Why Scotland is like an Adolescent
29 March 2010
Being the one man that picked up that first stone in the riot that led to the overthrow of a brutal dictatorship must do a lot for your sense of masculinity. Being a member of a minority party that sweep to power overnight is going to, if nothing else, inject a few months of virility into your love-making. Being in a country that has had limited political powers devolved to it by another stronger country, which allows you to take administrative control of street cleaning and sanitary provisions for retirement homes, however, somewhat fails to swell the chest and crotch with pride. This is Scotland and since 1999 we have had our own devolved Parliament. Since then there have been many questions about what the political change has done for Scottish identity, pride, and the possibility, much debated and hoped for – of the emergence of new kind of Scottish man. This may be delusional Post -Devolutional rhetoric - the idea of a ‘new Scottish man’ being only wishful thinking from all those, including us Scotsmen, who were sick to death of what a typical pre-devolutional Scot seemed to the world. Everyone knows the cliché, ala Rab C. Nesbit - miserable, negative, prone to excessive drinking, racist and sectarian, with an almost religious worship of a game that involves kicking around a ball, that was once rumoured to have been the head of an Englishman; the chip on the shoulder about the English being, now, an entire bag of chips, with a pickled onion maybe, if the dole cheque could stretch that far after eleven pints. The ideal of the Post-devolutional Scottish Man is a utopian one and seemed to spring, in ’99, from our once proud History of philosophical enlightenment in the 18th century, during which Edinburgh was a seat of International learning and philosophers like Hume paved the way for the bill of rights that would one day become the American and French Revolutionary constitutions, the rights of the sovereign individual enshrined in text for all the world to marvel at. Words of wisdom, which in turn had been inspired by Greco-Roman culture and the concept of the virtuous citizen. The Roman virtus, translates as ‘manliness,’ and signified the traits of ambition, strength and the fearless facing adversity. It was perhaps hoped, given devolved powers of self determination (over the Dept of Water and Sewage and the possibility of local govt. increasing revenues through new parking fines) that the Scottish Male would, for once, stop whinging about his suffering lot and become a proud citizen, a new self made man in the mode of Hume or Julius Caeser. If only it were so! If the image of the citizen is of the mature man taking responsibility for his life on the stage of History then the true image of the Post-devolution Scottish male is that of the pimply whinging adolescent. Consider it for a second and compare the facts. Adolescents moan about their parents, but still accept pocket money – and so to do Scottish men, who are more than happy to take hand outs from the Ma and Pa of British Govt, by way of state benefits (Statistics on Incapacity Benefit dependents in Glasgow are astounding.) Adolescents neglect their dietary requirements, sneak out to get blind drunk and think it cool to be confronted by the police – and in Scotland we have one of the highest rates of alcohol related violence, arrest and illness in Europe. Adolescents hang out in gangs and indulge in naughty little acts of anti-social behaviour – in Scotland we have a gang and knife crime problem bigger than the rest of the UK. Adolescents rebel against their parents but at the same time won’t move out and get a job and a home of their own – and every time we have had a referendum on home rule we Scots vote against it, then staying in the Great British House, start to whinge about our lack of freedoms. Adolescents are obsessed with failure and death, being bullied and misunderstood - and so too all of the drunken late night sing-alongs that fill our weekend night streets are about how sorry we us Scots for ourselves – ‘will ye no come back again.’ Is about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s failed revolution against the English in 1746. All our other pub-crawl soundtracks, excluding the sectarian football songs in which we attack each other, are about our long felt suffering at the hands of the English. The first line of Flower of Scotland, our alternative national anthem, is: ‘Oh flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again.’ The self-pity of the adolescent, with the retro Cd’s. The new Scottish man cannot have powers devolved to him but has yet to evolve. He has yet to leave his teenage bedroom. There are, however, methods for dealing with having a melancholy, drunken, self-pitying, adolescent male in your home. First – try to get him a job, if that fails force him to get one; Second – get him to do some exercise and stop sitting in his stinking room listening to the same old miserable songs. Third – let him know, gently, that you’d quite enjoy the freedom you’d have from not having him scrounge money from you all the time. Fourth – tell him that you’d like to be grandparents one day, and how it would make you proud to see him take pride in himself and his own self-made future. The UK may be called the nanny-state but really, it’s Scotland’s Mum and Dad. If we want to see a post-devolution Scottish man evolve as a fully-fledged adult with a sense of masculine pride in determining his own life, then the pocket money will have to stop. It’s about time he got thrown out of the paternal home to fend for himself.
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