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.
There’s enough going wrong in the world this week that even we optimists are getting the Windex out to clean our rose-coloured glasses. Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse – they did. People are starting to read Kafka for laughs and Cormac McCarthy is beginning to look downright light hearted. However, rather than dwell on the obvious let’s stop for a moment, pour a beverage and relax.
Remember, August is that time of year when the local folks of Edinburgh rent their houses out for mucho dinero and bugger off to Spain; chased out of their town by the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For those of you who’ve never heard of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, that’s too bad because it’s the greatest mish-mash of all-things-considered in the world. The Edinburgh Fringe is actually several coexisting arts festivals that run amok, day and night, through the streets of Edinburgh for the entire month of August. It was started in the late 1940s by some university students, and even though it’s become internationally huge, it still maintains its undergraduate Alphagetti-for-breakfast air.
One of the biggest parts of The Fringe is comedy; some good, some bad, some awful. And for the last few years, it has produced a Top Ten list of the funniest jokes of the Festival. This is this year’s offering. So, as the world continues to spin, tune out for a second and remember we’re still the funniest species on the planet.
10) DeAnne Smith: “My friend died doing what he loved … Heroin.”
9) Andrew Lawrence: “I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.”
8) Mark Watson: “Someone asked me recently – what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife.”
7) Alan Sharp: “I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.”
6) Sarah Millican: “My mother told me you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards.”
5) Matt Kirshen: “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”
4) Tim Key: “Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought… once you’ve hired the car…”
3) Hannibal Buress: “People say ‘I’m taking it one day at a time’. You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works.”
2) Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”
And the Number One funniest joke of the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival is:
1) Nick Helm: “I needed a password eight characters long, so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
With less than a month left in the Arab Spring turned Chaos Summer, it looks like Libya is the next North African domino. Gaddafi and his sons are almost certainly on the run, if not overrun already. The latest images from Tripoli show some local guy playing with Muammar’s hat. With that in hand, can the owner’s head be far behind? Meanwhile, this season’s journalists are looking quite jaunty in flak jackets and steel helmets. I’m waiting for one of the girls to undo her chin strap and go trend setter tres cas, a la John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima. The sound bytes coming out of the Rixos have a ninth inning World Series feel about them. They’ve pre-concluded the final score, but are still reporting the game anyway. Unfortunately, nobody on the business end of a microphone can name any of the players except Muammar and his boys. This is going to leave a lot of room for error once it’s time to start handing out the trophies. If I sound a little cynical, it’s merely because I am.
I’ll admit I was wr-wr-wr, not right when I said that the stalemate in Libya would outlast NATO’s patience for battle. (Frankly, I still think Western Political Will has a 90 day warranty, and after that, you’re on your own.) However, in my defence Western airpower has more shock and awe than the UN bargained for. Either that or NATO took my advice from an earlier blog, forgot about Resolution 1973, and started blasting away at hot targets. Personally, I’m leaning towards door #2 because the t-shirt and running shoe rebels I see on television don’t look like they could put much of a lickin’ on seasoned soldiers. The fact remains, however, the rebels, whoever they are, are winning, and they’re doing it without overt NATO boots on the ground.
So, why so cynical when the major components of the people’s victory are already whooping it up in Green, Martyrs’ Square?
First of all, I have this sneaking suspicion that it’s not over yet. Muammar is a tricky old bugger. He didn’t last 40 years plus by folding his tent and fading away every time Western jets came screaming out of the Gulf of Sidra. And just because some teenagers are playing with his golf cart doesn’t mean he’s going to retire from the game. Until somebody puts his head on a spike – oops – detains him to face justice under international law – and quickly – there are going to be a lot more dead bodies bleaching out in the desert.
