Fully Furnished

I met David Furnish at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto's Yorkville and staff seemed to have no idea he was something of a big thing--we got bounced around a bit trying to get seated and had to firmly ask for a corner table even though the inside of the hotel restaurant was mid-afternoon empty.

Furnish was honest and humble. I think being chosen as parade marshal in his hometown had made him reflective about his life's journey from Scarborough to LA/Windsor/Etc. But I would say that our interaction was pretty formal until my prepared questions ended and we started talking about the cult Canadian musician Jane Siberry. I had interviewed her in 1996 for a Vancouver magazine I was editing; he had interviewed her the same year for Interview magazine, when her album Teenager came out.

We both agreed that she has cleared the way for the commercial success of the many female Canadian singer-songwriters who had followed (especially Sarah McLachlan). Even though Furnish had already talked to me in great detail about how he and Elton John parent their two kids, it seemed like his enthusiasm for Siberry was our first totally unguarded moment.

When you're married to one of the world's most famous men, I suppose, you probably welcome moments where you can speak about something with passion, where that passion won`t likely end up in the tabloid headlines.

Read the exclusive IN magazine here.
interview

If you don't like the political script, why not do a rewrite?

When people say they don’t think Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is up to the job of being PM—that he’s a lightweight or gaffe-prone, for example—I always think about how, even if they have formed this opinion on their own, it feeds into and is shaped by the Conservative party’s preferred narrative. Running the country is about competency, it goes, and Stephen Harper, whatever his other faults, is surely more competent than Justin Trudeau.

Competency is a tough narrative to compete with, especially considering that Canadians are a particular risk-adverse people. But you could reframe the question, “Who would be the best prime minister?” as something like, “Who has the best vision for the country?” Skills can be learned, attracted, appointed, bought or rented; vision, not so much. If Justin Trudeau were able to articulate a cohesive and attractive vision for Canada, Canadians might have confidence that he could call in the right people to make it happen. What does our future look like? Who are we in the world? Can we rise above pure politics to bring the country together? Of course, you can't just ask these questions to articulate a vision, you have to provide some sort of answer to them.

That’s why the Liberal support of Bill C-51, known as the Anti-Terrorism Act, seems particular odd and self-sabotaging. On a spectrum from “Protect Civil Liberties” to “Maximize Security,” the bill leans toward the latter, at least in public perception. And that direction seems to contradict the Liberal values of a country built on trust and reason rather than fear. Trudeau’s explanation of his support for the bill was sharply devoid of any philosophizing or even any real emotion.

“We are hopeful that the government is serious about reaching across the aisle to keep Canadians safe, while protecting our rights and our values. There are concerns with this bill, and we hear them. But we need to do what we can to keep Canadians safe. And I believe that many of the concerns with this bill will be addressed through Parliamentary oversight,” he said in his February remarks. “There are gaps in this bill, including on oversight and mandatory reviews. And we in the Liberal Party will offer amendments to address these gaps.”

Gaps, oversight, review, amendments? These words are absolutely beholding to the Conservative’s competency narrative. Trudeau is claiming the Liberals can be more fussy that the Conservatives if you give them a chance; the devil is in the details; civil liberty is important, but then again, so is security. His words, and even his way of defining the issue, neither build on the established Liberal brand at its best (the country we want, not the best political compromise we can manage) nor offer a new manifestation of the Liberal brand under Trudeau.

There might narratives other than vision that Justin Trudeau will use to get people to stop comparing his level-headedness to Harper’s. But Trudeau has so far failed to present one, so busy is he following the Conservatives script.

Customer service in an information vacuum

Last year when I wrote a little piece for Reader’s Digest Canada about how to get better customer service, one of the key themes was keeping your cool.

In retrospect, I feel a little weird about that advice since, personally, I’ve found that losing my cool—at least just a bit—can work wonders. Especially when most customer service agents are so intent on following a script, they treat anything the customer tells them as a nuisance not to be believed. Getting emotional is risky, but it can be a way to get an employee to abandon a templated approach and listen in order to figure out the real problem—and solve it.

Last week I heard weird sounds from behind my house. I got left the work I was doing on my computer and went outside to investigate. In the dark I could see a family of raccoons, screeching and screaming at the top of a utility pole, as if they had been chased up there by something. They were inching nervously out onto the communications wire that runs along the back of my yard, which butts up against the yards of several of my neighbours. I had never seen raccoons walk on wires like that before. It was quite a drama.

I went back to my computer to discover my Internet was out and that my phone wasn’t working. The next morning the phone was back, though too static-y to have a comfortable conversation.

