Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

Republicans: Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way!

centreWay back when George Dubya was still compassionate, I predicted that the Democrats would take a veer to the left.  The ensuing liberal civil war would create a political vacuum in the centre and the Republicans would naturally slide on over and dominate American politics for the foreseeable future.  I was wr-wr-wr, not right.  9/11 came along, Dubya got trigger happy and suddenly it was Hope and Change that was priming the political pumps.  Whatever else you want to say about President Obama (and I’ve said a bunch) he’s a dynamic centrist and while he and Hillary are staking out the high ground in the middle, it’s the Republicans who are going nuts.  The war is on in the GOP, and it looks as if it’s going to end up in a loser-take-all victory for the raging right.  Never, in the history of human politics, have so many been so screwed, so thoroughly by so few.

Shutting down the American government, just because you can, is such a willful act of childishness that I refuse to give it any room in a reasonable discussion.  Who the hell do you people think you are?  You have one job – One Job! – to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.  And what do you do?  You shut it down.  No wonder you’re getting outwitted by the clowns at the New York Times.  And this isn’t just a rant about those Tea Party nitwits, either.  John Boehner, you need to give up being a full time cry baby and get your people in line.  You’re plucking your bum in the same chair that Henry Clay, Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill sat in.  The least you could do is look the part.  But enough about that.  The American government has survived worse than Ted Cruz and his motley crew, and serious people have bigger fish to fry.

Here’s the deal.  The Republican Party has been hijacked by a bunch of folks who obviously flunked out of Political Science, quite possibly as far back as kindergarten.  In an absolute tour de force of WTF logic, they’ve decided that the reason Mitt Romney didn’t make it to the White House is because he wasn’t conservative enough.  So, in order to rebalance the equation, they’ve launched themselves on an epic flight to the far distant political right.  Presumably, this is because, despite a century of voting records to the contrary, they believe America wants, needs and deserves a conservative government that lands just short of wearing a tinfoil hat.  While no one would suggest America is a hotbed of socialism, this kind of thinking is seriously delusional.  However, don’t take my word for it.  Let’s take a look.

In 2012, Romney lost the election by five million votes.  That’s four percent; not a lot by presidential election standards.  Historically, presidential losers get their asses kicked.  However, those five million votes are significant because they come from the political middle.  Like every election since Pericles ran for Afentiko of Athens, Presidential 2012 was an electoral Bell Curve.  The ideologically committed left and right wing voters anchor both ends of the political spectrum, and the great wad of the rest of us is stuck in the middle.  President Obama remained President Obama because he won more of those middle votes than Romney did.  Push Romney to the right, the far right or nothing but the right so help him God, and he wouldn’t have gained a single vote!  However, push him to the middle and he might have started siphoning votes off Obama’s juggernaut.  It’s not impossible: Ronald Reagan did it (twice) and two or three percentage points is not a lot to ask.  It could have been that simple.  Now, it’s becoming way more difficult.

The Tea Party and their ideological wannabes have seriously damaged the Republican Party.  First of all, they’re singing tocentre1 the choir.  I haven’t heard of one Democrat who changed his (or her) mind over Tea Party policies.  Secondly, their song is nonsense.  Their only message is “Obama’s being mean to me.” — the political equivalent of “Louie, Louie” on a loop.  But finally, and most importantly, they’re singing so loud nobody else can get a word in edgewise.  They’ve taken centre stage, and whatever good stuff Republicans might have to say is getting lost in the godawful noise.

Moderate Republicans need to quit being scared of these yo-yos and get organized.  They need to take back the primaries and start finding candidates who will be electable beyond the Barack Obama era.  (He’s going to go home, you know.)  But more than that, they need to tell guys like Ted Cruz to stick a sock in it and either lead, follow or get out of the way.  Otherwise, people like me are going to be looking at Hillary in 2016.

I Never Watched Breaking Bad

badI’m probably the only person on this planet who wasn’t watching TV last Sunday night.  That’s not unusual because I didn’t see the last episode of MASH, Seinfeld, Friends or Dexter either and, to this day, I have no idea who shot JR.  (Maybe Bobby did it in his sleep?)  I don’t do this stuff on purpose.  I have no philosophical grievance against popular culture; after all, I can name all the dead people on Game of Thrones.   It’s just that popular culture mostly eludes me at the time.  There’s so damn much of it, and it’s easy to tangent away from what’s really important.