Next, I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out who’s who in the rebel army. Somehow, I don’t believe the bakers and barbers of Benghazi have the kind of tactical military skill to liberate Libya in less time than it took Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps to conquer it. Nor do I think that your average shopkeeper, under the Gaddafi regime, kept an AK over the mantel, much less enough ammunition for a sustained campaign. FYI, North Americans, believe it or not, just because you’re an Arab doesn’t mean you instinctively know how to use automatic weapons. (It’s not in the DNA.) So just who are these guys and where do they come from? As a veteran taxpayer, I’d like to know who my million dollar-a-whack bombs are going to support. What’s their agenda? And are we just trading an old 20th century dictator for the new and improved 21st century model?
My biggest concern, however, is for when “the tumult and the shouting dies;/The Captains and the Kings depart:” — six months from now. Unlike Hugo Chavez, I don’t think this is yet another Western plot to seize Third World oil resources and sell them back to ourselves at exorbitant prices. No. Basically, the Europeans saw an opportunity to smack a $39.95 dictator who’s been making a fool of them for years, and they took it. The oil is an extra added attraction. NATO’s interest in Libya is limited, and I don’t think it includes rebuilding the place, now that we’ve blown it up.
The problem is that, even if the Libyan rebels are the soul of democracy, as we’re being led to believe by the flak jackets at Rixos, they’re going to have a hard time implementing it. Without a lot more help from the folks who brought them unlimited military aid, the Libyans are in for another bad fight for freedom — that could take years. Either that, or the West is going to have to pitch in with some ever-unpopular “nation building,” and I don’t think we have the stick-to itness for that.
There is some hope for the future, though. It’s good to see another one of the nasties, bite the dust and the aspirations of a people overcome the bayonets of a tyrant. There is hope for democracy in the sands of North Africa — even if it is a long and difficult road. Besides, if we’re smart, when this is all over (in a month or two?) NATO can stand down, relax and rearm. Then, we can take a good, long look at Damascus and say, “Okay, Bashar! Shape up and fly right, or you’re next. Remember what happened to the last guy who pissed us off!”
As Campaigner-In-Chief, Barack Obama, fights for his political life, his strategy is simple. He gets off the Darth Vader Bus of Despair with a clear message for the American people: “Folks, let’s all hitch ourselves to the Blame Bush Bandwagon ‘cause it’s all his fault.” Little does he know that he is maligning the single most accomplished president in the history of America! Dubya was the one guy who stood tough against both the stars that govern us and metaphysical forces that we cannot yet hope to understand — and triumphed. No other president — not Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy or even the great Ronnie Reagan — can stand in the hall of greatness where Dubya resides. He is solitary in his achievement, a true American hero, who lifted his country out of a morass of hopelessness.
It all started 200 years ago, in 1811, when resident bully William Henry Harrison and an American militia army kicked the crap out of Tecumseh’s little brother Tenskwatawa and a bunch of his Native American buddies at the Battle of Tippecanoe. However, don’t throw the racist stone just yet, because the Native Americans involved had been swindled out of their land — fair and square — a couple of years before at the Treaty of Fort Wayne. Moreover, they had surrounded Harrison’s militia with intent to do bodily harm and (all sides agree) threw the first punch (or spear as it were.)
The problem was Tenskwatawa was a bit of a part-time spiritualist, and he had foreseen the battle in a dream. He told his followers that the American bullets would not harm them, and there would be a great victory. Unfortunately, hot steel very seldom obeys the laws of the spirit world, and when the dust settled, the great victory was somebody else’s. The result was an end to a mighty Native Confederation (and a lot of name calling around the council fires that winter.)
Click all you want there's nothing there
At this point, the tale gets really interesting and the evidence gets really sketchy. In fact, the only hard proof we have that any of the rest of this ever happened comes from a 1930s Ripley’s Believe it or Not cartoon. However, in my day, most people who never made it out of History 12 (and some who did) believed it. The story goes that because of Harrison’s actions at Tippecanoe, Tecumseh or his brother Tenskwatawa (who, given the evidence, had the hilarious nickname, “The Prophet”) placed a curse on the American Presidency. Either Tecumseh, as he lay dying, or Tenskwatawa many years later, essentially said that Harrison would be elected President, but he would die in office. Not only that, but one of them (???) went on to say that every twenty years, forever after, no president, elected in a year ending in zero, would make it out of the White House alive. Apparently, the Shawnee know how to hold a grudge.