To me the cause was pretty obvious. My Internet drops out periodically in the fall and spring when the squirrels are in a frenzy, and my phone line gets mildly static-y when it’s raining. The weight of the raccoons seems to be the last straw for a communications line that was moody at the best of times. When a Bell technician visited last year when I changed my Internet plan, he told me the line was in bad shape and should be replaced, though the technician I scheduled to do that never showed up.

But trying talking about raccoons and chronic static problems to customer service people at my phone company, Primus. With each of the nine calls (or maybe more—I stopped counting) I had to make to solve the problem and with each of the two technicians who showed up, it was almost impossible to convince them that my theory—a raccoon-damaged line—could possibly be correct.

Had I restarted my modem? Yes, more than a dozen times. Was the cable to the modem less than three feet long? Yes, for more than a decade. Yes, there were filters on the phone line and, as far as I knew, they hadn’t dematerialized the night of the raccoon drama.

I understand that a lot of telecom customers don’t understand tech stuff. I understand that if I hadn’t seen the raccoons on the line that I wouldn’t have had any idea what might have caused the Internet outage and the phone static—it was an unusual piece of evidence to have. I understand that telecom companies want to troubleshoot simple things before investing time and money into fixing hardware. But to be disbelieved, dismissed and condescended to for the better part of a week was exasperating.

After a couple of days, the phone static became episodic; only 70 per cent or so my calls were inaudible. So I had one customer service agent tell me that my line was just fine because they could hear me just fine, so if I was still having an Internet problem—had I reset the modem? She got angry with me when I interrupted her wildly inaccurate description of my problem. The fact that I had successfully been using my phone and Internet for years, had seen the line being damaged and had talked to several other agents, some of who agreed with me, was irrelevant to her. She had her script and she was sticking to it. By this time, I had realized that the customer service ticket for my problem was wildly inaccurate, failing even to note that I had no Internet service. Yet for everyone I talked to, this ticket was the truth and I, as the customer, was an obstacle to the truth. It was customer service as theatre, not problem-solving. But what a depressing show it was.

Finally a Bell technician arrived. My telecom, Primus, rents Bell’s lines so Bell is kind of the landlord in this situation, Primus is the tenant and I, apparently, play the role of subletter (no wonder nobody listened to me). The technician agreed the outside lines were static-y and in bad shape. Yes, they should be fixed. But he needed to go up a pole in my neighbour’s yard to get to the lines and my neighbour’s yard was locked. I needed to schedule another technician to visit when I would be sure there’d be access. (It turns out the Bell technician hadn’t bothered to knock on the door of my neighbour who was home and would have readily given him access.)

When the second technician arrived the next day, it was like none of my previous conversations or the previous technician’s visited had ever happened. I had to tell him four times that the Internet went out moments after raccoons stepped onto the wire. He didn’t seem to believe me. Had I restarted my modem? At the time of his visit, the phone wasn’t especially static-y. He fiddled with some switches on the hub down the street, took note of the absence of static and told me the problem was fixed. If I was still having Internet problems, which I was, I’d have to call tech support again—the line was fine.

That’s when I lost it. Didn’t the guy from yesterday file a report? Didn’t you read it? If the problem is intermittent, as I’ve said innumerable times, then of course, the line may be fine right now—that doesn’t mean it’s fixed. Why doesn’t my not having Internet and having a static-y phone for days outweigh the 10 minutes you’ve been here? Why can’t you just believe me and fix the problem I’m describing to you? Why can’t you just fix the problem? Why can’t you just fix the problem?

As I was pleading with him, the Bell guy fell silent, walked away from me, got in his van and drove away as I stood there, aghast. Primus called me on my cell to tell me the problem had been fixed. “How would you know?” My Internet was still out and the static had already come back on the phone line. But the technician had already called to close the ticket and the ticket had been closed.

Then I realized what bothered me even more than not being listened to as a customer—that the various customer service agents, tech support people, dispatchers, managers and technicians don’t talk to or listen to each other except to report “Job done, clear the ticket.” Each interaction had taken place in a vacuum, as if no information had previously been collected or changed hand. Today’s technician doesn’t build on the work of yesterday’s; he starts from scratch.

But if companies aren’t going to listen to their customers, their employees should at least be listening to each other. This failure to absorb and share information is not only infuriating for customers, it costs companies money as they chase easy solutions to non-problems even though, after more phone calls and more false steps and more aborted technician visits, they will eventually have to fix the real problem—or lose the customer.

My story has something of a happy ending. After my emotional pleading with the second Bell technician to please, please, please fix the cable, he had driven away. I went back in the housing feeling totally defeated. Who needs phone and Internet anyway?

