They'll be back

"You have to vote," I tell my son over coffee in the kitchen of his flat.

"No I don't," he says. "It just encourages them." 

"That's a cheap joke and the opposite of the truth," I say. "If good people don't vote the extremists get in and we're all screwed." 

"There's no evidence for that," he says. 

"There is," I tell him. "It's how the Nazis came to power. After the First World War, the Germans were totally fed up with politicians, so the numbers voting plummeted every year. By 1933 only one person was voting in the whole country. Guess who."

"No idea."

"Hitler's mum."

He pours me a thick black espresso that could have boiled up from the Athabasca tar sands, and shakes his head.  

"It is pointless though," he says. "No matter who you vote for you get Tories. Cameron - Tory toff. Blair - Tory slimeball. Major - Tory twit. Thatcher - Tory twat." 

"You forgot Brown," I say.

"Who doesn't?" he says.

"Alex Salmond isn't a Tory," I tell him. "So you have to vote in the independence referendum. It's our one chance to get a country that isn't run for City of London mega-criminals."

"So what do you think will happen if we vote Yes?" he says.

"We get to live in a social democracy where the poor and sick are supported," I say. "Instead of abused by rich politicians and their media poodles."

"Good speech but no chance," he says. "The Tories will take over and we'll be back to square one."

"They can't," I say. "Tories in Scotland are like the dodo."

"Bald and stupid with a fat arse?"

"Extinct."

"Don't you believe it," he says. "Tories don't go extinct. They're just hiding."

"Where?" I say.

"All over the place," he says. "Caves, marshes, woodlands." 

"You're thinking of the Picts," I tell him.

"They were Tories," he says.

"You're obsessed," I say. "You're seeing Tories everywhere."

"They are everywhere," he says. "Soon as we declare independence they'll slither out their holes and take over the country. Did you know that 99.9% of Scotland's land is owned by 0.1% of the population?"

"You're making that up," I say. 

"I'm not," he says. "And guess what all those big landowners are."

"Tories?" I say.

"Correct," he says. "So we declare independence, first thing they do is put high fences around their land and herd us all into Glasgow."

"We'll climb out again and reclaim our country," I say.

"You won't be able to," he says. "They're taking the pound off us. You'll be so weighed down with two-pence pieces you can hardly move, never mind climb fences. We'll all be stuck in here."

He sips his coffee and shakes his head again. "Five million people trying to get a drink in Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night," he says. "Bedlam. Is that what you want?"

"I guess not," I say.

 "Well don't vote then," he tells me.

Fault lines

My younger son is a never-ending source of sideways slants on the human condition, which range from deeply profound through intriguing but speculative to gibberish he doesn't even believe himself.

Thing is you never know which you've just heard until you've spent half an hour looking at it from all angles, which could easily be half an hour you'll never get back again.

The latest throwaway remark to jolt my complacency came while I was driving him to Kilmarnock, the Ayrshire town that first published another great Scots iconoclast.

"I blame you hippies," he tells me, à propos of nothing.

"For what?" I ask.

"You name it," he replies. "Teenage pregnancy, autism, bird flu, climate change, the expansion of the universe, the economic collapse of the western world."

"All caused by hippies?" I ask, pulling into a gap in the slow lane to let a big Merc three feet from my back bumper glide effortlessly past.

"Every one of them," he says. "Think about it. Most of our problems are caused by repressive, authoritarian individuals and the systems they create to exploit the rest of us and keep us in line."

"True," I say. "But that's exactly the people the hippies despised."

"Precisely," he says. "So it made them try harder. Until then they'd had it easy. Nobody questioned them. Then you long-haired lovers came along and they got worried. If everybody made peace not war, they'd be out in the cold.”

“So the last 50 years of lurching to the right have been a reaction to a bunch of unwashed idiots letting it all hang out in muddy fields,” I say.

“Correct,” he replies, ignoring the sarcasm.  

“Well it’s a theory. But let me ask you something. Why did you say ‘you hippies’? Doesn’t the half-inch hair, the suave suit and the cultured conversation suggest to your unobservant eye that I am not and never have been a hippy?”

“Not now," he replies. "But you can’t fool me. You were out there with the other beards and kaftans, long before I was born, swaying in the sunshine, tripping on acid and skipping through the daisies like a big daft girl.”

He pauses for breath and the swish of the windscreen wipers fills the momentary silence. None of the responses that come to mind seem adequate to counter the calumny. He takes my silence for agreement and delivers the final verdict.

“It’s all your fault,” he says.