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.

Super Tuesday: A Revelation

Remember when you were a kid and your mother put something on your plate you didn’t recognize and said, “Eat it.  It’s good?”  And remember that sudden, life-changing understanding you had when you took the first bite and realized that the world was a hard and cruel place where a mother would betray her own child?  Revelations come to us all: every now and then, our eyes open just a little wider and a liitle more light comes in.  The irony is, most of the time when this happens, the world actually gets just a little darker.

I love politics.  It’s the thing that separates us from the beasts.  Throughout history, it has protected us from the bullies who roam this earth.  It allows people like me to say what I like without looking over my shoulder for the boys with the electrodes.  It delivers us from anarchy (which, by the way, has never been our natural state.)  It prevents chaos in a world where next-door neighbours don’t necessarily like each other.  It organizes us to achieve and accomplish things we could never do individually, and it keeps us from butchering each other with any more alacrity than we already possess.  Without politics, our world would look very much like the Dark Ages – scary, brutish and nasty.

Politics is the only human activity that combines our noblest ideals with our scuzziest behaviour.  It’s the real Sport of Kings.  And the rules of the game are very simple: there are no rules.  There never have been.  Ever since the first Egyptian tough guy discovered that Pharaoh sounded a lot classier than “that mean bugger over on the Nile,” there has been only one guiding principle to political life – you’re useless unless you win.  It doesn’t matter how altruistic your ideals, how noble your cause or how brilliant your solutions, without power you’re just another philosopher without a kingdom.  This is why, across history, so many men (and a whole lot of women) have assembled and excused all manner of low-life “ends justify the means” schemes and sacrificed more than their honour on the altar of political power.  It’s the way of the world.  You don’t have to like it; but it is the nature of political power.

Unfortunately, this leads us to the current crew of Republicans who wish to become the most powerful man in the world.  Their brand of “all’s fair” in primary campaigning is stooping to a new low.  In fact, they actually reached rock bottom some time ago, and now they’re starting to dig.  For the first time in my political awareness (and understand, I remember Richard Nixon!) I’m holding my nose.  Never in the history of political conflict has so much dirt been thrown so far for so little gain.  Look, men!  If you’re going to sling mud, at least make sure it sticks.  Not only that, but I’m not even certain these guys watch the news.  It’s the economy, stupid!  Yet, every time I turn around, one of them wants to bomb Iran, build a mansion on the moon or eliminate representation without taxation — meanwhile, stopping time entirely and returning the social calendar back to when Eisenhower was running the show.  Is anybody serious, here?  Take a look at yourselves, you guys!  You’re yapping on, as if you can change the world, but everybody and his puppy knows you spent last week hiding out from Rush Limbaugh, for God’s sake!  Not one of you called him out, and every one of you should have.

As of close of business yesterday, Barack Obama still had the keys to the White House, and Super Tuesday or not, the Republican Party is no closer to calling dibs on the lease.  Somewhere around Ohio, I had the revelation that these three pretenders (Sorry, Ron!  You never had a hope!) just don’t have the cojones for the job.

Politics is about ideas, but you can idea ‘til you’re blue in the face: eventually you have to do something about it.  You have to generate some excitement.  You have to gather the tribes and give them something to hope for… something to vote for.  This primary season is turning into the bland leading the bland, and nobody seems capable of putting it away.  Somebody’s going to win the nomination, obviously, but unless that somebody steps up and demonstrates political power, it’s not going to mean much.  Barack Obama isn’t a very good president, but he’s a great politician.  From what I’ve seen so far, that’s something the Republicans candidates aren’t.  Right now, it doesn’t matter who wins: come November, Obama’s going to beat their brains out.  It will be the worst defeat since Lyndon Johnson kicked Goldwater’s ass back to Arizona in ’64.

Last night, looking at the Super Tuesday numbers from Ohio, I suddenly realized: today, the world is a harder, crueler place.

The Twitterpatter of Little Tweets

I’m way too old to understand Twitter.  I know what it is – obviously – I don’t live in a cave.  But I have no emotional attachment to it; therefore, I can’t possibly understand it.  It’s always been my experience that you have to care about something before you can figure out how it works.  For example, I don’t care how the microwave works: zap my burrito and I’ll be on my way.  It might be heat; it might be light; for all I know it might be a little guy with a blow torch.  The transformation from frozen to food doesn’t interest me.  Twitter, however, fascinates me.  Unfortunately, I’m not young enough to see it as an intimate part of life.  I grew up with other things that take precedence.  It’s as if I were my own grandfather, trying to understand why everybody is so captivated by the magic box in the living room where grey-tone Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz live.  It’s nice, but I’ve got other things to do.

Twitter is changing the way we live — D’uh!  But, not in that vacant “everybody’s on Facebook” kind of way.  Yes, everybody’s on Facebook, but most of us have figured out that while Facebook works fine as an ego repository, nobody’s going to change the world by clicking the “Like” icon.  Twitter is more than just being connected, putting on the brag and showing everybody our pictures.  It actually makes us communicate.  Not since the Golden Age of letter writing, when the Victorians introduced regular and inexpensive mail service, has there been such an outpouring of social communication.  It’s as if there’s a gigantic cocktail party going on, 24/7, and everyone’s invited.  Of course, as at any cocktail party, there are a bunch of dolts over by the food, talking nonsense, and most of the rest of the room is as dull as my half-heated burrito.  However, interesting people will gravitate to each other (or to the bar) and Twitter lets them do that – on a scale worthy of the pyramids.

