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.

Trapped in the 80s with Privacy and the Politically Correct

There must be a Time Portal around here somewhere because, for the last couple of days I’ve been trapped in the 80s.  It’s not so bad, really.  The music is brilliant: Deborah Harry is still hot and David Bowie will always be cool.  Fashions suck, though, and TV is terrible, but I never watched that much the first time around, so que voulez-vous?  However, like Dorothy and Toto, I’ve had enough now, and I want to go home.  Unfortunately, I don’t know how I got here.

What happened was I was sitting around in 2011, minding my own business when I noticed that Politically Correct was having a hissy-fit a la 1985.  Apparently, some Social Science professor in a class called “Self, Culture and Society” at York University was explaining to his students something in the neighbourhood of “Without documented evidence mere opinion is useless.”  He went on to suggest that, despite the local mythology, everyone is not entitled to their own opinion.  (I knew that!)  He even went so far as to give an example.  Here’s where the time warp kicked in.  A student, who was either dozing or Smart phoning her BFF, regained consciousness long enough to hear “… all Jews should be sterilized…”  Instantly offended, she stormed from the room and set the media on fire with tales of rampant anti-Semitism.  The media typically goose-stepped into line, and the witch hunt was on.  Within hours, the social media had tarred and feathered the professor — and were within moments of driving him off campus with pitchforks and torches — when he finally got a chance to explain.  Actually he had only used the phrase as an example of a reprehensible opinion.  Luckily, he had over 300 witnesses — all the other students in the room at the time, so he was off the PC hook, so to speak.  Not so.  The offended student maintains “The words, ‘all Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context, I still think that’s pretty serious.”  She also issued a statement to the effect that it’s the prof’s fault she misunderstood, and he should apologize.  Logic has left the building!

You can see my problem, though.  This kind of PC/BS is strictly confined to the last quarter of the last century when Politically Correct’s reign of terror, one of our more medieval social tyrannies, stalked the land.  These days, we all know the drill: watch what you say and when (not if) somebody takes offence, apologize, say it was an error in judgement and go about your business.  In 2011, anybody who isn’t still undergraduate fodder gives Politically Correct the respect it deserves – none.

But the time/space continuum had already been broken, and the next thing I knew, the Rideau Institute issued a report on the coming Canada/US Trade and Security Agreement.  It stated, among other things, that the privacy of Canadians was about to be breached by the American bogeyman.  The Institute’s concern is that, in the hope of easing cross-border trade, our Canadian government will be sharing inappropriate personal information with those damn Yankees.  The outrage was incredible, but talk about a blast from the past!  The last time anybody in this country was truly a private person was probably around 1983 — when Parliament enacted The Privacy Act.  Let’s just stop and take a sanity pill, shall we?  I don’t think we need be worried that the FBI wants some passport numbers, considering Amazon and eBay already have our name, address, phone number, birthday and buying habits.  Honestly, if the CIA wants to know anything about me or 16 million other Canadians, all they have to do is go on Facebook.  In the last five years, Canadians have put thousands of hours of personal videos on YouTube.  This may come as a shock, but those hilarious shots of you dancing at the wedding are instantly available to anybody on this planet with a cell phone.  I think it’s a little late in the day to start worrying about whether or not Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security can find out if you’ve booked a Caribbean vacation – don’t you?  Frankly, I think that cruise ship has sailed!

Privacy, like politically correctness is something we used to be concerned about.  However, it’s a little silly to worry about Government intrusions into our private lives when we’re freely giving the same information to anybody having a Big Mac under McDonald’s Wi-Fi umbrella.   In the 21st century, private people are the ones who live in caves in the Himalayas.  The rest of us have sacrificed privacy on the altar of the Internet.  The Rideau Institute’s heart might be in the right place, but its head is at least a generation in the past, fighting a war that was lost before Google was even born.

None of this helps me, though, because if I don’t get out of the 80s soon, the next thing I’m probably going to hear is that Air Canada employees have decided to strike, and Ed Broadbent is calling the shots over at NDP headquarters.  No, wait a minute!  There’s Barack Obama, mouthing off to the Europeans about how to handle their debt crisis.  Thank you, Barack: you’ve done it again!  I’m saved!

The Necessity of Success

I’m tired of success not being an option.  There’s a gathering idea in our society that, no matter what we do, there are certain things we’re just going to have to live with.  This attitude has been floating around our world like an airborne social virus for some time.  However, recently, like its contagious cousin the flu, it’s become a regular feature of our everyday life.   (Remember, not so many years ago, when we didn’t have to make the annual pilgrimage to get stabbed against a recurring seasonal disease?)  My point is that more and more people are thinking that successful solutions to our problems are just so many Chimera, wandering in herds in the distance.  We can vaguely see them out there, but we don’t actually believe they exist.

