Thoughtland

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: In the age of the iPad and Kindle, libraries are to be defended, not emptied

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a small intervention in the debate about public sector cuts, but a large paen to my favourite kind of public building, a big city library. But also about how our defense of these spaces has to creatively consider what the Net, and e-books, are doing to our conception of public writing and reading. As ever, all comments welcome.

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There is much righteous and articulate protest at the moment about the fate of libraries, in the era of deficit-justified public sector cuts. The children's writer Philip Pullman has delivered an all-time brilliant speech in defence of libraries, as spaces of generosity and civility against the exhausting competitiveness of market culture.

And me, I'm the world's greatest fan of libraries. Many of my weekdays in Scotland are spent at the Mitchell Library - huge, comfortable, well-wifi'd, splendidly lunchable, still stocked with university-level resources for general public use, and about to launch its serious-minded books festival, Aye Write.

The library was the original "third place", a zone for people to contemplate and connect between work and home, well before branded coffee-shops and boutique malls. And any society worth its salt (perhaps Great, rather than Big) would be thinking about how to build on the public library - a supportive civic platform for new generations of workers and players, part-timers and freelancers, parents and singletons, trying to find the resources to shape their lives in unstable times. 

Suffice to say that the Coalition's vision of deprofessionalised, volunteer-run libraries doesn't quite match up. 

But beyond defending libraries as part of our social commonwealth, we do have to grapple a little with some bits of technology - the internet, and now e-books - that complicate a simple battleground of cuts and anti-cuts.

The evolution of my beloved Mitchell, over the thirty years I've been using it, is the paradigm example. When I first entered as an undergraduate in 1981, you'd trot upstairs to an almost literally transcendent Philosophy And Religion department, or wander over to a Social Sciences or Humanities or Technology and Science floor - the proper academic disciplines, open to the passing punter. 

All of them were stacked with the latest journals. |ndeed, my first experience of surfing knowledge, before Netscape and a plastic mouse came into my life, was the Mitchell's periodicals shelves. Some urbane librarian had placed Harper's Magazine next to New Scientist next to Electric Word (the predecessor to Wired magazine). I'd be lost for hours in the spectacle, greedily putting together my world views, fleshing out my hunches. 

But the Mitchell I face today, as I settle down with my Macbook to sup from the municipal wireless, is both much less, and only a little more. A scant periodicals list, and once mighty realms of knowledge scrunched into rooms on single floors. Entire floors given over to what seems like genealogy and Glasgow nostalgia; a business section which at least gives you free access to online commercial news archives, but which otherwise seems overly un-enterprising. 

However, the aforementioned cyberspace- and a generous supply of electric power-points - turns what would otherwise seem like a shell of its former glory, into a comfortable, solid basis for the hive-mind of freelance Glasgow. I regularly meet film-makers like Peter McDougall, or think-tankers like Graham Leicester, or writers like Ewan Morrison, or any number of non-office-able dudes, pecking away at their mobile or fixed keyboards at various levels of the building.

The webcafe on the ground floor is easily the most cosmopolitan space in this city - every shade and brogue on the planet using their allotted free hour to throw virtual tendrils of love, money or power, as the globalized world spins them around.

And the books are still there, now lendable as well as for reference. But there's no doubt that the internetting of libraries brings a challenge to the librarian's core vocation. At this point, we enter into the babel of debates about the future of the book in the digital and networked age - and quite rightly, the librarian asks some very sharp questions.

 What does it mean to manage and curate a collection for the benefit of the citizen, if - say - 50% of the same reference material can be accessed via a smart phone on the bus home? Given its current state of patchiness and murky commercial ambition, how could something like Google Books even remotely replace a good municipal supply of canonical and disciplinary texts?

The new boom in e-books (due to attractive and efficient new e-readers like the Kindle and iPad) is ensnared in a thicket of digital copyrights. The publishing business has observed the meltdown of the music business, and is trying to make sure they aren't as easily eviscerated by the copy-anything power of the web.

Yet, the librarian asks, what does it mean to lend a book in this environment? Does the idea of turning off the reader's access to the e-book from a central point - remember Amazon's accidental removal of Orwell's 1984 from Kindle - actually revive the notion of fines and returns? Or will a mad plethora of competing e-book standards, copyrights and devices be too much for a public library system to cope with, if digital devices ever become the dominant mode of book consumption?

