Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

When shopping for Christmas gifts at the Laughing Oyster bookstore in Courtenay, I came across a book whose subtitle, or rather, its very long and prominent description, spoke to me. Ever since befriending people who were able to project an attitude that they can change the world—or at least their world—for the better, I've started to believe the same thing. This belief came in direct conflict with my long-held attitude that I was just one person, that I neither had the energy nor the inclination to find the cause that I couldn't not join, the something so undeniably wrong that I couldn't not do something about. Everything seems taken care of. Global warming? Somebody's working on that. Sexism? A whole cadre of activists are on it. Hate, poverty, racism? All issues that I can outsource my conscience to someone else because these were so obviously problems that there were enough people on the job.

Enter Getting To Maybe: How the World Is Changed by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Quinn Patton. The "subtitle", in text as big as the title, that grabbed my attention reads: “This book is for those who are not happy with the way things are and would like to make a difference. This book is for ordinary people who want to make connections that will create extraordinary outcomes. This is a book about making the impossible happen.” I showed the book to Karen, my agent of change, who knew my struggle with cynicism and with trying to find my passion. She offered to buy it for me. She thought this might be something to knock me into action, whatever that might be. She was right, but it won't knock me into action soon.

Westley, Zimmerman and Patton describe the people who are the forces behind social change as "social innovators". I see social innovators all around me, but I yet don't have the confidence to describe myself as one. (Yet: one person, who will remain nameless, has pointed out that I'm at the top of a pyramid, and whether or not I agree with the idea that I'm "over" people, I concede that there are people who listen to me and take me seriously during the times I want to be taken seriously, and that my influence with them is nonzero.) The authors challenge the mindset that problems have simple explanations and simple solutions, and argue that embracing complexity and, most difficult for me, ambiguity lead to the change that social innovators seek. They also challenge the notion that the best social innovators are the strong personalities, and argue that they are rather people from all dispositions that felt a calling. They could not not act. Even if the social innovators knew for a fact that they wouldn't solve the problems in their lifetime, or even ever if they lived forever, they could not stand idly by while it was happening. "Not on my watch", Ulysses Seal of the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group said to himself. Write the authors: “that watch will last his lifetime, but by thinking about his mission in this way, he makes it human-scaled—manageable enough to carry without succumbing to despair.”

The authors recommend constant evaluation during implementation and finding moments to sit still, to see where social innovators are and to note changes in the social landscape and adjust. Citing the case of PLAN (Planned Lifetime Advocacy Networks) and their struggle to scale their network out, the authors suggest that not every movement can be replicable, or at least not quickly, despite pressures to do so. Other case studies offer more lessons. The case of Opportunities 2000 in Waterloo, Ontario suggested that even though the implementors believed they had only a small but measurable effect, theirs was the motivating force. Others found success through their failure: Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian hero if there ever was one, could not prevent a genocide in Rwanda, and lost everything after he retired. His current stature amongst Canadians has vindicated him, and he finds success in speaking tours around the country. (His stature amongst Belgians is another story.) MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), Bob Geldof, and other cases illustrate the calling, the struggles, the failures, and the changing landscapes social innovators face when making the change they must make.

The authors tend to repeat their stories for effect, and sometimes showcase overtly political motives (as opponents of the war in Iraq and President Bush), and their approach might be a tough sell in an age of one-liners and easy solutions. Despite that and not being able to identify with many of the cases presented, I found the book inspiring. Karen, unwittingly or not, bought this not for the current me, but rather the future me. The me who lets the ideas and stories in the book rattle around in his brain for a little while and waits for the forces that cause me to find my calling align. Or, as the chapter title has it, for hope and history to rhyme. They haven't yet, and they will. After having read this book, I'm better prepared for when they do.