Fifteen minutes later, I saw the technician up on top of the pole, right where the raccoons had been four days earlier. He strung new cable into my backyard.

The technician had taken pity on a desperate man, had listened to the desperate man and, against all conventional wisdom, taken action.

Less than 15 minutes later, the static was gone and my Internet worked perfectly. The customer who had been dismissed at every step of the way had been right all along.

Up, up and AWAY

Though it came out in December, I just found an online copy of Toronto Pearson's new AWAY magazine now. I contributed features on Mumbai, Mexico City and Bombardier's new luxury jet, and interviewed the "ice queen" of the winter de-icing program.

Vital Signs in a divided city

It's always interesting to be part of the team that reports for the Toronto Star around the Toronto Foundation's annual Vital Signs report. This year my main mission was to seek out residents from six corners of the city to find people who had vastly different experiences with transit, housing and employment depending on where they lived. In just 100 words each, I tried to provide snapshots illustrating that where one lives dramatically affects how one lives--and vice versa.

I really appreciated how candid some of the interviewees were about their life experiences. A seemingly simple question like, "Tell me about your commute," can reveal many personal challenges and triumphs.

Where you live affects how you live.

Is illiteracy hurting your bottom line?

This spring I produced this up close look at how poor literacy among employees may be hurting your business. What was amazing to learn was how many Canadians have poor essential skills, and how even a little training at math, reading, writing and computer skills can make people so much more competent at other tasks. The full report is here.

You can wash and wash Gap’s black denim, but the Film Noir blood just won’t come out

It’s funny that Gap, with its new David Fincher ads, has had to go back to the 1940s and ’50s to find some semblance of “normal” for our stylistically fractured age.

In fact, Film Noir, from which Fincher lifts the Drive ad’s aesthetic, could be defined as a classic movie genre about people who are pushed far outside their normal—crime, sex and mayhem. But then nobody ever said fashion advertising makes sense. Wholesomeness and sleaze are hinted at in equal measure, as if the concoction averages out to achieve some predetermined sales metric.

“The uniform of rebellion and conformity,” declares the text on the screen, after the lithe young women in the Drive ad takes off her jeans and throws them into the front seat where two other handsome young people are sitting, looking quite serious. Not only do the words contradict each other, they don’t connect with the images, either. Disposing of the evidence after disposing of the body of a murdered lover in a river, as a noir heroine might do, hardly counts as “rebellion” (or conformity, for that matter). The image here is all desperate depravity, playing against the words of modern marketing.

Then the lightness of Fincher’s Stairs conjures all the sexual charge of a 1980s Sprite commercial done in ’50s jazz style.

The Fincher commercials create a mystery which is then answered (but not solved) by the celebrity endorsements of the print ads. The familiar faces of Anjelica Huston, Elisabeth Moss and Zosia Mamet provide recognition in lieu of meaning; they are talented actors filling in the holes of a dodgy script with their performances. You can sell tickets to any unholy mess if you have the right cast.

All the murk disassociates Gap’s “normal” from the normcore trend of hipsters dressing in unedgy clothing, even as the campaign capitalizes on it. “Normal” has insider meaning to those who follow style trends, but, at the same time, can be interpreted as an opportunity to be stylistically lazy, old-school "normal," for those who don't.

No wonder Fincher’s Gap ads retreat into history. Like a sci-fi time traveller who goes to the past to change the present, Gap must scour other eras to dislodge “normal” for the purposes of selling black denim. They have to make “normal” mean exactly nothing…. And, therefore, everything.

The problem with art and news is not that they should be centrally planned

Taken together, Alain de Botton’s two latest books, Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) and The News position the writer and philosopher as a consumer advocate, lobbying the monolithic institutions of art and—if “art” wasn’t broad enough for you—the news media on behalf of underserved customers who are not nearly as articulate as de Botton, a thinker whose writes with a fluidity that, for better or worse, makes common sense seem fresh and the ridiculous seem appealingly obvious.

Both projects are worthwhile enterprises. The visual arts, on which Art as Therapy dwells, have a marginal role in contemporary western society, despite the rich archive of beauty and longing, and the talent of current practitioners. A few minutes with a piece of visual art can evoke many new feelings and ideas, so you could argue that there’s bigger bang for the buck in it than our current obsession with TV shows, which require dozens of hours to absorb. The huge auction bids that go towards top artist brands (Is Gerhard Richter the Prada of the art world? Is Jeff Koons the Dolce and Gabbana?) are a testament not to the relevance of visual art, but its lack of centrality; collectability shifts the value from the meaning and emotional effect of a work to the market surges it creates, that is, to buzz.

