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.

What You See Is Not What You Get!

I recently read a headline on a website whose name starts with an “H” and ends with a “P-O-S-T” (which I won’t name in case they sue me.)  It went something like “Celine Dion’s Shocking Confession” and I thought, “I knew it!  She’s a guy!”  I pointed, clicked and found out that Ms. Dion wasn’t confessing her clever gender scam; she was merely bulimic — or had been at one time, or knew someone else who was or some other such trash.  Obviously, I didn’t finish reading the stupid thing.  It made me mad.  Not because Celine was still a woman but because I’d been sucked in … again.  The headline did not match the story — not even close.  Celebrities confessing some trendy affliction are like lions confessing they like zebras for breakfast; it’s not news.  It’s not shocking!  I don’t stare at my laptop in disbelief and scramble for the Share icon to shotgun the revelation across Facebook’s time/space continuum.  I hit the snooze button and go back to work.  And so it was with poor old Celine.

Celine Dion aside, though, the H***** Post headline is just one example of an unholy trend in our society.  At every turn, we are beaten over the head by what can only be called gross misrepresentation.  We are being led to believe things that simply aren’t there.  The headlines might read “shocking confession” or “startling revelation,” but they never are!  They’re some second rate byte of information that you already know or could have figured out for yourself – if (and it’s a big if) you ever gave it any thought in the first place.  And it’s not just H***** Post; it’s everywhere.  Take a gander at any info/entertainment website.  Three headlines in, you know you’re getting conned.

Or take a look at television teasers, those in-house commercials that are supposed to grab you for the big deal program later on.  They’re always “outrageous” or “you won’t believe” what’s going to happen.  Then, when you get there, there’s nothing to it.  Usually it’s Jennifer, the disposable cash manager (read bank teller) from Portland, Maine whispering (to 6½ million people) that she’s really (like really!) falling in love with the bachelor guy she met three episodes ago.  D’uh — that’s what she’s there for.  This isn’t outrageous (even though, honestly, I kinda do find it hard to believe.)

Either that or they go for the salacious innuendo: “You won’t believe what’s hiding under Khloe’s bed!  Exclusive pictures!” and there’s Khloe, standing there with half a dress falling off.  Then, after the eighteen minute commercial break, you find out it’s a teddy bear with a rose in its teeth, that says “I wuv you,” when you punch him in the stomach.  No wonder Khloe sleeps alone.

Everybody knows sex sells.  The problem is there isn’t any sex – ever — just excited voiceovers telling us there’s going to be some — soon.  It’s like we’re living in a 500 channel high school.  I don’t know how many times I’ve been warned about the “hot” love scene or the “steamy” music video coming up.  Big wow!  Two people chewing on each other like they’re made of Egg McMuffins™ while simultaneously sliding out of exactly half their clothes — as if zippers and buttons haven’t been invented yet.  I mean, really!  That isn’t sex.  Try it sometime!  I guarantee you’ll end up with an inconvenient injury from tugging on each other’s underwear.  It’s not the lack of sex I mind; it’s the gratuitous titillation, the promises made with no attempt at delivery.  It’s exactly like Celine Dion’s shocking confession — that wasn’t.

So what’s the big deal?  After all, P. T. Barnum perfected roping in the rubes a century and a half ago, and there isn’t a State Fair Midway that hasn’t been doing it ever since.  The problem is these days this misdemeanor fraud is everywhere.  Check out the teasers for the news: “Killer cockroaches!  Details at 11:00!”  So you tune in to see what’s going on, and it turns out some scientist in Brazil has discovered cockroaches carry a weird tropical disease that is making the birds sick.  Again I say, big wow!

The fact is, however, this relentless wall of false advertising has created a whole generation that thinks disappointment is the natural order of things.  When everybody’s lying to you, it doesn’t pay to get your hopes up.  Young people don’t believe anything they see, read or hear because it’s been their experience that it’s all a bunch of crap.   Celine Dion doesn’t have a shocking confession; there are no killer cockroaches; and nobody’s going to save the whales.  To young people, the only difference between H***** Post headlines and your average politician is the size of the hustle.  After all, if you’ve been lied to ever since Teddy Ruxpin roamed the earth, what are the chances anybody is telling the truth?  Not much.  Listen closely and you’ll find out that most young people believe that if, by some miracle, there are modern day saints, they’re really just sinners with good PR.

