt shame at some bloody awful foreign policy taken by a government you had voted for.)