You should come to the USA for a week or two to observe. You might understand it then Perhaps you can’t see it in Oz because you’re too close to the culture there.
Here’s the thing man … in the USA, it’s rare that someone will get into the front seat of a taxi or even a Lyft. We just don’t do it because we have residue from our British classism that we were unable to purge.
Australians get into the front seat of a taxi (or I assume a rideshare, but those were’t invented when I lived there,) they get into the front seat of the taxi for the same reason you say “hey mate, got a light?” Because Australia may not have solved its residual British classism, but Australians knew that it exists. Yes, there are some Pommy Aussies that are trying to bring back classism, but the average workaday bob-a-job Aussie harbors a kind of hereditary hatred for it. Unlike the USA, Australia was apparently far enough away from England that it couldn’t be used as a strong trading partner, the ship voyages were too long and too treacherous. So it became a dumping ground, and “farm team” of America. The British knew full well that the future of shipping was on the horizon with stronger, faster and even steam-driven ships, they built a lot of these technologies after all, and Britain was the global leader in Western-style precision engineering and ship-building. The Germans and the Swiss controlled the guidance of these ships, but Europe seemed to converge on this idea that Britain would control the heavy lifting of the new global economy. And Australia had a future, but it’s future wasn’t then.
Yes, the English shit on everyone, they shit on the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, Australians, the Canadians, but they had an odd kind of grudging respect for the Yanks, and in typical gentlemanly fashion, once we had our grand punch-up, we were friends again. The Treaty of Paris was in 1783, so that’s about seven from start to finish … seems like greased lightning compared to our current wars that seem to drag on for two decades like like our War against Afghanistan. They tidied that up, the USA made out like a bandit, France, Spain and Britain divvied up what was left, and the USA demonstrated what happens when you put a bunch of religious fanatics in charge of a national economy. They’re going to expand, they’re going to isolate and secure trade chains, they’ll patent revenue sources … basically, a bunch of religious fanatics with guns who are in charge of a global economy are going to do pretty much what they did in the church … they’ll privatize their gains and socialize their losses. So it wasn’t long after the Treaty of Paris that the religious fanatics with guns controlled the center swath of North America. And Britain seemed to see a rising star in their new Client-State Scam so they let us grab some of that loot, and let the USA take charge of revenue direction down through Canada (which remained Canada because they kicked the shit out of us and burned down our White House) and up from Mexico, of which we bought, stole and captured down to the Rio Grande, but we could go no further, and that part remained Mexico, because they kicked the shit out of us and then introduced us to the wonders of smoking their own special blend of hemp, and drinking their own special blend of distilled agave nectar.
So we said “Canada, Mexico, you two are okay with us. Britain and Spain gave us permission to take advantage of your economies … What’s that Mexico? You told Spain to go fuck themselves? … Uh, Canada, remember how a few moments ago we told you that Britain and and Spain gave us permission to fuck you in the ass? Well, it turns out Mexico is out of this one, so it looks like this menage-a-trois just became a manage-a-une, plus one. We’re going to overwhelm your economy wherever Britain tells us we can, since y’all are too polite to tell the Queen to go fuck herself, like they just did in Mexico. Whatever The Queen doesn’t steal from you, we’re going to steal from you, and whatever is left over, you can have that part. We have a funny feeling that in a couple hundred years when the global economy for water becomes critical, that you will become an economic superpower due to all the freshwater you have up there, but what the fuck do we know about all that? We don’t know about disinfection, the radio hasn’t been invented yet, and we still think it’s morally responsible to enslave Africans, hell we don’t even have left and right shoes yet, I mean, would you take advice about virtual water exportation from a timeline of humans who don’t have left and right shoes? Oh Canada … Oh Canada … we were speaking to you Canada, it seems you drifted off into some reverie where you were dreaming about winning a Stanley Cup, which of course you know isn’t going to happen this year with the Avs standing on head and burning up the ice, right. Pay attention Canada!”
So that whole thing happened with Canada, but Australia was like “ooy, wha’ about us, ya cunts?”
And Britain said “oh yeah, didn’t we send a bunch of Cunts down to Oz? I guess we forgot about them. Okay, we’ll just have to manage that one the old fashioned way … we’ll send down a bunch of lower-upper-middle-class managers from the trading floor at Herrods, and we’ll give them the authority to kill anyone who gives them stress and we’ll tell them something like “Now see here, Good Man! I don’t want to hear any of that rot about you missing England. You have a job to do in Australia, and you’re just a lower-upper-middle class manager from Bolton, which means you will likely never amount to anything more than a warm plate of beans for breakfast. Buck up man, take your family to Australia, and when you get down there, you will get to live like Eric Blair did when he moved to Burma, as an upper-middle-class manager from your country of God and King. You’ll have the proper help down there, with servants who will allow you to feel like a member of the actual British public. Doesn’t that sound pleasant man? Now excuse me, I have a letter from our colonies in Australia … what’s that, harumph, it seems that our colonists went and killed most of the natives, you unfortunately won’t have that proper help we promised you. You’ll have to pay some of the prisoners and their children to cook, clean and drive for you, as Tesla has still not delivered those robot cars they’ve promised us. But it will be lovely, you’ll enjoy your new life in a beautiful paradise that has everything that England has, including some extra things that you’re going to love, like deadly venomous spiders, snakes and crocodiles, also a bunch of bats for which we theorize carry some odd diseases that will jump over to humans all of a sudden in a couple hundred years because Eddie Liu is going to eat it in a wet market. Excuse me good man, I digress … You’ll love Australia, you’ll probably die down there, but you’re doing it for The Queen and her kittens.”