And the news? As the highly formalized formats of TV news and newspaper stories are shoved aside by the cacophony of free online content (articles and charticles, rants and puff pieces, tome-like critiques that would never have been read if not for Facebook, video responses to video responses to non-official music videos chronicling news events), established profit-oriented media are desperately flailing for something that would make it stand out from a crowd composed of every literate and semi-literate person with access to a data plan. With news in such a deeply existential crisis, any advice is worth listening to.

For de Botton, the purposes of both visual art and the news are remarkably similar. In fact you could imagine the two books combined into a single volume: How media (plus nice buildings and furniture) can make a better, happier world through happier and more introspective people.

“Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties,” de Botton writes in The News. “While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.” In Art as Therapy, de Botton and Armstrong propose that “art (a category that includes works of design, architecture and craft) is a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.” Media can make us better. And can make us feel better.

I can’t disagree. A way forward is badly needed. De Botton’s intentions are worthy. Yet these two books seem simultaneously condescending and naïve. You admire de Botton for getting his ideas out there—the Art Gallery of Ontario is currently offering a show built according to his principles—and still shake your head about this unhelpful rabbit hole he has led us down.

In the case of art, the singularity of expectations set out in Art of Therapy ignores what most people find most delightful about the visual arts—surprise, open-endedness, transmutability. It’s a domain where effect in the heart and brain of the observer can separate itself entirely from artistic intent and critical interpretation; unlike in literature, you can ignore the voice telling you what it’s all about. But de Botton and Armstrong argue that discourse about art should focus on its effects on the human spirit and psyche, providing a balm—or perhaps a cure—for our anxieties about love, nature, family, work and politics.

The authors are right in attacking the dry art-history text that accompanies most art displayed in galleries—birth dates, historical events, formal artistic influences. No one can deny the art world is full of bad writing. But at least these curatorial insights are, for the most part, based on facts, even if they’re not particularly helpful in letting a piece of art work its way into our psyches. What de Botton and Armstrong suggest in lieu of dry, impersonal analysis of art is to insert an interpretive voice directly between the work and the viewer. They want to tell you exactly why they think a piece of art is good for you.

For example, the current description of Christ Appearing to His Mother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reads, in part: “This picture is the right panel of [Queen] Isabella’s triptych and can tentatively be attributed to her court artist Juan de Flandes on the basis of documentary and technical evidence. The center and left panels remain at Isabella’s burial site, the Capilla Real, Granada, where she bequeathed the triptych upon her death in 1504.”

Art as Therapy would substitute this historical tracking with something more like this: “This is an image of a loving mother-son relationship. But it does not avoid conflict or grief: these are precisely what the picture says are central to love. It is a very restrained image. They do not embrace. He will soon leave. How often has this scene been re-enacted. The picture makes the claim that such moments of return (and of survival), though fleeting and rare, are crucially important in life. It wants men to understand—and call—their mothers.”

That’s a fine approach for a newspaper column or a blog that is not official or definitive, text that does not claim to buttress the power of art in our lives. Critics can say what they want about art, no matter how wrongheaded or eccentric. But, as a comprehensive way of looking at art, de Botton and Armstrong’s approach makes not one but two wild assumptions. First, they assume what the artist’s intention was—did de Flandes explicitly try to paint that conflict and grief are central to love? Who knows?! I doubt he would have expressed it that way if he had expressed it at all. But worse, de Botton and Armstrong assume what’s going on—or what should go on—in the viewer’s own head. They have banished the viewer’s own imagination from the equation.

I have been a fan of de Botton for a couple of decades now. His early novels, especially, are brilliant at mapping the brain’s neuroses, the unique connections an individual’s experiences create. “Lucy lacked confidence in her intellectual capacities,” he writes in Kiss & Tell. “Afraid a conversation might grow beyond her comprehension, she had a habit of deflating matters to levels obviously below her. To discuss the politics of the Prime Minister would lead her to wonder how he combed his hair, consideration of a recent novel would elicit remarks on how the jacket cover matched the author’s eyes.” De Botton’s depictions of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s emotional wiring is the opposite of universal. Lucy needs a counsellor for her problems, not a generic self-help guide. Yet in both Art as Therapy and The News, he plops his very specific expectations on us all.

There are times in Art as Therapy when I thought the authors were having me on, positing art as a propagandistic pharmaceutical: get the dosage right, take it with the right sort of criticism and you get a better life. I kept waiting for the joke to be unveiled: But of course art is not a drug! Of course our emotions are trickier than that! The punchline never came. They are dead serious.