A couple of rainy afternoons ago, I wandered through this electronic booze cruise and randomly gleaned (“stole” is such a hard word) some of this good stuff.  The kicker is it only took me a little over an hour and here are just a few of the results.  I’ve changed them slightly from Twitterspeak.

I wish I had two more middle fingers for you.
Deja Moo: Same old bull
I have heels higher than your standards.
I hope when the shark comes, you don’t hear the music.
Are you Voldemort’s child?
Don’t you think if I was wrong, I would know it?
I can only aspire to be the person my dog thinks I am.

I could go on and on.  If Dorothy Parker were alive today, her head would explode.  The entire world is playing Algonquin Hotel, and Twitter is the Round Table.

Yet, even as you read this, people are lamenting the passing of the written word and damning YouTube for filming the eulogy.  They see texting and Twitter as mind-numbing barbarians who are putting Shakespeare’s quill pen legacy to the sword.  However, there are more words being written today than at any other time in human history.  There are more words being read, more conversations taking place and more ideas being exchanged.  Certainly, most of them are crap, but that’s the nature of democracy: everybody gets a voice.  My point is, though, so far, Twitter is not only saving the written word (140 characters at a time) it’s finding its own place in history.  It, along with texting, are reviving the art of written communication that cheap and easy telephones almost destroyed.   Young people all over the world are thumbing away at each other, sitting in schools and at the dinner table looking down at their crotches and laughing.  The wit and wisdom of the 21st century is sitting there — right in their lap.

This is the Twitter revolution that I’m never going to be able to understand.  I think it’s a wonderful, magical thing, but, as Mark Twain would have texted, “Too bad Tweets are wasted on the young.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Bond”

Today is Daniel Craig’s birthday, and it’s not my intent to dump on the guy.  So, go out and have a great day, Danny, get some presents, and eat some cake.  Anything said here isn’t personal.  It’s in a wider context which you cannot possibly understand.  If you did, you’d go to the film franchise that is James Bond, turn in your tuxedo, your double O ranking, your License to Kill and resign.  In fact, you should have done it already, but alas…  Daniel, you are forgiven ‘cause you don’t know what you’re doin’.

James Bond is part of the Western culture that stretches back beyond Beowolf to the heroes of Greek mythology.  He has a place with Hercules.  He ranks with King Arthur’s knights, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan.  He is so intimately connected to what we are as a society that when you mention his name, nobody says, “Who?”  There are presidents, popes and kings who don’t command that kind of respect.  So why has 007 been turned into a pouty tough guy with a tentative jaw line?  Don’t answer that!  It’s a rhetorical question.  The damage has already been done.

I’m not blaming Daniel Craig particularly.  There are producers, directors and writers who not only share the blame but are hugely responsible for it.  Craig is an actor.  He does what he’s told.  Of course, he could put a little more oomph into it, but these days actors are judged by their abs, not their oomph.  The real problem is it looks like everybody connected to the James Bond film franchise studied Bond at the Learning Annex.  It obvious they have never seen the other films and they have definitely never read the books.  If they had they wouldn’t be so cavalier with their portrayal.  They would treat James Bond with respect and quit making him look like Derek Zoolander with a pistol.

The current James Bond is based on one fundamental fallacy — he’s an antihero.  That assumption is so dead wrong if I were Ian Fleming, living or dead, I’d sue this current crowd of Bond makers for defamation of my character.  James Bond is not an antihero.  He’s not even an unlikely hero.  He’s a hero.  He’s quicker, smarter and mentally stronger than the average guy.  He has charm and charisma.  He does the right things for the right reasons.  He’s dedicated.  That’s why he has a Licence to Kill.  The licence is issued by the British government (for reference, see Sir Francis Drake’s Letters of Marque) under the proposition that when faced with a villain who is willing to blow up places like Miami (Emilio Largo in Thunderball) you don’t organize a discussion group — you shoot him.  (Where have we seen that scenario recently?)  And it is a Licence to Kill, not a licence to spray bullets around like some demented Rambo.

Playing Bond like an emotionally bankrupt thug is to diminish the purpose of Bond.  At root, James Bond is a civil servant.   He is a government worker, trained to do his job — just like a tax collector or a traffic warden.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  He is not a semi-loose cannon or a killing machine.  He gets up in the morning and goes to work, just like everybody else.  He has a desk and a secretary.  He doesn’t even have his own office.  He has to share with 008 and 011.  He has a demanding boss, and sometimes he gets bored.  Plus — and this is another rudimentary fact the current Bond people are missing — James Bond is a secret agent of the government.  Bond’s work, by its very nature, must be discreet.  This current guy leaves enough mayhem behind him to attract Lindsay Lohan’s three ring media circus.  If he had any higher a profile he’d be hosting Dancing with the Stars.

In the two Craig/Bond movies to date, James Bond is neither recognizable nor worthy of the name.  The last travesty, Quantum of Solace, isn’t even a real movie.  It’s a series of Mack Sennett chase scenes punctuated by random acts of destruction and numerous hard glances of tight-jawed “Blue Steel.”  Casino Royale at least had a story.

Speaking of which, there is a single scene in Casino Royale that sums up just how little the current Bond franchise knows about its raison d’etre.  In it, Bond breaks into M’s house.  Like hell!  James Bond would never do that.  It would never cross his mind, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is he has too much class.  Secondly, M would fire him on the spot, think about it over a whiskey, realize Bond had gone crazy and have him shot on his way home.  (Not a bad idea, given there’s another movie in the works.)

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Daniel Craig!  Jason Statham, where are you?