I have no idea what I was doing back in 2008 when Breaking Bad first hove up on the horizon.  It doesn’t matter, though, because by the time my friends were waxing eloquent about the antics of Walt and Jesse, I was hopelessly behind and the viewing curve just kept getting steeper.  At the end of Season 3, I realized I had to either take a weekend, OD on Season 1 and get formally addicted — or walk away.  I walked away and probably missed what most critics are calling one of the best dramas television has ever had to offer.  Oh, well!  I have the feeling they’re going to say the same thing about Mad Men when it finally folds up its tent in a couple of years — and with good reason.  My point is that, after decades of being aptly named an “idiot box,” television is now producing some of the finest art of this century.  The problem is unless I want to spend half my waking life smoothing out the ass groove I’ve established in my sofa, I have to miss some of it.  Thus, Walt and I were never friends, so, in reality I cannot mourn him.

However, at the risk of pissing off a bunch of Walt’s legitimate mourners, I’m going to say Breaking Bad was not actually the best thing to happen to TV since John Frankenheimer hung out his shingle on Playhouse 90.  It was good, even great, but the fact is Breaking Bad was only one program in a general resurgence of quality television.  Look around.  Ever since Tony Soprano and his crew showed up on HBO in 1999, there’s been a continuous stream of heavy duty drama on television.  Quality is not an issue here.  This stuff is universally terrific.  Led by Showtime, HBO and AMC, viewers like me can wear out their PVRs recording it all or wait and pick and choose it later on YouTube and Netflix (which, btw, has some cool stuff of its own going on, notably Portlandia.)  We live in a wonderful time when we not only have quality entertainment, we have great quantities of it.

It’s a simple case of a rising tide raises all ships.  Breaking Bad was one of those ships.  It had to be good in order to sail with the likes of Dexter, Boardwalk Empire and the aforementioned Mad Men.  Was it better?  It is right now because that’s how popular culture works (the operative word is “popular.”)  However, I remember a time when Twin Peaks was the best thing since cherry pie and, not so long ago, when the critics were lauding Lost as a replacement for cherry pie altogether.

Breaking Bad is now part of our collective culture.  Taken as a whole, it’s certainly one of the best and brightest of this current Golden Age of TV.  Whether it’s a defining moment remains to be seen, and I’m too old a bunny to start stopping the presses to make that announcement.  Culture, like water, has a way of finding its own level, and despite what the critics will tell you, it takes a while for things to even out.  I plan to watch Breaking Bad eventually, but I want to wait for the tumult and the shouting to hype itself out before I do it.

Two Kinds of Stupid

stupidOne of the many things they never tell you in high school is that there’s a big difference between knowing stuff and being smart.  If you know stuff, you get to amuse your friends and win impromptu arguments, but unless you get on Jeopardy, it’s not really a paying proposition.  However, if you’re smart, you can write your own ticket.  Here’s a simple example.  Given a map, I can generally find most of the countries in the world.  I get a little confused with all the new “stans” that showed up in Asia in the 1990s, and I don’t think even John Kerry knows what’s going on in the Balkans, but I get by.  For the most part, this is useless information, since, in all my years, no one has ever come up to me and said, “By the way, where’s Singapore?”  My point is that just knowing something is useless — unless you know what to do with the information.  Knowledge for its own sake may be a philosopher’s wet dream, but in practical terms, it doesn’t pay the rent.

However, let’s not get carried away with the educated idiot analogy because the other thing they never explain in high school, even while they’re teaching it, is that in order to be smart, you have to know stuff.  Information is fundamental to problem-solving, and you need to learn as many facts as possible because, without them, even the smartest person in the world is a dolt.  Again, let me explain.  Because I do know where Singapore is, I’m way ahead of the curve.  I understand a lot more about my world than the person who doesn’t have a clue about the Lion City.  For example, I know why it’s King Midas rich, how it got that way, and why it’s probably going remain in the Daddy Warbucks’ Top Ten.  Take a look.  Singapore is on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, on the fastest trade wind from the industrial East to the All-Consuming West.  That means it’s a natural stopping point for literally millions of megatonnes of shipping.  When that kind of dinero is going in and out of your front door every day, some of it is bound to sit down and stay awhile.  This analysis is a no-brainer — as long as you know where Singapore sits in the world.  However, without this tidy little tidbit, even Google can’t tell you why an insignificant city state the size of Philadelphia can cough in Asia and people in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg get a cold.

Here’s the deal.  In this world, there are two kind of stupid people, and even though they might look like there light yearsstupid3 apart in education, income, social status or what have you, they are essentially the same person.  First, there are the folks who believe that because they know who wrote Candide, they’re qualified to spout philosophy.  Then there are the other folks who’ve never heard of Francois-Marie Arouet but spout philosophy anyway.  Group A thinks that learning inherently makes them smart and Group B thinks they’re innately smart and don’t need to learn anything.  However, talk to anyone in either group and the conversation is the same.

Basically, it works like this: whereas you can know stuff without being smart, you can`t be smart without knowing stuff.

And if they’d just teach that in high school we’d all be better off come election time and at dinner parties.