The authors go so far as to commission an artwork according to an Art as Therapy-style brief: “Many couples have painful conflicts that break out over dinner. The spark often looks quite small, such as the way someone asked, ‘How was your day?’ which what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent….We would like an artwork to carry indications of an underlying but frustrated longing to be happy together. Perhaps the table is beautifully laid…. Can their suffering gain in dignity and be less catastrophic and lonely because of a work of art?”

Sounds like something Stalin might write if he cared more about matters of the heart than the grain harvest. But this is not satire, it’s sincere. As proof, there’s a photo by Jessica Todd Harper delivering on the brief’s dictates. Good for her, though you wonder if, while producing the piece, Harper wondered: Why don’t de Botton and Armstrong just go do this themselves? Besides, she didn’t quite get the RFP right: her table is not beautifully laid. Marshall McLuhan, who argued an artist’s power is discerning the environment we can not easily see—and seeing the future before others do—wouldn’t be impressed by this all-request-Friday approach to creativity.

The very appeal of visual art is that the space between the work and the observer is wide open. There are parameters, sure. But de Botton, more than anyone, should know how quirky human responses can be. Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire is both a gateway to the indescribably sublime and a provider of ideas for a new paint colour for the living room walls. Henri Matisse’s Dance (II) may conjure hope for some, but, in a certain mindset, it can conjure futility and desperation. The effects differ not only from observer to observer, but from day to day in a given observer. History changes the meaning of a piece of art more than any piece of critical text accompanying it. “Art,” declare de Botton and Armstrong, “has a powerfully therapeutic effect. It can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.” So true. But having someone guess how it should do so hurts rather than helps the process. Some of the text accompanying the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario seemed literally random, as if the authors had concocted a compelling meditation—a bit of chicken soup for the soul—and then rapidly chosen a work that might fit. You could easily imagine the therapeutic advice applied to another painting—or another hundred paintings—if the one on display hadn’t been brought to their attention. The specificity of any given piece vanishes in a wash of generic self-help.

The assessments laid out in The News seem less ridiculous, in part because de Botton doesn’t adopt a newly patented one-of-a-kind, super-duper self-help strategy in order to fix the mainstream media’s many problems.

He picks apart the failures of foreign news, cultural news and financial news with great astuteness. Foreign news and financial news, especially, are often stripped of all humanity—body counts and share prices reported without any sense of who’s dying and what’s been manufactured. “The financial news organizations have journalists embedded in some of the world’s most remote economic outposts. There are correspondents monitoring the wheat harvest in Saskatchewan, Canada, the progress of oil exploration off the coast of Brazil, the extraction of niobium and zirconolite in Malawi, the development of the next generation of commuter trains in the Ruhr Valley, Germany, the weaving of carbon-fibre aerospace panels in Chubu, Central Japan—and yet in spite of their extraordinary and privileged vantage points, these journalists are required to maintain a pinpoint focus on only such information as will help investors to answer one lone question: ‘To which companies should we commit our money?’”

But in an effort to produce a critique that is technologically neutral—de Botton focuses strictly on content, not delivery systems—he seems to ignore the established media’s current upheaval (I say “established” rather than “mainstream” because The New York Times and alternative weeklies are equally affected). It’s as if he’s talking about a time (perhaps an imaginary time but one that stands as a sturdy stereotype) when a citizen primarily got his or her news from a single newspaper, some hourly reports on the radio and an evening TV newscast. Even then, it’s as if magazines, weeklies and other news sources don’t exist in de Botton’s world. Sure, the daily financial news focuses on the bottom line, but Bloomberg Businessweek, say, is full of kooky characters and compelling narratives on which we can draw inspiration. The Economist may also be obsessed with data, but its writers often give us a quick snapshot of the people and places in which these trends and supply chains exist. It is certainly piecemeal. An idealist might suggest that instead of hourly updates about, say, the kidnapping of school girls in Nigeria, a 4,000-word piece about the country, the terrorist group doing the kidnapping and the lives of women there would be much more engaging and enlightening. But the fact that such hourly updates exist do not preclude that long feature. There are many journalists who dedicate themselves to such work.

In the chapter on photography, de Botton demonstrates his failure to see the mechanics of how news is produced. As a cultural critic, he does a great job of pointing out that great images communicate reams of information about their subjects, while poor images merely break up the text on a page. But it’s not like news organizations don’t want great images. It’s about talent, resources, timing and access. News organizations could wait until they get a compelling image of President Barack Obama before they publish one—but that could be weeks or months. Meanwhile, the Twitterati and blogosphere continue to talk about him, citizens still wonder what he’s up to.

