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.

Intolerance: A Public Service Announcement

Normally, I don’t make public service announcements — mainly because serving the public is a pain in the ass.  (That’s why so many public servants are in it for the money.)  I say “normally” because sometimes there’s such an overwhelming need for the public to be informed that even guys like me have to step into the breach.  That time is now.

For the last several years, our society has been throwing around the words “tolerance” and ‘intolerant” as if they were rice at a redneck wedding.  This promiscuous overuse has turned them (and their various incarnations) into the conversational equivalent of an advertising slogan’s tagline.  Everybody recognizes the words, but nobody really gives a damn what they mean.  Or as Inigo Montoya observed in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

For the record, “tolerance” is a noun that comes from the verb “tolerate” which according to my Oxford Paperback Dictionary (1979 edition) means (without the blah, blah, blah) “to permit– without protest or interference.”  Are you with me so far?  The same dictionary defines “intolerant” as an adjective which means “unwilling to tolerate ideas or beliefs etc. that differ from one’s own.”  Are we still good?  These two are opposites.  If one does not “tolerate” another person’s viewpoint, they are, by definition, “intolerant.”  Questions?

In practical terms, this means that, as a tolerant society, we “permit — without protest or interference” other people’s points of view.  We can disagree with them all we want, but we do not swear at them or call them names or question their right to hold that point of view.  For example, there are people in our world who approve of gay marriage.  These are regular folks who put their pants on one leg at a time and don’t eat kittens for breakfast.  They may be part of the Mauve Mafia, but I doubt it — and even if they are, that’s no excuse for name calling or any other such nonsense.  As members of a tolerant society, we must respect their right to hold their stated opinion — even if we do not respect that opinion, itself.

However, tolerance is not that easy.  There’s more to it.

As another example, there are people in our world who disapprove of gay marriage.  These are regular folks who put their pants on one leg at a time and don’t eat kittens for breakfast.  They may be part of a Right Wing Conspiracy, but I doubt it — and even if they are, that’s no excuse for name calling or any other such nonsense.  As members of a tolerant society, we must respect their right to hold their stated opinion — even if we do not respect that opinion, itself.

That’s the way tolerance really works, folks: the bus goes all the way around the park.  And I’m not merely talking about gay marriage; that’s just an issue that is currently trending and screamingly obvious.  Honestly, I don’t care one way or the other.  Since I’m not getting any gay marriage proposal these days, it doesn’t affect me.

However, in the 21st century, there seems to be a quaint idea that tolerance is the exclusive property of the liberal left.  It’s the buzzword that’s code for a particular array of ideas.  The argument is that an enlightened society has certain values that are universally accepted and contradictions need not apply.  Liberal ideas like gay marriage, corporate greed, gender insensitivity and all the other usual suspects from the politically correct movement.  It’s amazing to me that reasonably intelligent people are wandering around this world, saying things like “I hate those bastards: they’re so intolerant.”  Or, my personal favourite: “We cannot allow that group to speak because they represent intolerance.”  Huh?  Of course, the great irony is, that in our society, the last batch of folks who were so arrogant about dictating the one and only path to human salvation was the Medieval Catholic Church — twenty minutes before da Vinci and his buddies turned on the Renaissance.

So this is a public service announcement:  Tolerance is a two-way street and if you don’t want history to judge you as a jackass, show a little tolerance when somebody expresses an opinion you don’t like.

Anti-Americanism: The Changing of the Guard

As the Olympic Games continue and China and the United States duke it out for world supremacy in training and nutrition (nudge-nudge/wink-wink) something amazing is going on.  Ever so slightly, ever so carefully, the world is shifting its attitude away from blatant anti-Americanism.  It’s not a tectonic shift, by any means; just a subtle hint now and again.  Make no mistake, hating America is still the world’s #1 leisure activity, but every once in a while, at these Games at least, they’re not the ad infinitum root of all evil they’ve been accused of for more than half a century.

Anti-Americanism was born in the mid 60s when an entire stratum of pampered young people (with incredible buying power) went on a five-year temper tantrum.  They were pissed because, for the first time in their lives, they couldn’t get their own way.  Unfortunately, their sheer numbers and economic impact turned what was ordinary youthful discontent into a cultural revolution.  Half-educated, they were unable to distinguish between theoretical Marxism and the real thing and thus saw capitalist America as the big bad bogeyman.  America, run by the veterans of a simpler time, never understood the situation and exacerbated it by stumbling around the rice paddies of Southeast Asia in an idiot attempt to contain communism.  By the time Vietnam’s General Giap unleashed The Tet Offensive in 1968, America had squandered most of the prestige it had accumulated from World War II.   Richard Nixon and Watergate finished it off.

