shuggy's blog
"nauseating sentimentality" ain't enough - you also need the Cult of the Victim.
myth-making crud that makes a fetish out of suffering
Did ya miss that line then?
yes
Well I'm just a wee sassenach who loves Scotland. That is partly because of my ancestry, and partly because I'm an engineer.
It seems to me that the kitsch always serves to blind people to the real heroes and their achievements. But I reckon that is true to some extent everywhere you go.
I read the article. Money quote (literally in this instance):-
This weekend's event is predicted to give an £8m boost to Edinburgh's tourism industry and bring in £11m to Scotland as a whole, as visitors from overseas explore the rest of the country.
It’s a week or so before the Festival, and so yet another gap in the tourist year has to be plugged, just as they’ve bigged up Hogmanay, and were trying to get something done for St Andrew’s Day (in November, FFS)! There are about two days in February when there isn’t a heather honey trap being set for tourists.
As an ex-pat, I can confirm that it takes all of six months before our 'mawkish sentimentality' kicks in and we start pasting our houses with tartan wallpaper and putting Sydney Devine on heavy rotation.
Every time I'm horrified by this, I wash it down with imported-at-laughable expense Irn Bru and the feeling goes away.
Shuggy : "as the authentic unselfconscious attachment to custom fades, the psuedo-ritual becomes celebrated with ever increasing vim and gusto"
Hardy (the Return of the Native) : "A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction."
An attachment to historical kitsch is the product of fear and uncertainty about the future.
Scotland is caught in a state of doubt about which potential future to embrace, as a member of the United Kingdom, a province of an EU superstate, or a small but independent nation. An idealised past provides a safe sense of identity for a nation that is trying to decide what it is now. The Republic of Ireland is in the same state, half full of the revolutionary spirit of independence and half accepting of a cosmopolitan European identity. Indeed, the burgeoning English nationalism is a product of the same sense of uncertainty about where we are now and where we go from here.
The peoples of the Atlantic islands are all in a flux and which way we decide to go is anybody's guess, but once we decide we will all be ready to drop the kitsch in favour of a celebration of the new - whatever that turns out to be.
Commenting by HaloScan