I'm a Kindle user since just before Xmas: and in terms of my mobile lifestyle, I am thrilled to be amassing a portion of the research library for my next book in something I can slip between the pages of a Ryman's notepad. For me, no more slow separation of my vertebrae due to a volume-overloaded back-pack for me. But this seems, and is, a real privatisation of my resources: a step back from those tendencies the library and the web share, to make information and knowledge a commons.

I just realised the other day that I can't, or can't easily, lend any of these quite cheaply acquired books to anyone. That feels wrong, retrograde. I wonder if these restrictions are only a hiatus on the way to the state of stoicism about copyright that we have in the music business.

Will the book become just as decommodified as the album or song? Less an object to be reliably sold, more a stimulus to community - a community that will pay for scarce pleasures (the presence of the author, his work made into a beautiful object), but will expect story and concept to be cheap or free? Yes, a fertile currency of discussion - but hardly a chunk of pulped wood to be sold with a hidden margin. 

So much is up in the air at the moment, so many pieces yet to settle. But the last thing I'd want to go along with is the kind of glib technophilia so characteristic of many self-proclaimed "social entrepreneurs" - that there is some inevitable new order of readers and writers bubbling up naturally from the dot-com chaos.

As a CyberNat - in the best sense, I hope - I would want there to be a nation-state dimension to how we think about digital literary copyright. And even if those new copyright regimes are European or transnational, I would want a Scottish voice to be arguing in those halls of power for the classic librarian's virtues of fair use and public access - even in the age of electronic ink and touch-screens. 

But however wireless and permanently connected we are - however much we can make any coffee house our own research centre, with the right devices - we should value the enabling, non-commercial capacity and stability of a public library. It's a physical space we should give to ourselves, to honour our own seriousness about our lives. It can improve and develop, to complement our new tools and sensibilities. The library is to be defended, not emptied.

The Source of the Nile: Pat Kane review of Allan Brown's Nileism: the Strange Course of the Blue Nile

My review (for the Scottish Review of Books) of Allan Brown's excellent rock biography,  Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile. The book is a funny and sharp evocation of the rise of Glasgow's modern sensibility, via the tortured art of three musical obsessives.

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The Source of the Nile

The music of the Blue Nile conjured a distinctive image of Glasgow in the 1980s.

Pat Kane, Scottish Review of Books, Vol 7, Issue 1, 2011

It’s a straightforward memory test: recall the music you listened to when you went to university or college. Try it; shut your eyes. And once you finally return to this page, has a recollection ever been so vivid? Have the physical details of a place, the faces and clothes and significant conversations and afternoons of passion, ever been so easily recalled?

The neuropsychologists would pedantically point out the reason why: the combination of a life beginning to be lived as a choosing, autonomous adult, with a youthful brain that’s still growing and ramifying, the switch stuck on “receive”. Which is why the texture of that malodorous couch is still on your fingertips, the first ever croissant still flaky in your mouth, the thrill of an enlivened intellect still electric inside you.

And music – that elaboration of a heartbeat, a mother’s croon, an innate sense of symmetry – just floods the memory circuits, like a red wine bottle tipped onto the crappy carpet of a rented flat. Goes everywhere; never really disappears.

For me, for Allan Brown, and for hundreds of thousands of others, one listen to any track from the Blue Nile’s 1984 debut album A Walk Across The Rooftops makes such a transportation possible. And although any reaction to any piece of music is subjective, it’s easy to tell a personal story about this record which makes a strong claim that it captured something objective, really out there.

To be a studious young Glaswegian male between 1981 and 1985 was to exist under roiling skies, shot through with occasional light: paranoid about being conscripted to fight in the Falklands, living a double life of intellectual demands in Garnethill and hometown mediocrity in Blairhill, yet beginning to explore a great city both in its streets and in your mind.

The city fathers hadn’t really discovered the joys of urban branding yet – the collective euphoria that a few well-chosen symbols, festival slogans and property developments could bring. The modernism, even futurism, that we brought to our student lives in Glasgow, was largely self-generated – and almost entirely based around music. Scottish post-punk was scattering its riches across the available media; which meant the NME, scraps of youth TV, John Peel at ten, and most crucially, Radio Clyde’s Billy Sloan on a Sunday evening.