Before the new year, the death of former United States President Gerald Ford took the sails out of former-Senator John Edwards' announcement that the latter would run for the highest office in the land. Press platitudes described Ford—the only in American history to be neither elected as Vice President nor as President—appointed by Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned, ascending to the Presidency after Nixon resigned—as "decent" and "honorable", an image that despite press clichés, still has resonance. Ford appeared at the end of an episode of The Simpsons, asking Homer if he liked football and nachos, and whether the latter wanted to join him in watching the football game while eating nachos. Homer, the episode makes clear, identified with the former President, because both were a little dim and a little clumsy, but at the core, decent human beings unlike the episode's portrayal of a hateful George H.W. Bush.

John Robert Greene's book, The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford attempts to portray the President as a man leading an administration in search of an agenda, only to have it derailed by both his miscalculations and Congress' increased power after a nation appalled at the executive branch's excess. We are given a tour of Ford's domestic and foreign policies, as well as political intrigue involving Ronald Reagan's challenge to the incumbent's renomination, nominations of a sitting President these days a done deal, as well as former Nixon administration officials who either disliked Ford personally or were bitter about their exit from the halls of power.

The Nixon pardon was—and remains—Ford's most controversial act as President. Anticipating neither the outcry nor its vociferousness, the pardon shattered Ford's image of humble, honest President who appealed for healing after Watergate. Ford was an angry, partisan, political president that sometimes acted on principle (school busing and desegregation) and out of political concerns (New York City's bailout). Greene does not judge Ford as harshly as Christopher Hitchens about the Mayaguez rescue mission, one of the few foreign policy crises Ford faced. Greene recounts the punitive air strikes matter-of-factly, almost as if Ford didn't care that the crew had been released already. (While both discuss the Solzhenitisyn snub, Hitchens covers Ford's turnaround against the Kurds in Iraq, while Greene does not cover it at all.) Greene devotes full chapters to Ronald Reagan's challenge to Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination—Ford ultimately eeked out a victory both in the primaries and at the convention—and another chapter to the presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter, to whom Ford lost.

Greene's book, while short at 193 pages (this excludes the endnotes, bibliographic essay and index), comes very detailed, outlining Ford's rise from Congress to the vice presidency to the presidency. The book also features tidbits on major contemporary political players, like the aforementioned Reagan but also Richard Cheney (currently George W. Bush's Vice President) and Donald Rumsfeld (up until recently Bush's Defense Secretary). Green has written another book about a one-term president, George. H.W. Bush, and that book is next on my reading list about U.S. Presidents. One-termers have necessarily less written about them than two-termers, and while, because of that, they seem a little more mysterious, they still have enough primary resources to draw upon for book-length studies, and the George H.W. Bush book no doubts talks about players in that Presidency that will make up a future Republican presidential administration.

Ford's brief experience offers lessons for future presidents—and decision-makers in general who are thrust to the top of an organization with not a lot of preparation, and that is what makes Greene's study of Gerald Ford so interesting. The writing is accessible, not bogged down in interpretation or policy details, but written as a story about a football-playing midwestern President with a public image of sometimes having a few sandwiches short of a picnic, whom the American people judged still too close to Nixon and the perceived moral failings of the Republican Party in the 1970s. A President, in Greene's mind, who nevertheless set out to heal the nation and succeeded.

Of the main characters in the book, only the names of Mimi, Krishna and Kurt—the only three main characters who can be reasonably assumed to be human, Mimi's appendages aside, and there's even reasonable doubt that's her real name to begin with—stay the same. The names of the not-quite-humans (Alan and his five brothers) switch frequently, each character's name's first letter remains the same. While most of the time the protagonist, Alan, remains mostly Alan, he changes from Abel to Arthur to Albert to many others, all starting with A. Mimi's, Krishna's and Kurt's names never change. Kurt and Krishna are the closest to what we would consider human, neither having wings nor lacking navels nor being altogether evil, with Krishna being the only one that displays an ability for figuring out who is not-quite-human (Kurt never really catching on). Why have the not-so-humans' names change while humans' remain the same? Not clear: I've never seen this device used, but it at least forced me to pay attention to the narrative and not skim a paragraph as I sometimes do.