There are indeed publications that wait for the right photo, the right story, the right writer, that try to rise above the 24-hour news cycle. Again, magazines seem to be something that deliver just what de Botton is asking for, but seems never to have encountered one he could cite in this book (he does quote a particularly bad piece of writing from The Economist, which seemed a little unfair. How about this as a way to improve the media: write better!). He seems to call for news to have some sort of codified system—perhaps not unlike the education system—but he ignores that the marketplace has created a system. Visual cues, language, venue and reputation guide gossip-seekers toward Us magazine and TMZ, thoughtful types toward the New York Review of Books and local shoppers toward their weekly flyers. Online publications like Slate and Salon have been particularly adept at blurring the line between highbrow and low brow, thoughtful and sensational, topical and enduring. In the west, we don’t rely on a single or handful of news organizations to surprise us and tell us what we want to know. We navigate between trite and deep as we see fit. Could the offerings be better? Oh yes. But that’s often an economic problem, not one of a commitment to quality or lack of thoughtfulness on the part of editors and producers.

The thing about de Botton as a consumer advocate is that he seems to lack faith in consumers themselves to bring their own insight to what they read and see, to know their own needs when they seek out and consume media and art. Certainly there are some consumers that take in only the loudest voices. But they have been with us always. And they are sometimes the consumers who also want a refined experience. Centrally planned art and news worlds can’t anticipate who wants what when. There’s no one door in.

This piece originally appeared on Suite.io.

Somebody's gotta do something about Toronto's Pride "Parade" (and what I think they should do)

Like dinner guests too polite to say the chicken's overcooked and the potatoes are inedible, Torontonians cheerfully show up year after year to see the city's annual Pride parade. But after this year's six-hour WorldPride non-spectacle, it's time to pull the hosts into the kitchen for a few words.

WorldPride, on the whole, was great. Pride Toronto promised big and delivered big, with a panache that seemed almost effortless. It takes amazing talent and dedication to pull off an event of this size and the Pride Toronto team has both. As to the locals who said things like, "WorldPride doesn't seem that much bigger than a regular Pride," I would point out that they probably had failed to change their own Pride habits to take in the whole 10-day festival. There's only so many people you can fit on Church Street; those who wandered off it were bound to be impressed. Every visitor I talked to had nothing but good things to say.

As someone who has followed the planning of WorldPride from the beginning, I can also say that it's astonishing it happened at all. There were several changes in Pride Toronto management and board approach and philosophy since the idea first emerged in 2006--yes, eight years ago. The fact that the WorldPride idea outlasted politics, both internal and external, tells you how good an idea it was. Unlike in other cities, Toronto's Pride celebrations always seem to transcend back-room drama, Any factionalism seems to, in the long run, produce a better event.

I will write more about these WorldPride successes in the future.

But back to the WorldPride parade. Or should I say the WorldPride march.

Having watched almost every parade, from beginning to end, since 2000 (I missed it two years ago when I was at WorldPride in London--let me tell you about THAT some day), I can tell you that Toronto's parade has been dull for some time. For budgetary or other reasons, the quality of the entries peaked in the early 2000s and has dwindled ever since. Few floats, not enough music, not enough planning in the entries, not enough inspiration and flair. Some much perfunctory, so little perfection.

Although there are always some spectacular exceptions (I won't risk leaving someone out by naming any of these stars), the bar has become quite low for creativity and craftsmanship (as a gentleman, I won't name these offenders either). For most entrants, a marching contingent with flags and Mardi Gras beads seems to be enough. God bless their hearts, but I have to say that as a spectator, standing in the hot sun, forgoing many other fun Pride activities, it's not enough.

It's nice that entrants are proud LGBTTIQQ2S or straight people supportive of the same. I love good intentions. But a parade is a parade, not a petition. It's a show! It's theatre! It's sensation and glitz! It's brazen and bold! It's emotional! It's quite possibly shocking! And, despite some exceptions, the Toronto parade is none of that. It is a march, punctuated by an occasional float and an occasional burst of music. It is a march that's bigger than the Trans March and less exhilarating than the Dyke March. But it's a march. The grand marshals, international guests and PFLAG have earned the public good will to get away with merely marching. For everyone else, it's just not enough.

And this year's WorldPride "parade" was... drum roll... more than six hours long. I gave up early. Most spectators did. It was hot. There are lots of other things to do. And, after a while, one union waving rainbow flags looks like one group of politicos waving rainbow flags. Unless you know the individual people marching--and most spectators do not--it's boring, boring, boring. A show of popular support and mass mobilization? Sure. But a show of how fabulous queer people are? Not quite.

When organizers promised an "enhanced" parade this year, I got my hopes up. But it seems "enhanced" was just code for "unbearably long."