When Sloan played the Blue Nile’s first single, 1981’s ‘I Love This Life’, I remember sitting bolt upright in my Coatbridge bed, instantly responding to Paul Buchanan’s reckless, slightly cracked swoon of a voice, to the bubbling serialism of Paul Moore and Robert Bell’s music – but perhaps most of all to its mood of bruised, weary romance, resting on a shimmering plane of electronica. A Walk Across the Rooftops confirmed it. In the Blue Nile I heard the dogged optimism, the growing dramatic arc, lurking behind my stumbling, day-time scholarly life in the big city – but set in a soundscape that (as the Edwin Morgan poetry collection from the 1970s put it) seemed to stretch from Glasgow to Saturn.

Via New York, it would also have to be said. Though far less crudely and directly than the late 1980s clutch of aspirational Glasgow bands, the Blue Nile channelled a towering, light-blinking imaginary Manhattan deep into their songs: ticker tape fluttering down from on high, tall buildings reaching up in vain, automobiles not cars, Glasgow-New York fused together as a tinseltown in the rain. 

As Paul Buchanan often admits in Nileism, ‘The music I had was what I inherited from my father and his tastes, which was Sinatra and that generation of singers, that American world.’ And out of all those who inescapably drank from that well, Buchanan has surely taken the richest draught: he combines the staggering ruin of the later Frank’s voice with the vaulting gospel ambition of a soul singer. Quite a combination.

But again, the bold, symphonic confidence of the Blue Nile’s electronica deconstructs all this Americana – makes it less like a clichéd trigger for emotion and excitement, and more like an abstract landscape of urban modernity that almost anyone could live in, and imagine their triumphs and failures, their ardencies and heartbreaks.

The first time I read Don DeLillo’s Libra, with Lee Harvey Oswald sitting on the A-train, I immediately heard the soundtrack coming from the Blue Nile: ‘The wheels touched off showers of blue-white sparks, tremendous hissing bursts, on the edge of no-control. People crowded in, every shape face in the book of faces. They pushed through the doors, they hung from the porcelain straps. He was riding just to ride. The noise had a power and a human force. The dark had a power. He stood at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass.’ 

It’s maybe not such a presumptuous connotation: DeLillo’s latest book, Omega Point, begins and ends with a contemplation of Glasgow conceptualist Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho. I’ve also just watched a YouTube interview with Paul Buchanan, quietly defending their glacial pace of four albums over 25 years to a jocose Irish presenter: ‘Try to think of them as novels.’

Easily done. One of the many delights of Allan Brown’s biography of the band is the way he allows himself enough literary pretension, amidst and between what is otherwise a conventional rock chronology of formation, relative success, and downward slide. This seems to be mostly shaped by his attempt to comprehend the inner dynamic of the band itself, ‘an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a raincoat’, a ‘hive mind’ which he sets himself the task to dissect. Music producer after svengali manager after record company executive relate the same experience of dealing with the Blue Nile: ‘It’s like they have a telepathy going between them’, says one factotum, ‘which it’s very difficult to break into.’

This tactical opacity made it difficult for them to conform to the ‘army manoeuvres’, as Brown correctly puts it, that conventional music business success requires: regular touring, albums every 18-24 months, relentless glad-handing of retailers and media, some commensuration between commercial revenue and recording budget.

He picks up on a phrase that the band delightedly pass among themselves – some overheard diddy in a bar in the 1980s, drawling ‘I’m in a band...as you probably know’ – and cites it as the core of their carnaptiousness. How do you make the purest, most considered modern music you can in a business best summed up by Hunter S. Thompson? ‘A cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.’

Well, you defend your autonomy as best you can. Part of this is the perennial musician’s ability to hunker down and minimally survive (the financial grace and favour of various girlfriends are mentioned in passing). But another part is lucking into the right context for making music: a physical place, or a trusted soundman, or a sympathetic small record label. Some defensible compound that can resist the harpies of promotion, so you can chase the sonics down the rabbit hole, and come up with something sui generis.

The Blue Nile’s mighty first two albums, A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982) and Hats (1989) were produced under exactly these conditions. I’m very pleased that Brown puts producer Calum Malcolm, and his converted-schoolroom studio in Pencaitland, at the heart of the Nile’s story. (My band Hue And Cry recorded two albums with Calum and I can attest to his genius). A somewhat bruised and elderly schoolboy in appearance, Malcolm took this bunch of disgruntled new techno-romantics and sat them down for listening sessions with Eastern European orchestras playing Bartok.