Today, three generations later, anti-Americanism is a worldwide institution.  All political, spiritual and economic arguments end when America gets the blame.  They are responsible for Global Warming, Globalization and every other global godawful anything that happens to wander by, including poverty, famine and Justin Bieber.  Hell cannot hold half their nastiness, and their stupidity is beyond the ability of Charles Darwin to figure out.  American leaders are schizophrenic in their cunning, both dumb as the proverbial box of rocks and capable of creating any number of complex and nefarious conspiracies.  These plots are conducted by the shadowy and “omnipotent” CIA and are intricate in their planning, massive in their scope and have never (at the time of this writing) worked.  They are usually discovered, after the fact, by a dedicated team of sceptics, operating from the relative comfort of their parents’ basements.

Popular wisdom has it that America has both faked the moon landing and destroyed the ozone layer.  The greedy bastards have sent their corporate lackeys out into the world to destroy all indigenous cultures and to fast-food the fitness out of innocent children.  They have alien technology they won’t share and a cultural bankruptcy they’re forcing on the rest of us.  They are gun-happy cowboys who like nothing better than buggering up everything they touch.  In short, when America wakes up, Satan hides under the sofa.

The weirdest thing about anti-Americanism is, though, even in our uber-sensitive world, it’s not seen as bigotry, prejudice or even ignorance.  It is so ingrained in the world’s thinking that nobody even questions it.  Many people don’t even admit it exists.  The most common statement to that end is, “I’m not anti-American … but” and then the speaker launches into an anti-American tirade worthy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher combined.  Like prejudice everywhere, it doesn’t matter what bigots say before they get to the “but.”  It’s what comes after the qualifier that counts.

Of course, up until recent history, America has been a catchall for a lot of people’s dissatisfaction.  They get the flak because, for the last sixty years or so, they’ve always been front and centre.  They may not be omnipotent, but they’ve certainly been omnipresent.  And that’s what’s changing in our little world.  Slowly but surely, China is reaching its fingers into the international community, and they’re discovering that there’s a whole lot more to being a world power than selling toasters to Italians.  Many people have gone from looking at China through a telescope to putting it under the microscope.  China has already played the racist card (a time-honoured tradition, pioneered by the Japanese) a couple of times to deflect criticism, but that’s not going to last forever.  As more and more people discover China — up close and personal — there will be criticism.  It’s inevitable.  After all, there is no Chinese utopia – any more than there was an American one.  However, for now, it’s interesting to watch the world tiptoeing around the coming Chinese Colossus and hearing a collective American sigh of relief as the spotlight shifts across the Pacific.

Marilyn: August 5th, 1962 and Forever After

In our time, fame seldom makes it past the eulogy, and as more and more of us have our Andy Warhol moments of adoration, fewer and fewer of us will ever survive the grave.  Celebrity has become commonplace, a devaluated currency, practically worthless beyond the initial public craze.  Our society pays little homage to that which has past from its immediate sight.  Yet, in a couple of days — Sunday, August 5th, 2012 — the entertainment world is going to be filled with stories, truths and out-and-out lies about a 36-year-old who has been dead for exactly fifty years: Marilyn.

There is no final word on Marilyn.  She is the story that we have been footnoting for half a century – with an ever increasing litany of clichés.  She took centre stage in the 50s with only a handful of movies and has never relinquished it.   Her image is as recognizable now as it was when she was alive.  She is as iconic to our world as Coke™ or Apple™.  To be compared to Marilyn is still the definitive compliment — and the direst warning.

Marilyn’s legacy is her legend although to call her legendary only diminishes her.  No other entertainer has so completely outlasted her time, not even James Dean (whom she is continually paired with) and only Elvis has made a bigger post mortem impact.

We value Marilyn not for her body of work but for the woman herself — an enigma within a riddle.  The ultimate “dumb blonde,” she was an astute business woman.   A consummate professional, she disrupted every movie set she was ever on.  She was frivolous and silly but refused to distance herself from Arthur Miller when he was hauled before the communist witch hunt of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.  She drank and abused drugs but had the social conscience to use her celebrity status to guarantee Ella Fitzgerald a job at an LA nightclub called Mocambo which was “white only” at the time.

For the last fifty years, everybody and his friend has tried to explain Marilyn – to define her.  She was the exploited female coerced into becoming the personification of 1950s sexuality.  She was a light weight who used her obvious assets to make her way in the world.  She was a misunderstood artist who never had a chance to spread her wings, a no talent phony who happened to die at the right time, or a strong, independent woman of her time.  Was she any of those things or all of them?  Of the millions of words written about Marilyn, none of them answers these questions.  Even her death is inexplicable.  Was Marilyn murdered as the pawn in a massive political power play conspiracy?  Did she commit suicide, unable to cope with the constant strain of just being Marilyn?  Or was it all big a mistake, made in a half-stoned stupor?

Fifty years later, Marilyn is still Marilyn, but none of us is quite sure just who that is.