Estimats cüncitaxhiêns és amici:
In my official State of the Republic speech, I referred to micronationalism as "our glorious, ridiculous hobby". (Before I get going on the essence of this talk, let's get some definitions out of the way. Let's define micronationalism as "a group of people who simulate nation-statehood on a recreational basis". Yes, that includes the Kingdom of Talossa, and they can come argue with me if they disagree.)
Well, what drives people to do such a thing? I have long been of the opinion that small-group organisations follow extremely similar lines, in terms of organisation, internal dynamics and the evolution of conflicts, no matter what the on-paper purpose and ideology of the organisation is. Everyone knows that tiny political parties and tiny religions behave quite similarly - you can extend that to chess clubs, sci-fi fandom circles, minority sexual orientations and, yes, micronations.
The common factor is surely a specific subset of human nature common to the broader culture from which all the members of these groups come. I just want to look at one interesting parallel today.
As many of you know, I play and follow the sport known in our national language as futból sochéir, "football" in most of the world and "soccer" in the rest. One of the reasons I got interested in futból sochéir is that, unlike any of the other codes of football, it has a fandom culture of the type that would be familiar to sci-fi fans, of which I am also one. I recently informed a baffled nerd of my acquaintance that soccer fans have invented filking as well. Except instead of making up new words for songs to express the forbidden passion of Kirk/Spock, they do them to troll the opposing team. (It's incredibly what a range of subject matter can be set to the tune of "Guántanamera" or "Walking in a Winter Wonderland".)
An eye-opening exposition of football fandom is the book A Season With Verona by Tim Parks. Parks is an English-born author living in Verona, Italy, who spent a year following the notoriously violent and racist tifosi (hard-core fans) of Hellas Verona FC on the road all around Italy. An interview he did with the Australian Broadcasting Comission on this issue had him saying that, in his view, the racist sentiments expressed by the Hellas tifosi
are tagged onto a more healthy tradition, it seems to me, of creating a local identity for today, just for today, we imagine we’re back in the Middle Ages to city-states who hate each other.
I've always thought, going all the way back to 1997 when I first discovered Talossa, that micronationalism is just one example of a general trend towards a kind of "artificial localism", or voluntary tribalism, which catches on given the complete breakdown of all traditional affiliations and bonds of solidarity in modern globalised capitalism.
But similarly - just as Hellas tifosi go from being perfectly respectable citizens in their daily lives to spouting the most insane verbal abuse at opponents and sometimes their own players at the game - so do we in our micronationalist lives entertain concepts and modes of behaviour that we would never approve of in daily life. The mere concept of "patriotism" or "nationalism", for example, sends shivers through me as a socialist in my daily life. But as President of the Republic, I will be yelling for more and more vigorous patriotism just about every day for the next year, and hopefully beyond.
The Talossan Republic will only survive and thrive - as any micronation - if it provides something that we can't get elsewhere in the world. That can't just be "a place to hang out and meet people online" - that probably worked in 1997, but today there's a few million other ways to waste one's time on teh intarwebz.
A former Seneschál of the Republic, now sadly no longer with us, seemed to be under the impression that what that could be for us was the kind of organised mock-violence that Tim Parks sees as the core of Italian football fandom. I think his words - and I'm paraphrasing here - were something like "the point of Talossa is to be in a gang", and compete with other gangs.
I think he might have been right... but not in the sense that he meant. He was talking about party political warfare. Now that's fun and everything, but it really drags down group cohesion. I am familiar with the concept of "lesbian drama", for example - that in a small, rather enclosed social situation, tiny personal issues get blown up into grand guignol vendettas. That's certainly how pre-Revolutionary Talossa worked (given that the sides in any vendetta were King Robert and Sycophants vs. Traitors of the Week). It led to actual, real personal damage, and the retreat of that monarch increasingly into a very nasty and narcissistic personal reality.
No, citizens and friends, I don't think that the point of our Republic is political combat with other citizens. This can be a good thing - as long as it's political, rather than personal. And "political" means "around real issues of substance about our collective direction as a nation".
I think that "our gang" is a good place to start. But our gang can't be our political party - to a lesser extent it can be our province, but there's limited mileage in that. It can't even be the Talossan Republic - because that leads to the logic of "cold war with the Kingdom", which I'm thoroughly bored with.
No, dear friends, our gang is Talossa. I suggest that patriotism - that dirty word - is precisely what the modern world of open borders and multinationals deprives us of, and what Talossa - with its 30-plus year cultural history - can offer people, and what we should, to use the modern jargon, market as our Unique Selling Point.
To make our nation survive and thrive, we must present ourselves as proud of it. We must start wearing the green and red (with or without the four silver stars) with the same pride as the Hellas fans wear the gialloblù. We must happily discuss Talossa with our non-Talossan friends and acquaintances. We shouldn't seek to start wars with any other gangs (except on the field of sporting combat!), but to simply express our deep-down belief that Talossa is a simulation-of-nationhood worth the deepest pride, and a measure of evangelisation.
But what if we simply don't want to do that? If we are ashamed of Talossa - or apathetic about it - then that is a real problem with our nation-building, which we must rectify. So perhaps, before we can wear our colours with pride, we must make them mean something to ourselves. And that's the ethos I want to take into the Seventh Year of Our Freedom Restored.
(P.S. Hellas Verona are contesting the playoff final in the next two weeks for promotion to Italy's Serie B [second division]. Wish them luck!)