For example, my city has an outrageous drug problem.  I’m not talking about Carol, Bob, Ted and Alice getting together, rolling a joint after dinner and watching The Hangover on Blu-ray.  The stuff going on here is life threatening.  It’s destroying people — wholesale.   Entire neighbourhoods are falling down stoned, and they can’t get up.  It’s a complex situation that just begins with a Hydra-headed set of problems and then gets worse.  But the major obstacle that prevents us from reclaiming our city and its people from drug dealers and criminals is our own attitude toward drug abuse.  The prevailing wisdom is that there will always be people who abuse drugs – full stop.  Therefore, any strategy (we don’t even call them solutions anymore) we attempt to deal with our drug problem has got to be based on that one overwhelming fact.  And make no mistake: that fact does overwhelm us.  We have never taken the long-term view that we must focus our energies on eradicating drug abuse and the soul eating misery it causes.  Instead, year after year, we expend our limited resources trying to mitigate the here and now effects of individual drug use.  We do this because there will always be people who abuse drugs – full stop.

Similarly, because of our mild climate, my city has more than its fair share of homeless people.  I live in one of the most affluent countries in all of history, yet as incredible as it seems, we still have people — who are, but don’t want to be — homeless.  Meanwhile, across the street from Shopping Cart Estates we’re building six-storey condo units, as fast as we can pour the concrete.  We have the wealth, equipment and expertise, yet our chances of solving the homeless crisis in this country are as bleak as a northern Manitoba winter. (No offence, Herb Lake.)  Why?  Because once again, we simply don’t have the will to solve the problem.  It’s long since been decided that the destitute among us must be warehoused in urban atrocities called “social housing”; either that, or they will naturally remain part of the landscape.  So, since there’s never enough “social housing,” the attitude (although nobody ever out and out says it) is, “Ain’t it awful!  You can come and see us for some blankets next winter, but sorry, buddy: you’re on your own.”

In that same vein, there is more poverty in this country now than ever before, but instead of helping poor people get on the Gravy Train, we’re throwing money out the window at them, as we go by.  And the kicker is, after forty years of The Just Society, we know it doesn’t work.  Our attitude seems to be that people who have enough to live on have somehow taken that money away from people who don’t, and they must give it back.  This is not a solution.  We’ve just hired a bureaucratic Robin Hood to maintain the status quo and perpetually keep the poor on the cutting edge of down and out.  It’s an unfortunate fact, but robbing employed Peter to pay unemployed Paul is only good in the short term.  Eventually, given that trickle down, neither one of them is going to be eating regularly.

These are just three examples.  There are hundreds more.

The problem is, as a society, we no longer believe we can succeed – at anything.  We don’t think we can identify a problem, agree on a solution, turn our collective strength to that purpose, and with resolve and hard work, solve it.  We are becoming convinced that our problems are permanent and our best course of action is to throw money at them promiscuously in the futile hope they won’t get any worse.  That’s why, for example, we waste our time and resources looking for terrorist bombs instead of terrorist bombers.  We don’t believe we can win the War on Terror, so the next best thing is to minimize the damage.  It’s why our kids have become fat, dumb and unhappy.  It’s why we’re choking on our own waste and why Climate Change is going to make Armageddon look like a Wiener Roast gone wrong.  And it’s why, if we don’t change our attitude tomorrow, over breakfast, things are going to get a lot worse.

Here’s the deal.  We’re it.  We can’t shuffle our problems off anymore and there’s nobody left to download them to.  We need to succeed because, if we don’t, the consequences will be terrible.  We can do this.  It’s not hard, but success must become our first choice again.  As Galadriel said to Frodo, “This task was appointed to you, Frodo of the Shire.  If you do not find a way, no one will.”

9/11 Truthers: Another Stupid Conspiracy Theory

Last weekend, in Toronto, tucked away somewhere between the Hollywood highjinks of TIFF and the chest clinching antics of the TSX, a dedicated group of malcontents held The International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001.  Despite its grand title and conference space at Ryerson University, the international hearing was anything but.  Basically, it was a crew of 9/11 conspiracy theorists demonstrating their bad manners — just because they could.  After all, of the 365 days available this year for their Truther Convention, I don’t think they chose the 10th anniversary of the attack because the caterer was available.  When asked by the Globe and Mail: “Don’t you get accused of being insensitive to the victims?” the organizer, Graeme MacQueen responded with “Yes we get criticized.  But we reject that completely.  It was a horrific crime.  That’s why we want to solve it.  We also have the support of some 9/11 families.”  This is conspiracy-theory speak for “Everything we say or do is perfectly acceptable because we say it is.”  This is the essence of any discussion with conspiracy theorists.  It’s like arguing with your toaster.  No matter what you say, the toast comes out the same.  Since we all know that arguing with small appliances is futile, I’m not going to waste bandwidth disputing the Grand Canyon gaps in logic propelled by the 9/11 Sceptics.  However, there are a few items that the Truthers need to explain before I quit thinking they’re merely the visible part of the Stupid Iceberg.  So to all those 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists out there, I have this to say:

First of all, rhetorical questions are not a logical argument.  9/11 Sceptics spend more than half their time spouting questions like:  “So why didn’t President Bush run screaming from the classroom when he heard the news?”  Or “Why was Dick Cheney conveniently not on the 27th floor of Twin Tower #2 that morning?”  Logical arguments follow a distinct A-B-C-D pattern; they don’t jump all over the map.  I have yet to hear any Truther lay out a logical explanation that follows the documented chain of events.  Even the weirdo version they claim is the truth.

Next, overwhelming scientific evidence does not come from two construction engineers, a guy from Memphis with a PhD and your FaceBook friend who saw the Dunes Hotel implode on YouTube.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of experts all over this planet who accept the events of 9/11 as they happened.  It is impossible that they’re all dumber than you are or that they’ve been bought off by George and Laura Bush – even if they got a loan from Cheney.  In any reasonable discussion, the expertise of the majority of the world’s scientific community takes precedence over some guy and his girlfriend who disagree.  Oh yeah, and just because you say it’s a scientific fact, that doesn’t mean it is.  Without serious documentation it isn’t even a fact.

Also, I find it difficult to believe that a secret organization, with huge resources, capable of perpetrating a vast worldwide conspiracy involving thousands of people over several months (if not years) would then leave incredibly simple clues to their nefarious purpose – clues so glaring that a 12-year-old with a Pause button can figure them out in an hour.  I doubt very much if all the 9/11 conspirators passed Evil Masterminding, Chicanery and Skullduggery in Conspiracy School and then flunked Trickery 101.  Or were they all sitting around the secret headquarters on September 10th, trying to figure it out and sometime around midnight just decided “Aw, the hell with it!  Nobody’s going to notice.”

Likewise, of the army of people needed to pull off the crime of the 21st century — from the original planners to the guy who made the sandwiches — not one person has ever had a crisis of conscience and confessed.  The laws of anti-chance alone dictate somebody got drunk one night and told his lover – or his mom.  And if not that, bragging rights alone would be reason enough for some of those achtung military types to spill the beans.  Remember, these are the same geniuses who took pictures of themselves beating up the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  Yet, in ten years, not one person has come forward, not even a deathbed confession or one of those weird, blacked-out muggy-voiced silhouette things from A & E.  This seems highly unlikely.

There are tons more questions I could ask but the one major piece of the conspiracy puzzle that’s never answered by even the most rabid 9/11 Sceptic is why.  What was everybody’s motivation?  All the Truther evidence suggests that the US government is the most likely suspect in the great conspiracy, which points directly at George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Yet, to hear them tell it, these are the guys who rigged the 2000 presidential election, convinced half the world that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, went to war to find them, didn’t and weren’t even embarrassed about it.  They’re the same guys who sold the US military to Haliburton, left hundreds of thousands of people to rot in New Orleans and nearly bankrupted the USA so their friends could make a fortune out of oil.  Plus, they’re the same people whose incompetence led to the subprime monetary crisis of 2008 that nearly ruined the world economy (and whose war-torn policies set up the current debt crisis that might yet do it.)  Still, for all this, we are expected to believe that they (or someone close to them) felt it necessary to engineer a gigantic and incredibly complicated plot to fool the American people because they were afraid of public opinion.  Give me a break!

Honestly, if the Bush Administration cared about public opinion (which all the evidence says it didn’t) all they would have had to do was send three guys with a heavy suitcase to Minot, North Dakota and nuke it.  Problem solved.  At that point, the American people would have been so enraged Bin Laden wouldn’t have made it to the Men’s Room — I don’t care how deep his cave was.  The marines would have been picking their teeth with Saddam Hussein’s bones within the week, civil liberties would be a distant memory and oil would be 25 bucks a barrel or 15 dollars a gallon — depending on which side of the conspiracy fence you’re sitting on.  There is absolutely no motive for a world-class JFK assassination style conspiracy when Ukrainian nuclear weapons are on sale for less than the cost of a slightly used Boeing 767.

Explain the motivation, Truthers, and then you might have a case.  But until you do that, you all just look like a casting call for Dumb and Dumber 3.