The title track of their first album is surely as evocative an opening sequence as the first few bars of Miles Davis’ ‘So What’ on Kind of Blue: you listen today and marvel at the sound of industrial-meets-post-industrial Glasgow wrenched out of the crudity of 1980s synthesizers. The company context was important too: the Blue Nile have always had a relationship with the recording label of the hi-fi manufacturer Linn, for whom perfection of sound was an absolute.

Yet the second half of Brown’s biography, covering their last two albums (1996’s Peace At Last and 2004’s High), is a familiar tale of how relative success can progressively unravel the delicate conditions that produce something of brilliance. Huge publishing deals were signed; their songs were covered by Rod Stewart and Annie Lennox; major American and London managers were signed up; lives started to be uncomfortably lived between LA and Glasgow; celebrity girlfriends were picked up (Rosanna Arquette).

Simmering tensions over musical direction also came to a head. For Peace At Last, acoustic guitars and gospel choirs rang out in expensive studios; on a stylistic pendulum swing, High is a dense, claustrophobic wall of digitality, apparently recorded in a control room where keyboard player Paul Moore would look only at his computer screen.

‘You have to remember that we were just three panic-stricken guys’, says Buchanan, the only member who consented to be interviewed for the book. ‘If we were full of confidence, the records wouldn’t have the ambivalence that attracts people.’ Their last kick-ass manager, Dire Straits’ Ed Bicknell, who knocked down doors to provide them with six-figure sums to finish their most recent recordings, says ‘the history of the Blue Nile was the most screwed-up I had ever encountered.’

In 2011, where organised noise has to contend with every other attraction in the media sensorium (and is having the financial nexus ripped out of it by downloading), the tale of the Blue Nile – total musical visionaries facing down the cash-rich 1980s and 1990s music business, and mostly winning – seems like ancient and glorious history.

But better this Nileism than the alternative, that’s for sure. One would hope that there are still young Glaswegians staring moodily out of the top windows of their student flat, in the city’s university district; and that somewhere, coiled deep within their Garageband software and infinitely capacious hard-drives, they are planning to take another sonic walk across those rooftops.

NILEISM – THE STRANGE COURSE OF THE BLUE NILE

Allan Brown

POLYGON, £14.99 224PP 

ISBN 1846971381

Pat Kane's Cal Merc column: the poverty of ideas behind Scottish party politics

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - responding to a new opinion poll which puts the SNP back in contention for the coming Scottish Parliament elections in May. And though my votes for independence parties are already cast, I'm not too excited about the culture of ideas behind it all. As ever, all comments welcome. 

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As an long-term independista, I wish I could get all excited, and party like it was 2007 again. With a new poll from Ipsos MORI putting the SNP slightly ahead of Labour in both constituency and regional votes, it seems that we have an electoral race again for Holyrood in May.

The controversial Brian Soutar and his hundreds of thousands are back in Salmond’s campaign money-box; new partisan online publications like Newsnet Scotland (and others in the blogosphere) are correcting Unionist weightings in the mainstream media; even the mother of my children is standing as an SNP candidate in the South of Scotland.

And I’ll be voting my usual constituency (SNP) and party list (Green) preferences. But after those duties are performed, I will revert to my current ho-hum attitude towards existing party politics in Scotland, and beyond.

Yes, I’m pleased to hear that Alex Salmond’s big idea for the Scottish election is that Scotland should become a “powerhouse of the world’s marine energy industry”. With the Royal Society commending Scottish education for its production of science students, our democratic intellect already seems set up to produce a generation of green-tinged engineers and scientists – would that we had the macro-powers to create a better business context for them.

I prefer this energy emphasis, certainly, than thumping on about coal and oil assets, which just staves off Scotland’s reckoning with the low-carbon future. (The operations of “Scottish business winners” like Cairn Energy, rampantly buccaneering for oil reserves in India and Greenland, are hardly suitable for any election manifesto.)

Having been part of the petro-problem over the last 40 years, Scotland seems extraordinarily lucky that it’s now poised to become part of the sustainable-solution. If top-down, big-picture Scottish nationalism justifies itself in any realm (other than the removal of Trident), it’s the argument for more regulatory and economic powers to support the green renaissance of Scottish manufacturing.

