Anzac Day should probably divide us, lock us in some sort of conversation, as it did back in the late sixties when Alan Seymour's play One Day of the Year was written, banned, then performed in protest.

Today, most minds seem made up; the patterns of observance are set, mandatory, ritualised and assumed.

The more dimly distant the day, the clearer it seems to have become in the national mind. The forging of our character, the very root of what it is to be Australian. Or so they say. And say and say.

The further we have moved from 1915, the more Anzac Day has been free to become an idealised and disconnected rite, one that can be invested in meaning remote from its original role as a get together, a pause for solemn reflection and remembrance.

At the MCG today, Essendon and Collingwood will parade before a capacity house in the 'traditional' Anzac Day AFL blockbuster.

The players will wear specially machined jumpers, the bayonets of the rising sun badge on their breast; a bugler will play the last post, lulling the crowd to a massive, weighty silence before the relief of Reveille.

Once there was a better than good chance some goose would shout "go Pies!" midway. Not so much in recent years, the day having been invested with that now-common zeal for anything that speaks of The Nation.

The Anzac Day clash was the brainchild of canny marketer Kevin Sheedy in 1995. It wasn't the first game to be played on April 25, a day once set aside from normal routines; reserved for the veterans of war to meet while the surrounding culture observed a momentary hush.

Football was in fact illegal on April 25 until 1960, but now, with our attitude to the observance simultaneously more feverish and relaxed, Anzac Day has been captured for the exclusive use of the Collingwood and Essendon football clubs, part of an elaborately detailed celebration of bravery and nationhood.

But why does it feel strange and a little uncomfortable? When did we become so skilled at presenting this shiny, well-packaged jingoism? Is any of this true to the sort of country those young men so famously left in 1915, so many travelling one way? Or have we co-opted them, and their memory, to something they'd struggle to recognise as their own?

My grandfather had left Gallipoli and journeyed to France by April 1916. In two months time he and the other men of the 27th Battalion AIF and many, many others would be locked in a deadly arm wrestle for what high ground might be found in the wide flats round Pozieres in the Somme Valley.

Tens of thousands of them would die. Not so Corporal Henry Thomson Green: 'shell wound right arm, right knee, severe' is the notation on his Army Form B.103, Casualty Form – Active Service.

Lucky fella. He'd lose the arm, but otherwise get home in one still functioning piece.

On April 25, 1916 he noted the first passing of what would be Anzac Day: "Anniversary of the landing. Quiet day in the trenches. Relieved tonight and marched back to our billets in Chappelle- d'Armentieres."

I visited Pozieres 18 months back, a bitter winter. Looking out on the ground, that century old battle is unimaginable, its objectives just mounds and hillocks; the distances that claimed thousands just stone's throws.

Our guide on this little minibus tour of the Somme took time out between shepherding us from one pocket handkerchief cemetery to the next to marvel at what was then being done to recover Australian bodies in Fromelles.

Did we not realise that this whole valley was a grave to goodness knows how many? So many mass graves. So many bodies that will never be identified. There was a sense of the sepulchral over every inch of ground. What purpose did we serve now, nearly a hundred years on, with all this digging, and these 'full military honours'?

It was a levelling perspective. The exercise seemed to make sense in the glorified dialogue back home.

Both my granddads fought in World War 1. Corporal Green would die when my own father was just a toddler, but I remember – perhaps the memory is only of photographs – the other old chap, an RSL badge permanently stationed in his lapel.

War and what it left behind meant a lot back then, but somehow it was personal. And quiet. These were back in the very many years when mateship was just a shorthand for loyal friendliness, when a 'fair go' was just common decency. When loud, flag-waving displays of nation love were things we rather wished Americans wouldn't do. We certainly had no time for it ourselves; back in our age of insouciance.

And now strangely, with the country infinitely more diverse and spiritually complex, we fix on war more closely than ever as a key to our national personality.

No-one so much as blinks when the Australian cricket captain likens the tough competitive companionship of international cricket to the sort of unthinking selflessness that leads a man to drag a wounded, screaming, dismembered mate into cover under deadly fire.

The deeds of our veterans are at once honoured and dragged down to the humdrum of ordinary life through constant acts of easy equivalence.

The further we travel from those great wars that saw the mass involvement of ordinary men and women, the more we see their sacrifice, their often terrible sacrifice, as analogous to the recognisable struggles of our modern lives: the valor of footballers, something as universal and banal as 'mateship'.

Complete rot of course, and as sure a symptom as any of the narcissistic individualism of our time. As we motor to the centenary of Gallipoli we can only expect the effect to be exaggerated. The Federal Government will spend $83 million over four years to mark the anniversary. As one observer remarked yesterday, spending on ADF mental health care will be $93 million over the same period. As he says: "Priorities?"

Confusing. Not simple, but disturbing in the way that the past can be used to smooth a path for one particular view of the present. And here's the thing: it was them, not us. Their war, not ours. Their deaths, not this life of ours. Lest we forget.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.