The unfortunate thing, however, is once this pessimism starts creeping into our psyche, it’ll be almost impossible to get out.  The long term consequence?  I don’t know, but disillusioned is a disease, and it’s only going to spread.

John Glenn and The Big Idea

Fifty years ago today, we took a guy from Ohio, sat him on top of 100,000 kilos of high octane fuel, lit the match and shot him straight out of our oxygen-rich atmosphere into the void of space.  And the only reason we did it is because we could.  We had the technology to throw man and machine off our planet entirely so we did.  John Glenn didn’t have to put on his polyester suit and plastic helmet and climb into Friendship 7 that morning.  He wasn’t an essential component of the mission.  In fact, he was considered extra weight by Von Braun’s aeronautical engineers.  He was, as Chuck Yeager called him, “spam in a can.”  Nor was he the ground-breaking first person in space: Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin beat him there by ten months.  He wasn’t even the first American: Alan Shepard and “Gus” Grissom got there first.  However, John Glenn is the one we remember because he was part of the Big Idea.

The Big Idea is that magical mystery phenomenon that galvanizes a people and motivates them to reach for the stars – in this case, literally.  It grabs our imagination and brings our best qualities forward to achieve what might even seem to be impossible.  It’s a vision of a better future.  It ignites the human spirit.  It can be as simple as The March of Dimes to end polio or as large as the Interstate Highway system.  But the one common denominator of the Big Idea is people believe.

Six months after John Glenn orbited the earth and returned home safely, President John Kennedy stepped up to the podium at Rice University in Houston, Texas and told America what the Big Idea was.  He said:

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet.  Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain?  Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?  Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too”

Kennedy could have held a Washington, DC press conference and mambled on about committing billions of dollars to rocketry, computer technology, material fabrication and the exploration of space, but he didn`t.  He went to a university where his future technicians would come from and said, “Hey! What are you doin’ after graduation?  Let`s all go to the moon!”  He told those bright-eyed kids that they could be the first generation to defy the laws of gravity set down by Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century.  He told them they could slip the surly bonds of earth and follow Copernicus and Galileo into history.  He turned their faces to the shiny thing in the sky that has fascinated humans since the beginning of time and told them they can go there.  And he told them their studies, their work, their very lives had a purpose, a meaning, a fulfillment.  He gave them the Big Idea that they could do something larger than themselves.  They could make a contribution, however small, to the continuity of civilization. He gave them a tangible target and said go get it.

And the Big Idea caught fire.  For seven years those kids and others worked long hours, suffered setbacks, had triumphs, dug in hard and gave their creativity and time to every problem and their enthusiasm and energy to every solution.  They built one of the most complex systems in history, and in July, 1969, they took another guy from Ohio and put him on the Moon.  And they walked away proud of their accomplishment in a world that was better off because of what they’d done.

Fifty years ago today, John Glenn made a giant leap into space.  He did it because somebody had to.  He was one small step on the stairway to the stars, a single part of the Big Idea that said “We can do this.”

Half a century later, even though we can live in space now and send our machines to Mars and the outer reaches of our solar system, we still have staircases in our world.  They lead to hungry places, places without light, places where people suffer needlessly in a world of plenty.  Sometimes, it looks as though these are insurmountable problems that will plague humanity for all time.  They aren’t.  There are still Big Ideas in the world; we’ve just forgotten where to look for them.

The Mythology of Poverty

Whoever said “There’s honour among thieves” obviously hadn’t met many thieves.  This is one of those modern day truisms that simply isn’t true.  Thieves steal things; that’s their job.  When there’s no one else about, they will steal from each other.  Haven’t you ever seen The Sting?  Our world is chock full of these pseudo aphorisms — all widely accepted and all utter crap.  For the most part, they’re harmless, even cute.  But lately they’ve been creeping into our fundamental thinking, causing trouble, distorting our ability to handle problems.