But no matter how attractive the policy horizon, we know this routine of existing politics. Capable leaders drill their messages through whatever media they can, to get to an electorate with a once-in-four-years chance of turning their citizens’ consciousness into a political act. This empowers an expertocracy of representatives, civil servants and advisors to get on with it, while we get on with our daily lives.

Many of us who were constitutionally active in the 1980s and 90s hoped that an achieved Scottish parliament would be better than this largely passive process. It would exist in a sea of energetic democracy – waves of petitioning and campaigns that would remind former activists sitting in the chamber of the ideals that put them there.

Hasn’t really happened, has it? The commentator Gerry Hassan has been relentless in his critique of the complacent “establishment” of devolution-era Scotland – and has found himself recently backed up by the head of a major Labour think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. Where is Scotland’s salon society,  asks Hassan – the busy public sphere of idea-merchants and open meetings that keeps official politics on its toes?

Hassan adeptly analyses what currently squats in its place: a bureaucratic-Labourist complex of bought-over civil society groups, self-satisfied professional bodies, and constrained conventional media spaces. But other than a few bright spots in the blogosphere,  events like Changin’ Scotland and our burgeoning book festivals,  it’s difficult not to agree with Nick Pearce of the IPPR that the overall Scottish policy debate is a rather moribund culture.

Beyond the coming ding-dong of battling parties, how does the ideas dimension of the political debate become more vibrant in Scotland? To my memory, what typified the “Radical Scotland”  of the 1980s and 90s (the title of that era’s definitive political magazine) was a crucial alliance between the poverty-driven anger (both economic and spiritual poverty) of Scottish schemes and ruralities, and a constitutionally ambitious Central Belt middle-class.

With the implosion of the street-left in the vanitas of comrade Sheridan, a conduit was lost between these two forces – which, let’s not forget, had its opportunity to be part of the Scottish parliamentary process in 2003–07.

Maybe an articulation of the raw edge of need, despair and anger would inject some life into Scottish politics – and perhaps dynamise some of the bottom-up structures currently struggling.

What’s interesting about the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings is that a net-enabled generation examined their police-state adversaries and came up with a politics of protest that was genuinely imaginative. Young activists began to stage creative actions that subtly reclaimed the streets: flash mobbing in city centres to sing the national anthem, dressing in black to stand silently before the Nile.

And their street tactics for their initial “day of rage” on January 25  – in the words of activist Ahmed Salah, “we wanted to be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces]” – sounds exactly like the kind of collaborative, lateral-thinking play that is celebrated in computer games.

Interactive culture of all kinds has shaped a new sense of civic confidence among Arab youth. But they had the brutal, often fatal experience of the police/state oppression of daily life in Egypt to contend with, giving their seriously-playful activisms some real urgency. Is life anywhere in Scotland as desperate as this?

Certainly some of the schemes that the Scottish Socialist Party traversed – in areas where drugs, crime, depression and gang violence dominated – provide daily experiences of peril (as I wrote about recently)  which wouldn’t be all that distinguishable from the world’s mega-slums. We are missing a politics of the poorest in Scotland at the moment. Whether it could be inspired by the brave, bold and innovative tactics of the Arab street movements is quite another question.

So enjoy the Punch-and-Judy show of Scottish party politics over the next few months. For those who have the mental resources to enjoy the high ground of grand policy, the game is worth the candle, performed across the usual media and High St outlets. But there are gaping holes in the thought process of the Scottish body politic, which all the posters and leaflets will not paper over.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: The revolution will be Twitterised (and Al-Jazeera'd)

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - the product of more than a few days spent obsessed with the current Egyptian uprising, via all the new media forms and continuous live feeds that exists to keep the armchair viewer of world history occupied. At the end, some rueful reflections on the comparative bathos of the coming Scottish Election. All comments welcome. 

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Gil Scott-Heron once sang that the revolution will not be televised. The Tunisian revolution, and the continuing Egyptian uprising, would seem to refute the great man’s chorus. But it’s worth returning to the last lines of the original lyric: “the revolution will be no re-run, brothers … the revolution will be live.”

And indeed it has not been an edited package, “brought to you by Xerox, in four parts without commercial interruptions”, as Scott-Heron once growled. Via Twitter, BBC Online and the continuous live web transmissions of Al Jazeera English, it has been very easy to set aside my daily world of gigs, commissions and bills, and be an armchair witness to history.

