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.

Shakespeare Without Tears

Apparently, Shakespeare’s birthday was a couple of days ago (nobody really knows for sure when it is) and I missed it.  That’s okay really; I don’t care when Shakespeare was born.  Nor for that matter do I care to wander into the great discussion about whether he wrote his own plays or not.  As far as I’m concerned, they could have been written by Fetchin’ Gretchen, the German barmaid at the Golden Hind Hotel.  Shakespeare’s plays exist: if a local boy from Stratford didn’t write them, so what?  Somebody did.

Actually, the only reason there’s any debate at all about who quill penned what for whom is scholars can’t figure out what else to do with Old Bill, now can they?  It’s not like there’s a nerdy little war going on in the Ivory Towers about whether Shakespeare is crap or not.  Rhetorically speaking what do Shakespearean scholars do all day — sit around telling each other how great he was?  That’s the point: Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language and nobody disagrees except sophomores trying to be difficult and people who’ve never seen the plays.  Everybody knows Shakespeare is the best, but I would venture to guess that 8 people out of 10 haven’t got a clue what he’s talking about.

Shakespeare appreciation runs into a bunch of trouble in the 21st century.  First of all, unless your education was terminally New Age, you got stuck with the guy sometime in your high school career.  Since modern education means kicking the delight out of everybody but the janitor, chances are good Macbeth was ruined long before Macduff got hold of him in Act V.  Besides, I’d bet even money that the person running the show in Lit. 12 probably didn’t know much more about the Bard than you did.  Cliff Notes work both ways.

The other problem is Shakespeare wrote his plays in Shakespearean English, and we don’t speak that language anymore.  A lot of the clever stuff and the beauty of it is simply lost in translation.  For example, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” doesn’t mean much if you don’t know anything about courtly love.  And that’s the major problem: Shakespeare is talking about things people in the 21st century know nothing about – love and power.

These days, we have reduced love to its lowest common denominator: the relationship.  This is a cerebral little device that cuts our emotional well-being off at the knees.  Having a relationship is akin to owning a small kitchen appliance like a juicer.  You buy the thing, make juice at every opportunity for six weeks or so, but slowly by slowly, it ends up largely unused, sitting in the kitchen, getting in the way.  Occasionally, if guests come over, you might crank it up again, but eventually it gets stored somewhere out of mind until it’s time for the yard sale.  Shakespeare didn’t think that way about love, neither did his audience.  They knew love for what it is and wanted to hear the words that spoke its name.  They didn’t talk about “having feelings” for someone or “taking the relationship to another level.”  (What is this crap?  Angry Birds™ with benefits?)  No!  The Elizabethans were engulfed by love; that’s where “swept off your feet” comes from.  They felt it: they didn’t think it.  They looked forward to it and mourned its passing.  To them, it was what life was made of.  Even though we proclaim our sensitivity at the drop of a puppy, we just can’t get there from here; we don’t know anything about it.

Nor, for that matter, do we know anything about power.  In a world that no longer recognizes obscenities, the mere mention of power can still cause an embarrassed hush.  Power is to us what sex was to the Victorians: a slightly icky necessity of life that nobody should ever speak of.  It’s considered ill-bred to publically pursue power, so we dress it up in altruism and team-building.  Demonstrations of power are the last faux pas in our society, and people who have power are somewhat suspect.   They are always the villains in our stories.  They weren’t in Shakespeare’s time.  His four great tragedies are all about power.  They show the obligation powerful people have to wield it wisely and the consequences if they do not.  It’s not power itself that corrupts Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear and Othello; their demise comes from a deep flaw in their own character.  Their tragedy is magnified by the height from which they fall, not caused by it.  At the end of each play, they die, but the institutions of power are cleansed with their blood.  It is the province of the powerful who remain to set things right again.  In the Elizabethan Age, power was, for the most part, a benevolent force sometimes corrupted by the people who manipulate it — not the other way around, as we see it today.