The march of nations was a great idea. But the activists from around the world marched in silence, as if the only appropriate tone was reverent awe, not the joy Pride is supposed to foster. Where was the "Rise Up" theme song? As international delegation was followed by more and more marching contingents, their presence did not stand out as much as it should have. It was a missed opportunity.

But I am not a critic without suggestions. Here's how to fix the parade.

Each parade applicant--corporate or community, big group or small--will be asked to to have at least one "feature" in their entry. What a "feature" is is up for debate (some people might include "shirtlessness and sex appeal" but I wouldn't be so crass). But I would suggest a list that starts something like this:

- A float, that is, a decorated elevated platform on which participants can perform (note the word "perform" as opposed to, say, "stand listlessly")
- Live or recorded music, ideally chosen to represent the spirit of the entry
- Choreography
- Creative and/or matching costumes
- A novelty performance (eg, clown on stilts; drag queens acting out comedic vignettes) or novelty object (eg, confetti canon)
- Etc.

But wait, you say! You can't stop people from going in the Pride parade! Just because someone hasn't an ounce of creativity or the budget for a couple of dollar-store pompoms doesn't mean they can't show their pride! That's censorship! That's uninclusive!

But Pride applicants who don't have 20 minutes to come up with a little dance or a group cheer or some little joke that might provide delight to spectators, can indeed participate. Under my rules, they just follow all the groups who made a special effort to have a "feature." Their march will seamlessly immediately follow the actual parade. If spectators drift away after the transition, they have at least seen the best of the community.

For participants who don't like this two-tiered arrangement, it's an easy fix. Make an effort.

Under my system, if the real parade is 20 minutes and the march is five hours, that's fine--it'll be a great 20 minutes. And if it's six hours of parade and no marching contingents at all, then, at last, that's an afternoon well spent.

A successful parade isn't about body count. It's a demonstration of the vibrancy and creativity of a community. Numbers matter in elections, not in fabulousness.

Catching up with my spring output

After a particularly demanding contract as publications coordinator at Hot Docs, I am finally focusing on writing again.

Which isn't to say I haven't published quite a bit so far in 2014.

In the past couple of months I've published the long feature "How Bombardier’s experiment became ground zero for Mexico’s economic revolution" in Canadian Business magazine, "13 Things You Should Know About Customer Service" in Reader's Digest, "How to Sell to Foreign Governments" and "One Way to Trade (and Get Paid) Faster" for Profit magazine and, further afield, an essay about PEI's tourism industry for National Geographic Traveller India (the piece isn't available online, but this link provides a sampler of the April issue in which it's contained).

I've also continued working as a contributing editor at IN magazine, covering gender non-conformity (it's a bit of a head-spinner, but I have to say that everyone I talked to was exceptionally nice and had a sense of humour) and gay life in three Indian cities. I have a few fun projects coming up for IN mag, including one heart-string-tugger.

Seat mates from hell... maybe not so bad?

I've just started blogging over at Suite101.com,the Vancouver-based blogging site which is currently going through a rebirth. My first piece is about travel: The horror and the value of sitting next to some who is so uniquely awful they might actually be the highlight of the trip. You can read the whole thing here.

The horror beneath the dining room

What is it with the state of Toronto's restaurant washrooms?

If you've dined out in the city, you know what I mean. Not all establishments are guilty. You usually find the classic example in a storefront dining room, maybe on an established commercial street like Queen or Yonge or Dundas. Long narrow spaces in older buildings. Not a lot of elbow room. Owners, like any smart business people, want to maximize their seating area and their revenue.

So what to do with a non-monetized space like the WC? Well you stick it in the basement, of course.

Being in the basement is not an inherently awful thing. I have been in a considerable number of nice basements in my life. But in Toronto, it's like there's a bylaw that requires stylistic neglect of all subterranean rooms containing or purporting to contain running water. These facilities are treated as if there's not a part of the establishment at all. Perhaps they are contracted out to property managers in the developing world.

The other day I was at Soos, a Malaysian fusion restaurant on Ossington, Like many of its Ossington-strip peers, it's a fashionable spot, with attention to every dining-room detail. One wall is painted with evocative red lanterns. A big spiky lighting fixture in the centre of the room is set off against funky mechanic's lights hanging over the tables. A vintage-looking wooden screen separates the front room from the bar. It's all exceedingly tasteful. There was a huge table of fashion-retail types there the night I was there, every hair in place, making me feel like I should be drinking a cosmo.

The food was pretty, too. Not to mention tasty. Especially the pork belly pancakes.

