
Australia Day & Our Stinky ‘Americanization’ (The Naked City)

‘Australia Day & Our Stinky ‘Americanization’‘ is the latest column (January 27, 2025) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.
It’s an annual debate that inevitably precedes the Australia Day celebration on January 26 and then quickly fizzles out until next year.
For many First Nations people the date is clearly ‘Invasion Day’ and needs to be changed. For the majority of Australians it’s simply a public holiday, injected with a number of official events and a swag load of tacky Australiana-like inflatable kangaroos and cork tassel hats. The positives are citizenship ceremonies welcoming new Australians and the various awards which always seem to go to the very worthy. It’s refreshingly low on nationalistic fervour, at the same time somewhat meaningless as a true reflection of contemporary Australia and a history that dates back long before white settlement.
Let’s move the date for starters, so it has no connection to our questionable colonial past but also look to something more significant than ferrythons and sausage sizzles. The current date of January 26 relates to our British heritage but it can easily be argued that the overwhelming influence on Australian culture, national security and international involvement has come from the USA – and continues to do so.
Since WWII there’s been a reverence here for all things American – from music, movies, TV shows, fashion and celebrities, not to mention their role as the most powerful nation on earth. Add to this the constant corporate onslaught of American companies and our security obligations in sending soldiers to fight their futile foreign wars.
Have we been ‘Americanized’ or has the broad Australian ethos always shone through?
With the repugnant Donald Trump now calling the shots and some 77 million Americans endorsing his MAGA dream, maybe it’s time to assert our own homegrown values and echo the sentiments of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. At the national prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, following the inauguration, she urged Trump to “have mercy’ on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people’ and ‘to pray for unity as a people and a nation – not for agreement, political or otherwise — but for the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and division”. The supposedly born-again Trump was not impressed and later described the Bishop as ‘nasty’.
In his book Yankee Go Home: Canadians and Anti-Americanism, author Jack Granatstein argues that through fear of cultural domination, a rejection of US foreign policy, resentment over tariffs and trade barriers and even jealousy of a more powerful neighbour, Canadians make excellent anti-Americans. Canada of course is geographically much closer to the US than we are and Trump has already indicated a desire to make it America’s 51st state.
I’m not suggesting that we rejig Australia Day as ‘Yankee Go Home Day’ but why celebrate one day of national pride and then succumb to 364 of rampant Americanisation. There are of course many fine Americans, like Bishop Budde, who reject the policies of the megalomaniac now in the White House.
What I am advocating is that in the current climate we celebrate all the positive and humane values of this country as opposed to those that stink in our so called ‘major security partner’.
There’s still a mass of improvement needed in the way we treat asylum seekers, deal with racism and treat minorities within the broader LGBTQIA+ community – not to mention poverty, homelessness and a myriad of other problems. Trump’s method of dealing with all these issues is an anathema to the values of modern Australia.
Finally, if you believe some of the postings on various US websites such as the Meidas Touch Network it’s not just Trump’s policies that stink – it’s Trump himself. The POTUS apparently has a huge problem with excessive foul smelling flatulence and incontinence. The Meidas commentary is quick to make the distinction between elderly incontinence and that brought on, in Trump’s case over forty years ago, allegedly from illegal drug use in particular cocaine.
There’s a strong witness validated account of Trump being asked to leave a New York steak house after stinking the place out and numerous other incidents documented where he was on the nose. A staff member from the TV series ‘The Apprentice’ has stated Trump wore a diaper which he spoiled a number of times during recording.
The rumours are nothing new and the ‘Diaper Don’ tag was applied to Trump by many of his critics during the 2024 campaign. It received little coverage in the mainstream media although Robin Abcarian, writing in the Los Angeles Times discussed it with mixed feelings noting:
“The need to seem infallible — a hallmark of dictators throughout history — is an important part of Trump’s ‘I alone can fix it’ self-mythologising.”
Did the humiliation of the steakhouse incident, when Trump was right at the top of the New York rat pack, provide his motivation to eventually seek the presidency? A kind of ‘I’ll show you’ moment. Then again there’s a distinct irony in the fact that as a convicted felon Trump cannot own a gun but still controls the nuclear codes.
Let’s hope the only big bang he ever generates in the next four years is within his euphemistically named ‘maximum absorbency garment’. Phew!
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