dlowan wrote:Ok - how do we love a country? Now - landscape I understand - but a country? Do people espouse to love a sort of Platonic ideal of their country, or their actual nuts and bolts neighbours, the fella who farts in the lift, the back alley where the cats piss, the local sewerage farm, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
Yes, yes and yes - all of that! (Well, in my case of the Dutch equivalents).
I dont have much up with my state, my government, "our borders" ... but there's something abstract, lingering in the confluence of random impressions - the style of a building, the illuminated rooftop advertisement you've seen from the train since you went to the zoo with your dad, the raincoat of an old man that vaguely reminds you of your grandfather's, the mohawk of a punk, the slogan on a wall and its phlegmatic irony, the shape of the clouds (always the clouds, banks of clouds, shafts of light, flutters of grey, white and blue), the feel of the breeze when you step out from the station's back exit, the sound of the seagulls, the sullen, sometimes gloomily imposing grey of the waves, the smell of fish, the absent stare of passengers on the ferry, the jovial, colloquial speech of the bus driver, the sight of a sign on an old warehouse that once sold "potatoes", the headscarves of the Moroccan mothers with their prams, the drawbridge over the canal where they opened that new, trendy place, the checkered gingham on the folksy seventies plates they sell inside as newly rediscovered camp, the stubby cigar you sometimes still see old men smoke who once sold cattle in auction-halls where now young, hippy-looking Poles whom you remember from the club from when you shared an E sell you second-hand cars, the swish of bikes in the park, the "soft g" of the rapper from Limburg, the annoying wheez of the new trains, the memory of the white dirty tables in the train's "dining car" where you could order a plastic cup of coffee at best and stickers told you not to play cards or drink, the sigh, joke or rant that'll still go with the intercom message of yet another delay, the black and white cows outside in layer after layer of damp green field and hedge, the fatty accent of the big-town mamma and the annoyed look of the girl with the walkman and the blond hair, the Turkish guy playing his flute, always, when you arrive back home, the yellowish light of the lanterns in the sidestreet, the tiny blue square lights fitted in between the pavement stones of an alleyway no-one, ever, enters at the order of a civil servant with a keen sense for the whimsical, the dreamy tile pasted on the same alley's wall, like many others with each a different little graffitied painting that have kept cropping up in random other places thanks to who knows what kind of gentle-minded art rebel, the TV commercial of the country's biggest bank with its universally recognizable theme tune called "fifteen million people", that goes with random images of people like those described above (junk as well as young mother, gabba-houser as well as granma, all welcome as client), the gameshow host that everyone has the same ghastly memories of and the thick, lamenting, Dutch-language tear-jerkers with the lyrics you'd otherwise only find in Greek or Arab, the newspapers with their understated headlines and ever-present columnists reflecting on the little, ordinary things, the total lack of pride in army, history, conquest or victory and the massive, near-unanimous, spontaneous party frenzy when the soccer team wins, the Loesje posters, the skaters and how they get to negotiate with city officials about the exact location of their skating rink, the narrow, slanted houses at leafy canals, the narrower houses still in the streets that intersect them, the squatted abandoned warehouse opposite the water from where a pensioner who used to work there sits at his open window with the TV on in the background and a cup of coffee on the embroidered cloth on the little table, the endless variations of cheesy porcelain animals on windowsills in working-class neigbourhoods, the "peace" posters in the better-off neighbourhoods where the young fathers "drive" the baby's buggy and argue always so reasonably when their five-year old wants an ice-cream, the elegant white transparency of the new city hall and the tram terminals - yellow, short trams - that used to be there before - all of that makes much more than a landscape or a set of friends and family and random places you've lived - there's a connection, sometimes contre coeur, sometimes sensed in gratitude, that ties you with "these" people, this land - home.
. Oh well, he isn't perfect after all. 
