Our apologies for the lack of recent activity here, readers, but there’s just been nothing happening worth talking about. Meanwhile, here’s some more music.
See you soon, hopefully.
The SNP put out this party political broadcast (PPB) last night.
And alert readers might already have noticed something odd.
I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.
They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.
There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:
(Warning: some adult content.)
Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.
Luckily, someone else has already said it for us.
The haunting words of a dead man, brought to you again on the exact anniversary of the day William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered at Smithfield in London for treason against the English crown.
Three deaths for the price of one. RIP.
This is the SNP members’ website tonight.
Looks like anything goes, folks.
In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.
At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.
But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.
And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.
Things change very slowly, then very suddenly. Here’s to better days, readers.
Past and future.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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