It’s a shame that a lot of the contemporary “feelings” we have for Shakespeare are just talk.  Unfortunately, it’s too difficult for most people to enjoy Shakespeare these days.  However, it`s not impossible.  But start slowly; Shakespeare’s plays are a big chunk to take in one chew.  You don’t have to sit through an entire play to begin with.  Just go to YouTube and check out Marlon Brando delivering Mark Antony`s “Friends, Romans, countrymen…” speech, or Kenneth Branagh (as Henry V) calling his troops “a band of brothers,” or anything Shakespearean Lawrence Olivier ever opened his mouth for.  Me?  I like to curl up with a bag of Doritos™ and watch The Lion King which is Hamlet without the blood bath.

If You Don’t Understand Our World, Blame Gutenberg!

If you live long enough, you find yourself out of the loop.  You lose touch with your own society.  You don’t understand the language anymore, fashions look scandalous, music is noise, young people are stupid and technology is a battle, not a convenience.  This is why, for the most part, old people are grumpy.  They simply don’t understand the world they live in.  This is the natural order of things, and we all do it.  It’s been going on since Zeus replaced Horus as the god of choice along the Nile.  In essence, we remain brand loyal to the years that made sense to us and we never leave them, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing.  So we fondly remember the 60s or the 20s (or whenever we thought we were cool) and naturally wonder, loud and long what the hell happened to that time.

However, in recent history, this generational disconnection has become more than just a side effect of the trudge to the grave; it’s now happening to young people.  Thirty-year-olds are looking back at the 80s like it was a Golden Age.  Forty-year-olds are wrapping themselves in fashions clearly unsuitable for a widening waistline, and if you’re creeping up on fifty — forget it – you just might as well have been born during Prohibition.  The problem is we live in an age when the layers of knowledge are getting thinner and thinner, and if you miss one, you can never catch up.  Here’s how it works.

For the thousand years or so between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, nothing much changed in our world.  Certainly, there were scientific and social advances during that time, but progress was slow.  To your average peasant, one century looked pretty much like the last one: a bit more plague, a little less heretic burning, but no decided differences.  People were born, lived and died in a world dominated by the church, impending famine and war.  Generations of people worked the land, built cathedrals and occasionally bashed each other over the head — for a millennium — with the tools and weapons their ancestors used.  Innovation, when it came, travelled slowly and new ideas were not readily accepted.  The layers of knowledge were thick.

This all changed when a German named Gutenberg built a printing press sometime around 1436.  Suddenly, ideas didn’t have to travel by word of mouth anymore (getting totally screwed up along the way.)  They could be written down and printed in large numbers.  So, if Wolfgang, a Bavarian smart guy, figured out a better way to grind wheat that knowledge was both easily assessable and, more importantly, widely distributed (with no embellishments.)  With this rapid exchange of information, the
layers of knowledge got remarkably thinner.  By the time Pope Urban VIII was threatening to cut off Galileo’s protruding parts for saying the Earth revolved around the sun — not the other way around — in 1633, there was no stopping it.  Galileo may have recanted his discoveries to save his appendages, but his book remained out there for anybody to read.

Thus it was that invention no longer had to rely on the genius of one person to initiate change, nor the local gossipmonger to spread the word about it.  Books changed all that; ideas became permanently available.  Philosophers and scientists could build on each others’ knowledge just by reading each others’ books.  And each innovation was also written about, in turn, thus spawning dozens of refinements that continued the cycle.  The world of ideas expanded exponentially.  The layers of our society’s knowledge became thinner and thinner.

Skip forward two centuries and these days the layers of knowledge are so thin they don’t last more than a couple of years.  Some are added to our world and expanded upon before people are even acquainted with them.  For example, for 99% of history, people looked at a map if they wanted to know where they were going.  In the late 1990s, the GPS system revolutionized that.  However, before anybody could really cash in on a stand-alone GPS device, it became an accessory (App?) on our Smart phones.  The same thing is now happening with digital cameras and MP3 players.  These devices were born, lived and died in less time than it takes an average person to get a PhD in Sociology.

