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.

Bitcoin: I Guess I Missed It!

bitcoin1Like so many trends, the Bitcoin phenom was born, lived — and now has nearly died — before I ever got a handle on it.  The world’s first virtual currency was virtually wiped out just as I was beginning to understand its significance.  And now it looks as if it’s not going to matter.

Ironically, although the concept of Bitcoin (I’m not sure if there is a plural) is very simple, the actual nuts and bolts of the thing are impossible to understand.  For example, I have no idea how Bitcoin is generated, and nobody I’ve talked to does either.  Even the mighty Wikipedia is so convoluted as to be useless.  Not only that, but I have yet to find a place where I (or anybody else I know) would spend Bitcoin, assuming of course that we had any.  These are two serious problems with a currency which is supposed to take the place of sweaty twenties and good old-fashioned Visa™.  However, let’s put the thing into perspective. because even though Bitcoin may be going the way of the iPod, virtual currency is the way of the future.

As far as I can tell, Bitcoin is the brainchild of a group of Uber-nerds who created it as virtual money — money that exists without ever taking tangible form.  Their concept is an anarchist’s dream: a People’s Free-Range Currency, untethered to any bank or national monetary system.  It is money that follows the ebb and flow of the marketplace; its value dictated by its purchasing power.  This is not a radical idea.  It’s merely contemporary capitalism at its fundamental best.  Let me explain.

As we all know, in simplistic terms, money is nothing more than faith.  We believe that the piece of plastic in our pockets will buy us Big Macs™.  We’re allowed to buy them because McDonald’s believes they will get their money from our bank.  Our bank gives McDonald’s the money because they believe we will pay the bill when it shows up.  Everybody’s happy, and we’ve had lunch.   In this entire sequence of events, no one has actually handled any money.  The reality is our national currency is virtually virtual money already.

So why did Bitcoin fail so miserably?

The answer is quite easy.  The creators of Bitcoin forgot one simple overwhelming principle of economics: money is only worth what it can buy you.  Since currency itself has no intrinsic value, if it can’t be exchanged for Big Macs™, it reverts to its original incarnation – a rectangular bit of plastic with your name on it.  Thus, when it became apparent that Bitcoin couldn’t be exchanged for anything beyond a few esoteric Internet specialities, it ceased to be a currency.  However, since it was tied to a tangible dollar value, it became a commodity and — in a marketplace (the Internet) without any rules — the object of wild-eyed speculation.  Bitcoin was a bubble waiting to burst, and last week it did.  Today, it doesn’t matter how Bitcoin is generated or what people say it’s worth; it’s virtually valueless.

Bitcoin didn’t fail just because ordinary people couldn’t buy anything with it and therefore lost their faith in it.  It actually failed because we don’t need another virtual currency.  We have one already.  In fact, aside from street corner drug deals, we live in a cashless society.  We no longer need tangible money to go about our business and, in reality, very seldom use it.  So it doesn’t really matter that I missed it: Bitcoin was redundant before it began.

Miss Reed and Acts of Terror

miss reedI met Miss Reed (not her real name) many years ago in a Residential Hotel in London.  She was 80-something and lied about her age.  Strictly speaking British residential hotels are not retirement facilities, so according to her — and select members of the staff — she was 72 (and had been for more than a decade.)  The fiction was Miss Reed was looking for a part time teaching position in the area.  She had excellent credentials.  As a young woman, she’d left Britain sometime in the 30s to teach school in China – Shanghai, to be exact.  She’d vaguely spent World War II in the Far East (she redirected all my questions about the war.)  When the war was over, she slowly retreated home to London as the British Empire closed up shop; first in India, then in Kuala Lumpur and finally at a boarding school in Sevenoaks, Kent.  The London she lived in was not the London she’d left, and it made her sad sometimes.