Unlike in the USA, there just wasn’t a lot of opportunity to enslave humans that gentlemen and gentlewomen could feel like proper members of a proper society that can only feel that way while destroying their lives and futures of our fellow human beings. So the takeaway here is that the USA could continue a cut-rate version of British stuffy-pants snobbery, and Australia couldn’t. Australia had no choice but to do away with classism because classism was incompatible with the life down there. Much the same thing happened in the USA when people moved out West. Suddenly it was a lawless territory and any slaves that the Easterners brought West would either escape or outright rebel. So it was like legal weed is now, but with Africans deciding that they could fight back, and a life sufficiently difficult that money meant less than ability.
Or course even now, some Pommie influence has crept back into Oz, and there are people who cling to their snobbery, who treasure their snobbishness. Orwell described it better than I can, in Road to Wigan Pier;
A shabby genteel family is in much the same position as a family of ‘poor whites’ living in a street where everyone else is a Negro. In such circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck-up-ness and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class.
But we had a lot more of it in the USA than Australia ever had, and our rapidly expanding economy after WWII launched a generation of well-healed, essentially spoiled-rotten Baby Boomers who have from their birth to this point, received most everything they have ever desired, because it was their birthright from the Post WWII American Way. At this point, the USA has one of the greatest concentration of classist snobs that the Planet has ever seen, and in fact, might ever see. History will remember the planet for these touchstones; the Aztecs threw virgins into volcanoes and the jaws of drug cartels, the Ancient Romans threw those with a streak of independence to the lions, and the Americans threw those of hungry bellies and empty pockets to the snapping jaws of The Great American Snob.
So here’s the deal man … you want to know why. The why is because The Great American Snob, they — WE — can’t enslave Africans anymore. The government told us we can’t do that anymore. But we have an unexplainable need to think of ourselves as better than someone in our lives. It’s in our DNA, though it isn’t clear yet if this will remain after the genetically-engineered COVID vaccine gets in there and fucks some shit up. But as for now, it’s in our DNA, this need we have to feel superior to someone, anyone, as long as it’s a human. And it can’t be an African, because they taught us in Baby Boomer school that it’s wrong to not only enslave Africans, but we also aren’t allowed to make them feel as miserable as we feel. And we aren’t allowed to hate anyone in the whole world of pain, like Arabs, or Latinos or Asians. We can’t hate homosexuals anymore, and we’re still allowed to hate Jews, as long as we call them “Israelis,” but we aren’t allowed to hate people who are only too happy to kick the shit out of us. We’re the new British after all, still under Her Majesty’s grace, but she seems to like us Yanks better than you English anyway. We pull in a lot more holla’ dolla’ bills for her than you lot.
We can’t even hate fat people anymore, unless the fat person is a man, and the person doing the hating is a woman, then it’s still allowed. But we obviously need someone to hate. So we’ll hate rednecks, they’re still fair game, because they have to work for a living and we’re not going to need them soon anyway, that now that Elon Musk has finally found a way for us to move around town without needing those rednecks to keep our cars running. We’ll supposedly still need them to drive all the trucks, but as long as they drive at night and don’t force my robot car to slow down, then they can do their thing. Ah, I just can’t say how wonderful it is to be alive and woke and progressive and be able to hate rednecks, be able to wish them death by drowning in the shallow end of the gene pool. It’s such a pleasure to be able to hate people who have to get dirt under their fingernails. It completes me as a person. My friend, you know us … atheism is just another way of saying that we don’t need to worship gods because we now know that we can worship ourselves. And people who have religion tend to read People Magazine, which is kind of weird, right? I mean, yeah, we’ll look at the cover to get an idea of what we need to look up on our Instagram and make fun of whatever basic celebrity is hawking her broken down shit. But we have henna on our feet, we can say that “boys lie” and girls go to Mars and boys get stupider, because we still have a hierarchy of hate, thank goodness. And Jews … excuse me, Israelis, rednecks, men and dads have a remarkably stellar rank on the Hierarchy of Hate. We can hate them with impunity, blame all kinds of shit on them, and they’re usually too stupid to even see what we did.
Do we care if a religion provides the death sentence for atheists and homosexuals and feminists and union activists and poets? Of course not, it’s not like were were going to live there, we just wanted to identify with their poor, sad plight for a while, which lets us vampire their sadness to use in our own lives where anti-depressants and staggering quantities of inherited wealth in Baby Boomer Nation has made actual sorrow something that we forgot how to do.
Tee hee.