One the peculiarities of the American experience is that so many of us are never quite sure what we are. We are obsessed with genealogy, and robbing most African-Americans of the depth of this investigation is counted among the lasting crimes of slavery. It’s not about pedigree or title so much as simply searching for an identity. We’re not quite sure how to be American, so we look to the family tree for those moments of emigration and try to be whatever those moments say instead.
I take part annually in this appeal to heritage: every March 17th I’ll don the green, boil some meat and cabbage and potatoes until it’s all mushy, drink some stout and a shot or two of whiskey and shout half-pronounced toasts and oaths along with a bunch of other stout-and-whiskey drinking, green-clad people. I’m not Irish. A couple of my great-great grandparents were Irish, a few of the rest of them might have been Irish and a lot of them were something else, and through variety and time I’m just another jeans-wearing, rap-and-country-listening, bourbon-drinking American. And that’s ok! There is a history and a culture in that, however briefly established; but it’s fun to pretend.
Today I hung out with people pretending to be a different kind of Gaelic at the Stone Mountain Highland Games. It had a little more authenticity than an unplanned annual bar crawl, bringing in the local British Consul-General and Lord McFauntleroy of Glenwhatever to kick things off, but the attendance was much the same. There were a handful of Scots, from Scotland, and a whole bunch of Americans who followed a particular line on their family tree to a muddy field beneath the Redneck Rushmore and found a chance to dress up and drink and dance and throw some heavy things around. It was a fun place to be, and a little different from anything I’ve seen among my Plastic Paddy brethren, something with the same sentiments but much more organization.
The oddest thing to me was the clans. Both the Irish and Scottish organized themselves in ancient times around little fiefdoms allied to a local Lord, but the Irish system was destroyed pretty much entirely by the period of Everything Is Horrible that lasted roughly between the Norman discovery of the Emerald Isle and the post-Victorian establishment of the Republic. The Scottish concept of clans, however, survived both the English assimilation and the American diaspora, resulting in a long semicircle of tents here bearing names and tartans and crests, each with an organization with dues and newsletters and some feeling of an history. The tartans were something new to me. I’d thought of the plaid in those funny skirts that all the men wear as little more than a local aesthetic, but the choice of color and pattern that goes into the things bears a sign of one’s allegiance to some family or another. In some contexts it’s serious, but in others no one really cares: Sharon’s clan identified her on sight by the clothes she wore, but I was also able to buy an umbrella (something I’d been meaning to do since about the time 285 flooded) bearing the MacDonald crest without so much as a blink, and clothing of all sorts in whatever greens and reds and blues and yellows you might desire were available from a dozen different vendors. Some stuck herbs and branches in their hats as a show of solidarity with whomever they call kin, while the various drum and pipe bands took up whatever tartans happened to be convenient. The details were signs of a particular type of Scot or Scottishness in general as the need arose.
The costumes, though steeped in tradition, aren’t something that folks are going to wear every day, so there was sometimes a con cosplay feel to it, a parade of fantastic objects and dress. What was missing was the sense of competition and the sense of artificiality. These were people not manufacturing the appearance of something false with creatively-constructed false things, but people dressing and accessorizing with real things to create a real, personal look. That dude with the ostrich feathers and the mace? He looked a lot finer than a lot of people there, but he looked like he earned it, and his presence didn’t lessen the meaning or importance of the outfit worn by the mohawked guy with the kilt and sporran.
The games themselves were the traditional Scottish things: dance, drums and pipes, and feats of strength. There was a kind of extreme hammer toss where men the sizes of bulls struggled to throw a weight down a field, a caber toss, and some thing where a bag of I don’t care to know what was pitched over a bar that must have been about fifty feet high. It was pretty silly and terrifying; I was pretty sure one of those airborne stone blocks was going to kill someone at one point, but no one even flinched. As for the music…eh. Bagpipes have such a limited range that it all starts to sound the same after a short while. I’ll stick with the Irish and their Uilleanns on this one.
Alongside all of this was something more like a county fair: people selling trinkets and gewgaws and fried dough and scotch eggs. It was a lot of fun! I found a vendor from Northern Ireland and bought a nice tweed cap. Utilikilt was also there, trying to create a new fashion of everyday dresses for every gender separated from the symbols and meanings of the clans. The whole thing was a fun and strange thing that a lot of people hitched their heritage to, and why not that? It’s a chance for a little borrowed history and a lot of good times.