Al Jazeera English, in particular, has been fascinating. With anchors and journalists from Britain, the US and the middle-East, it’s been like watching BBC and CNN liberated from the usual ideological manacles that contain English-speaking news discourse about civil unrest.

State heads like Obama, Mubarak and his hastily appointed new cabinet have certainly had their pronouncements dutifully covered. But it’s Al Jazeera’s prior and substantial presence in Egypt – with scores of journalists already in the bureaus, and (after the station was evicted from the country in the last few days) anonymously phoning in reports from the streets of Cairo and Alexandria – that has rendered the most extraordinary record of events.

Covertly recording footage from rooftops, combined with eyewitness accounts on satellite phones, they’ve captured the early joy and exhilaration of the occupation of Liberation Square, and the current slide into near civil war, as the anti-government masses desperately defend their occupation of this symbolic space.

The minute-to-minute reportage has been, to these eyes and ears, properly balanced. They’ve not just recorded the unpredictable miasma of events that a leaderless street revolution brings, but also allowed an impressive Egyptian intelligentsia to inform the agenda of what’s happening.

We should perhaps call them netocrats – so many are self-described as bloggers and social media experts. On a roundtable I watched in the early days of the uprising, Al Jazeera gathered together a youthful trio that exuded intelligence, charisma and a profound distrust of any vertical leadership, including that of the Nobel Peace Prize winning nuclear weapons inspector El-Baradei.

They sounded like a graduate generation, their awareness of better standards of democracy and development amplified by social media and the internet – all this building up a swell of impatience with the steely paternalism of the Mubarak regime. And let’s not forget their inspiration by the thoroughly cyber-spaced Tunisian revolution – which used Wikileaks’s leaked cables about Tunisian political corruption as the spark to mobilise a similarly educated and connected graduate class.

Some of these Egyptian netocrats are exiled in major metropolises. But they’re using both top-down and bottom-up information tools in order to become their own personalised news channels. They not only aggregate comment from friends, family and colleagues on the ground through social media, but also drive traffic to these aggregations through pugnacious tv interviews.

Foremost among these is Mona Eltahawy, currently all over US and UK TV and the Twittersphere, in which she assiduously re-tweets voices and accounts from the literal heart of the revolution (like Mosa’ab Elshamy, Sharif Kouddous, and Ramy Raoof). Follow these feeds, and you’re right at the core of the spectacle in Tahrir Square.

In this thoroughly reverberating net-world, you can also make direct personal connections with like-minded souls, through very simple and direct means. At the beginning of the uprising, I tweeted an image I found on the BBC website – a photo of protestors linking arms to protect the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo from looters.

The text that accompanied the image was: “The human wall protecting Cairo museum. So beautiful”. Which it was: a row of men, in civilian clothes, looking fearful but determinedly defending their heritage.

Since then, I’ve seen that my tweet has been distributed (or as they say, re-tweeted) thousands of times – my original text retained, and framed with several languages from both hemispheres. Yes, there have since been reports of museum lootings and destruction of artefacts, though with Cairenes and the army combining again to protect the treasures within.

But in the meantime, my text and image just keeps getting passed on from hopeful idealist to hopeful idealist around the world. People seem to want an idea that defies the narratives of chaos and destruction shaping most news reports on the Egyptian uprising.

It’s a subtle and moving image. What it communicates is that revolution isn’t just about unleashing the unruly masses, but also can be a wise and informed act of self-determination. That an uprising can be just as aware of what needs to be protected, as well as what must be overthrown. Does it misrepresent what’s happening on the streets of Cairo right now? Undoubtedly. But in the politics of the networked world, it can be just as important to transmit inspiration as information.

The multitudinous revolutionaries of the Egyptian street need as much help as they can get. As an image of national transformation conducted with civility and wisdom, I’d be more than happy if it helped to re-define the national brand of the new Egypt – where the soft power of reason and democracy triumphs over the hard power of Mubarak’s police state.

And one last thought, as the rocks fly across Liberation Square. Compared to these heroes, we in Scotland have such a tiny, peaceable distance to travel, in the journey from devolution to statehood. It would be a delight if the vitriol on both sides of this argument in the coming Holyrood election was thinned out, as we remembered the sight of millions of unarmed Egyptian citizens making light of army tanks and state police.

If it happens at least once, I’ll tweet it for you. Don’t expect it to go viral, though. And “The Devolution May Well Be Re-Revised” isn’t that much of a chorus line, either.