There is no longer a generation gap in our society.  There is only an information gap.  As the world spins ever faster all around us, we long for the security blanket of the objects we’re familiar with – whether they’re electronic devices or social interaction.  Nobody fully understands the world we live in (not that anybody ever did) but in the 21st century, more and more of us are falling further and further behind.  People are downloading information at such a furious rate they can no longer process it properly.  (For example, that last sentence wouldn’t have made sense a couple of generations ago.)   The result is we look with nostalgia on what we remember as a simpler time.  So the next time you see some kid with droopy drawers, talking to what is clearly a teenage prostitute, in a language akin to gibberish, blame it on Gutenberg: he started it all.

Taxation: The First 10,000 Years — Part 3

Although it’s relatively new and still not universally accepted, you don’t need a PhD in political science to understand the concept of taxation without representation.  It’s quite simple, really.  All you have to do is remember taxpayers are people.  Yes, corporations pay taxes, but that’s a whole different bunny rabbit.  Believe me; the corporate world is well represented in government circles.  I’m talking about the fundamental building blocks of democracy – ordinary people.  To understand taxation without representation, you find an average person, and as Deep Throat said to Woodward and Bernstein, “Follow the money.”  Here’s how it works.

Jane is an ordinary person.  She works for an ordinary company and earns pretty good money.  She has a car, lives in a tidy one bedroom apartment and has a boyfriend named Joe.  She takes the bus to work because gas and parking are expensive, and she’s trying her best to be green.  Jane is not particularly political or socially active, but she votes, knows the issues, did the Find A Cure Fun Run and volunteers Thursday night at her mother’s After School Drop-in Centre.  You could pass Jane on the street forty times and never know she was there.  Jane pays her taxes.  Actually, aside from income tax once a year and big item sales tax, Jane isn’t even aware she’s paying taxes; she just does it.  It’s part of Jane’s ordinary life.

The reason Jane gives the government her money is to provide for the common good.  However, should Jane desire a few things from her government — like more buses in the rain or perhaps a streetlight or two, so she doesn’t break her neck walking in the dark — chances are good she won’t get them.  Why?  Nobody’s on her side.  If she was an endangered goat, she’d have at least twelve different environmental lobby groups working for her.  If she was a rubbish disposal technician (or whatever garbage men are calling themselves these days) she’d have a powerful Public Service Union to rely on.  If she were a cultural event, she could get public funding, etc. etc.  Unfortunately, since Jane is none of the above, she’s on her own.  Jane has been abandoned by the people who are supposed to serve her.

The bottom line is Jane can’t hurt her government and powerful activist group can.  Social and political activists are no longer a bunch of like-minded citizens who have temporarily banded together to get their message out.  They are now permanent.  They have bricks and mortar office buildings, high octane lawyers and tons of money to throw around.  They don`t necessarily buy politicians; they don`t have to.  They can produce opinion polls, social and scientific research papers, press releases and enough media time to browbeat the politicos into line.  Meanwhile, all Jane has at her disposal is a nasty email or telephone call.  Furthermore, many activist groups are nonprofit and not only pay little or no actual tax but are also in line to receive government funding (which, by the way, is Jane’s money.)

It’s the same with Public Service Unions.  Over the years, they have been able to negotiate some pretty healthy contracts with the various levels of government.  In general, Public Service workers earn higher wages, receive more benefits and have better pension plans than the average private sector worker, and the gap is increasing.  This is because Public Service Workers control services essential to a modern society.  Even a minor disruption in garbage collection, transit service, education or health inspection can have disastrous results.  Politicians know this, so it’s better to throw money at union problems than risk angering its membership.  Union displeasure wields power far beyond its sheer numbers.  Once again, this special interest group has a lot more influence on government than Jane does, even though Jane is paying the bill.  It’s more than ironic that in many cases, Jane’s public service employees are earning more money than she is and certainly have a better pension plan.

Our democracy faces a unique situation.  Ordinary people are becoming disconnected from the government that is supposed to serve them because their voices are a mere whisper compared to the noise that 24/7 special interest groups can generate.  Jane’s problem is that streetlights aren’t sexy.  They don’t produce headlines; social questions and moral dilemmas do.  As activists push politicians further and further away from the nuts and bolts of government, ordinary people find their needs going begging.  Yet they are increasingly being asked to foot the bill.

In a nutshell, representation without taxation is no different from its colonial counterpoint, taxation without representation.  It just doesn’t have a revolution – yet.