Meanwhile, back at the facts, for the next 140 years Tecumseh’s Curse kept ticking away like a top-end Rolex. Harrison, was indeed, elected President in 1840, at his second kick at the can. He caught a cold giving the most boring inaugural speech in American history and died a month later. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and although he survived his first term, was re-elected in 1864 and assassinated by John Wilkes Booth less than a year later. Next, James Garfield, elected in 1880, was shot by Charles Guiteau in July of 1881 and died that September. However, to be fair, this may have had more to do with the presidential medical staff than a Native American curse. Apparently, Garfield’s wound was not life threatening, but his doctors were and that’s what finished him off. In 1896, William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryant to become the 25th president of the United States, and rather than quit while he was ahead, he ran for re-election in 1900. He beat Bryant again, but the next year, while touring the World’s Fair in Buffalo, was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz and died within days. In 1920, Warren Harding was elected to the Oval office. He lasted long enough (3 years) to preside over one of the most corrupt administration ever and be considered one of the worst presidents. He died in San Francisco in 1923. The jury’s still out on the cause of death; opinions range from stroke to food poisoning to suicide. There’s even one theory that he was murdered by Mrs. Harding (who oddly enough burned all his papers when she got back to Washington.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to work very hard, indeed, to fulfill Tecumseh’s Curse. He was elected president in 1932, 1936, the magical 1940 and 1944. He finally died of exhaustion and a cerebral haemorrhage in April, 1945. John Kennedy was elected in 1960 and died in Dallas in 1963. I’m not going to go into the wherefores and the whys of JFK’s death because if you ask any four people their thoughts about it you’ll get six different conspiracy theories.
Of course, many people do not believe in NativeAmerican curses. Unable to accept the metaphysical power which surrounds us every day and only primitive people possess, they pooh-pooh the idea. Many prominent astrologers maintain that the regularity of presidential death has nothing to do with Tecumseh, his brother or anyone else. It is, in reality, controlled by the stars and the evidence is available to anyone who wants to open their eyes. There is an astrological cycle which occurs every 19.8 years when Jupiter, the faster orbiting planet, crosses paths with Saturn, the slower planet. Since Jupiter rules politicians and Saturn rules death, something catastrophic is bound to happen. Luckily, however, the stars are only concerned with American politicians or we’d have others world leaders popping off with the same annoying regularity.
Fortunately, in the 21st century, George W. Bush came along and put a stop to both 19th century Native American cursery and ancient Americo-centric astrology. He was elected in 2000 and served two full terms in office. (There was a moment there when the pretzels nearly got him, but in the end, he prevailed.) When his presidency was over, he packed his bags, waved good-bye, and went back to Texas, hale and hearty. Barack Obama, the Democrats, Jon Stewart and the girls from The View can continue to blame him for everything from the National Debt to obesity in preschoolers, if they want to. However, even they have to admit that when George W. Bush stepped away from the White House, he’d lifted the curse that had plagued America for a century and a half — and even realigned the stars. Not bad for a straight C student from Yale!
But, wait a minute, you might ask. What about Ronnie Reagan? Reagan was a great president who won the Cold War and gave us “trickle-down” economics. However, as any supporter of either the Tecumseh Curse or the Jupiter/Saturn theory will tell you, Reagan was elected in 1980, and he died from Alzheimer’s, which was already very apparent during his last days at the White House, when Nancy and Frank Sinatra were running the country.
There’s enough going wrong in the world this week that even we optimists are getting the Windex out to clean our rose-coloured glasses. Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse – they did. People are starting to read Kafka for laughs and Cormac McCarthy is beginning to look downright light hearted. However, rather than dwell on the obvious let’s stop for a moment, pour a beverage and relax.
awful. And for the last few years, it has produced a Top Ten list of the funniest jokes of the Festival. This is this year’s offering. So, as the world continues to spin, tune out for a second and remember we’re still the funniest species on the planet.
WD Fyfe 