For those of you unfamiliar with British residential hotels, they are all basically the same.  There are rooms upstairs, reception, a dining area and a lounge/bar which usually opens at six.  Actually, just think Fawlty Towers.  There is always a Basil in there somewhere, a Manuel and at least one Major.  The place we stayed at had several.  It was these various ex-military residents and the IRA’s propensity for revenge that made our hotel a “soft” target for terrorism (although nobody called it that in those days.)  It was The Troubles and it wasn’t open to academic debate.  We were shown the evacuation routes, told not to leave our bags unattended and generally advised to be cautious during our stay.  I had no idea what cautious looked like.  After all, I hadn’t been threatened with violence since Betty Jones and her big boyfriend decided my lunch looked more interesting than hers back in second grade.   However, being in a foreign country, I wanted to do my best, so, after the first couple of days of getting the lay of the land, I took the nightly residential gathering over drinks in the lounge to ask around.  Most of the advice was the usual; hide your wallet sort of thing, although one fellow did tell me it was best not to speak to Irishmen.  Then there was Miss Reed who usually had one gin before dinner.

“Nonsense,” she said, “Here we are, young man, and here is where we intend to stay.  We haven’t drawn the curtains and turned down the lights.  One cannot hide from those who would do us harm.  So we must go about our affairs as best we can.  In the High Street every day, there are automobiles and buses whizzing about and any one of them can strike you down in a second.  So what do we do?  Stand at the kerb and wait for them to go away?  Return home and lock our doors?  No, we cross.  We use caution and look both ways — but we cross.”

So Boston, it’s time to take your place with London, New York, Madrid and Oklahoma City.  It’s time to open your curtains and turn on the lights.  The madmen, who wish to do you harm, are not going to go away.  They live on fear and the only way to defend yourself is to take that away from them.

The next day, Miss Reed put on her hat and her gloves and went out, as she did every afternoon, to have tea on the High Street.

Margaret Thatcher and Ugly Politics

thatcherOkay, I’ve had enough.  I really thought that I could let it go and maintain the moral high ground by not acknowledging — forget responding to — the hate.  I can’t.  I’m not that fine a human being.  So…

We live in cowardly times, mean-spirited and smug.  We celebrate cheap shots and slink away from honest debate.  We attack those who can’t defend themselves while insisting it is our moral principles which give us the open warrant for this revenge.  We applaud bullies in our streets and on our social media and then wonder why they’ve crept onto our playgrounds.  In our society, many of us are not very nice, and because of that, history will probably judge all of us as vulgar.

The infernal optimist in me thought that we couldn’t sink much lower than making fun of 86-year-old Pope Benedict XVI for wanting to retire.  Old Christians are easy targets, but the same folks, so quick with the jokes, had already loudly refused to publish satirical Moslem cartoons under the guise of sensitivity.  I thought integrity was not a flexible commodity.  I was wrong.  As of last week, the vitriol circus three-ringing itself around the death of Margaret Thatcher proves the “progressives” among us have hit intellectual rock bottom and are now starting to dig.

As a public figure, even in death, Margaret Thatcher’s policies should be (and are) open to vigorous debate.  For those who disagreed with her methods and results there are any number of well thought out arguments they could use to support their opposition.  However, I doubt if “bitch” is one of them.  Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t see abandoning my political position on the strength of that thesis.  At least, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” — although about as original as most leftwing ideas — has a sophomoric air of carnival about it.  However, neither of these responses to one of the most divisive politicians in recent history is exactly a tsunami of intellectual prowess.  If this is all the left is bringing to the table, it’s no wonder they couldn’t convince the voting public that Margaret Thatcher was the personification of evil – on three separate occasions.  And this bringsthatcher1 us to the interesting question: What does one do with one’s political self-righteousness when the ballot box disagrees with them?  (After all, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was democratically elected three times.)  Does one snarl and cry and demonize one’s opponent, or pout and call her names?  Or perhaps one tantrums through the streets in sanctimonious anger, smashing things, burning cars and injuring police officers?   Or maybe one merely gathers enough explosives to attempt to blow one’s opponent’s head off and thus alleviate the need for any further discussion?  In Margaret Thatcher’s case, the answer is all of the above — plus one more.  Many on the left just quietly waited until the object (she was an object by then) of their hate died and now attack her viciously and personally with no fear of repercussions.  Plus it should be noted that those who profess an absolute abhorrence of hate are among the first to cast a stone.

To those who disagree with Margaret Thatcher’s policies — with measured argument and open debate — I wish you well.  To those who rant their hate from the rooftops and “celebrate” her death: you are the embodiment of all that is dull-witted and crude in our times.  I want nothing to do with you or your politics; you’ve shown the world the ugly face of both of them.