THE REMAKING OF SCOTLAND

Historic Scotland through modern revisionist apologist eyes. Self-flagellating, appealing for clemency from half-caring unseen masses worldwide. Scottish portraits in a now-rogue’s gallery, criminal paint peeling revealing imperial masks underneath. Burning coal is a hazard, cluck modern environmental unfriendly tongues. Frown and look down on busted busts and portraits of long-gone Scots of robber baron note, amber-trapped colonialists, timeless gentlemen of rough trade plunder, retro stories of Caucasian treason, painted magnates of colonies, conquerisation oncoming, tied to the murdered tracks of living long in infamy. Steam engine inventors, scream engineer deceptions, coming and going exploitation faces from the fairground haunted house of unjust history. Eyes on the foreign prize, Raj and majesty and freight and weight of historic massacres, mutinies and forever-mute histories. Scottish slaves, Cromwell trapped sneers, indentured servants, unintended services to the evolution of the American colonies. Bifurcation of Scottish dream and reality, fact and friction, enabled delusions of split-second grandeur. Foreign colonies, outposts, battles, extinctions, mournful piper death laments under struggling African or Indian or American skies. Bowing to no traditional established local power, powderkeg feats of defeat and victory, to and fro, fore and aft, front row best seats in the theatre of war and conquest and plunder. Peeling panting sweating white skin red and battered under alien sunstorms, no 40 acres and a mule, a hill-hidden moonshine still if you’re lucky, dooking for apples next to the bobbing boiled body of a nosy government taxation agent. American family separations, no reparations for lifelong horror and desperate deprivation, Highland Clearances, eternal clan disappearances, ejected and evicted for black sheep wool and fool’s gold. Agenda-waving tunnel vision vistas opening and closing in more-things-change rote and ritual debasement by smug losers of
life and history and
wealth and ancient
untortured
undiluted
culture.

(NEVER) END

Afterword: 

This was written after I visited the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh on Wednesday, 31/7/2019. I went into their 'The Remaking of Scotland' exhibition and was somewhat nauseated by the revisionist sense it was presented in. As has been noted elsewhere on the net, it does not include any information about the Highland Clearances, and only has one oblique mention of this vile phenomenon. What it does have is the usual modern politically correct whining about slavery and the environment, as evidenced in the photo at the start of this piece. I sat down and wrote this on the spot with a pen and pad, just capturing random thoughts from the slipstream that run through my head, as I like to do. It is what it is, win-lose-draw ambiguity of empire and time and chance. Fuck it.