For example, “Honour among thieves” suggests that there’s some kind of a Rogue’s Code out there that governs the little bastard who stole your iPhone™.  There isn’t!  He doesn’t belong to a fleet-footed fraternity of contemporary Robin Hoods, dedicated to redistributing technology to the less fortunate.  The only creed he lives by is economics – straight up and down.  He stole your phone for money: that’s it!  We attribute a modicum of honour to his profession because most of us simply can’t fathom an ordinary person following a moral compass that has no dial.  However, the reality is the gentleman thief is a fiction, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law to amuse his Victorian friends.  Unfortunately, it has somehow gotten stuck to our psyche, with disastrous results.  And it’s not the only one.  There are others way more serious.

There is a general misunderstanding that poor people have a moral leg up on the rest of us.  It is widely believed that if you are struggling to make ends meet, you’re absolutely bursting with integrity.  Not only that, but if, for whatever reason, you jump off the moral balance beam, the assumption is you were forced into it by an unforgiving society.  Let me set the record straight.  People who take the early bus to menial, minimum wage (or below) jobs do not necessarily have either honesty or empathy hardwired into their DNA.  Yes, they are working hard and, quite probably, getting the shaft on a daily basis, but I doubt very much that moral intrepidity is based on an unfavourable income tax bracket.  The “Poor but honest” stories we all grew up on are wonderful tales for children.  However, unless you’re seriously into economic profiling, there’s no reason to believe that poor people are any less corruptible than your average middle-class, 80K-a-year systems technician (No offence, systems technicians!)

And while we’re at it, the other prevailing myth about poor people is they all want to live together.  There is an unshakable belief among NGOs, city planners and politicians, that the cure for homelessness, slumlords and squalor is social housing (sometimes euphemized as affordable housing.)  Surprisingly, this legend is still with us, even after half a century of building gigantic, high and low rise concrete bunkers to warehouse the poor.  These urban battle zones are low rent Mogadishus and probably contribute as much to our low income social problems as cheap, hardcore drugs.  The real head scratcher, however, is the biggest proponents of social housing all live in tidy little neighbourhoods with painted fences, dogs on leashes and manicured lawns.  Either that, or they’re in gabled condo communities with assigned underground parking and more security than the Green Zone in Bagdad.  Is it just me, or is the disconnect here so wide you could sail the USS Abe Lincoln through it?

These are just two examples of truisms about poverty that just aren’t true.  There are piles more.  Think about it.  Poverty is not one homogenous entity.  It covers a huge area of land and has millions of people in it.  It’s also a relative term.  Poor in Detroit is quite a bit different from poor in Seattle.  The below average family in Biloxi has more in common with their wealthier neighbours than they do a statistically similar family in Newark.  Yet, we continue to think, talk and act as though poverty were a one-size-fits-all affliction you throw money at.

Furthermore, some of those most willing to perpetuate these myths are those socially and politically active people who are walking examples of exactly what I’m talking about.  Ever since Bob Geldof couldn’t figure out what to do with Tuesday, wealthy activists have been making a part-time profession out of poverty management.  Sometimes, they’re celebrities but mostly they’re just people with money and time on their hands.  Unfortunately, extended amounts of leisure do not qualify anybody to dabble in economics, education, social or urban planning.  Their opinions are no more valid then the local drycleaner.  In fact, the very success that gave them this free time is actually a detriment to their thinking.  For the most part, they are isolated from the real world and some have become so cocooned they wouldn’t know how to cope with reality (poverty-stricken or otherwise) if it bit them on the bum.  I’m sure these people truly care, but that doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.  Sympathetic does not equal smart.  That’s just another truism that isn’t.

Our society has some serious problems, and most of us sincerely want to fix them.  Unfortunately, we’re never going to come close to solving any of them as long as we keep taking mythology as our starting point.