There are two scenes that stick out as memorable, neither having a lot to do with the plot, but which came across to me as refreshing and interesting, at least considering the source is Cory Doctorow, who some might have the impression of someone who automatically resists anything that a large corporation would want to support. This is particularly the case when Kurt and Alan meet executives and techs from Bell, one of Canada's largest telecom companies, which gets this soliloquy from one of the executives:

Think a second about the scale of a telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We've got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can't see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and the wires? Those are *our wires*. It's a lot of goodness, especially for a big, evil phone company.

So we've got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A gigantic budget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage -- like a model train set the size of a city.

That said, we're hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done, but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you've made any progress. From the outside, it's easy to mistake 'slow' for 'evil.' It's easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.

But I don't let it get me down. It's *good* for a Bell to be slow and plodding, most of the time. You don't want to go home and discover that we've dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our customers still can't figure out voice mail. Some of them can't figure out touch-tone dialing. So we're slow. Conservative. But we can do lots of killer R&D, we can roll out really hot upgrades on the back end, and we can provide this essential service to the world that underpins its ability to communicate. We're not just cool, we're essential.

So you come in and you show us your really swell and interesting meshing wireless data boxes, and I say, 'That is damned cool.' I think of ways that it could be part of a Bell's business plan in a couple decades' time.

Another memorable scene, near the end, has a reporter from NOW magazing coming over to interview Kurt and Alan about their wireless network, with the young reporter not buying the line that freer access to the Internet will lead to freer expression:

"You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other -- even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.

"And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there's always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don't give us *real* democracy. It's so much bullshit."

He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt's mouth hung open.

"I'm not old," he said finally.

"You're older than me," the kid said. His tone softened. "Look, I'm not trying to be cruel here, but you're generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it's not the last great thing we'll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You're a PC guy, so you think my phone is a toy. [...] I'm talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for *free*. I can talk to *everyone* with it. I can say *anything* I want. I can use it *anywhere*. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can't invent the Web for my phone or make free long distance calls I'm being censored?"

The reporter is later mollified by a more nuanced argument, that it's not an either or proposition.

Aside from the above scenes, and the running theme of producing freely-available wireless Internet access, there does not seem to be any overt social commentary happening in Someone Leaves Home. The best science fiction I've read—not that the novel is heavy by any means on science or even futurism, but rather more so on fantasy elements—has political or social commentary as its basis for existence. This novel clearly aims to entertain, but of his three (I've read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe), this is the least entertaining. That's not to say it isn't entertaining, but that there's no interesting take on scarcity like in Down and Out and no IRC chatlogs for me to identify with like in EST.

Of the three Shakespeare plays I've read, Hamlet is my favourite, and after having watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the movie, I decided to see it performed in the legitimate theatre. It was really great, really funny, my favourite part coming at the very end, where Rosencrantz says "here must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said ... no." Hopefully I didn't ruin it by blurring out the last word before the actor did.

For those who don't know, the play centers around two minor characters of Hamlet who, obviously, get starring roles in this one, and find themselves meeting The Players, and then all of them finding themselves with the play Hamlet (without really knowing it). It's your basic recursive play, also touching on so many subjects it's hard to fit them in a paragraph, much less a sentence, but they include the nature of chance, reality, memory, acting, sanity, and, overall, death. The actors from the Bard on the Beach production of Hamlet played their scenes in this play (the actors who play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play, respectively, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in Hamlet), and the only significant part that was "missing" from my experience having seen the movie was the puppet show.

They announced during the play that tickets were sold out, but the couple whom I sold my second ticket to was able to get in (meaning that they were able to themselves get a second ticket from someone), so I understand there's still a chance to see it this year. If not, hope that they put on a production next year, and if they do, I imagine I'll attend again.

Milan has an excellent review of the play, performed earlier at Bard on the Beach this year.