The stairs to the loo, worn wood, were not out of character from main room. No, you had to make the full descent. Stepping onto the basement floor was like pulling back the curtain at a vaudeville theatre. It was an alternative universe, perhaps lorded over by an ornery junkyard owner for whom aesthetics are both offensive and cumbersome.

Bulkheads in the hallway, bulkheads over the sink where I bonked my head. The tile and fixtures were so dated, so cheap and blah, they might have been purchased at a fire sale in 1979. They might have been given away by a low-end contractor. The paper towel dispenser would not have been out of place in a prison.

It was not dirty. Everything worked. I won't compare it to a gas station washroom. But not a smidge of attention had been paid to its appearance and comfort. So it was comparable to a very clean, well-maintained gas station washroom. Except it was underneath a trendy restaurant.

Soos is not unusual. I have been in the washrooms of nice Toronto restaurants where non-functioning urinals have been covered with garbage bags, where mops are left standing by the sink, where soap coats a cheap plastic soap bottle, where the toilets are baby blue, where the caps on the sink's taps are missing.

None of this is the end of the world. But why on earth, when a restaurant is trying to create an environment for which $50 a person is the starting price for a decent meal, do Torontonians put up with it?

Is it because no one wants to admit they go to the bathroom, not even restaurant owners?

Bothering billionaires

Having worked on a project for Canadian Business magazine a couple of months ago that involved chasing down retired CEOs, I can tell you that contacting billionaires for the Richest People in Canada feature was much much harder. I didn't talk to a single one, though I did chat with the son of one of them.

My billionaires mostly made their money on real estate development, food retail and franchises. Aside from that, it's hard to generate advice based on their successes. Some started poor, some were born into money. Some have been impressive philanthropists, others not so much. Some are highly social, others more reclusive and/or belligerent.

All of them, by the time they're worth billions, are pretty hard to get access to. Although there is no record that Louis Reichmann, for example, the most reclusive of the Reichmann brothers, has passed away, I had difficulty finding evidence he is still alive. So writing the simple sentence, "Paul Reichmann is survived by three brothers" was not so simple at all.

My response to Sky Gilbert's critique of my IN Toronto piece on celebrities coming out

It's always flattering when someone you admire takes issue with something you said, since, at the very least, you were worth responding to. 

So I'm glad Sky Gilbert took umbrage with my piece in this month's IN Toronto magazine, which asks the bratty question "Does coming out even matter anymore?"

Sky's critique is here.

I responded to Sky directly and wanted to share my response here, for the record.
---

Hi Sky,

I appreciate your thoughtful essay and feel delighted and honoured that you took the time to respond to what I wrote.

My piece was meant to be a playful riff on a series of ideas around coming out. (It all started when a friend of mine complained that there were too many out actors and not enough out scientists, which was a weird notion I wanted to unpack.)

It might have been hard to figure out what I was saying in the piece because I was deliberately trying to be non-prescriptive--evasive even. I didn't want to tell anybody what to think or do with their lives, nor give a thumbs up or thumbs down to different celebrities. Rather, I was throwing some ideas and stereotypes into the air to see them crash into each other, hopefully provoking readers into examine their own feelings about famous people coming out. I purposely eschewed answering the headline's question so readers could answer it themselves. And you've done so yourself quite forcefully and I'm glad of that.

But I hope I was clear, especially when I write about the "enduring value of coming out"--that's the bit near the end where I laid my cards on the table--that, despite my cavalier approach and the provocative headline, I still think coming out is very important. Perhaps I buried the lead.

I just think coming out publicly has a very different social meaning than it did a decade or 20 years ago. That's progress, though not the end of our labours.

Rob Ford's substance abuse problem

People love to quibble over "addiction." It's a term that suggests a medical condition with specific symptoms (for example, you start to shake if the substance is withdrawn) and specific treatments (methadone, AA meetings).

That's why I much prefer talking about drug and alcohol problems. A problem is something an outsider can determine without knowing the biochemistry, thoughts and feelings of the person in question. A problem doesn't presume to know what's going on inside a person, only how the person is doing in the world.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford has said again and again that he's not an addict--it's something he's entitled to say. It could be true. But his addiction or non-addiction is irrelevant. That's why councillors need to focus on his drug and alcohol problem--Ford undeniably has one.

Ford might not crave a drink or a fix. Ford might use only occasionally. But if drugs or alcohol (or drugs and alcohol, as seems to be the case) harms his work and personal relationships, it's a problem. It may not be a problem for Ford himself--I've known some users who have had a great time drunk or high--but it is is for the people around him who have to respond to his doped up behaviour. Those who are affected decide if there's a problem, not the user.

It's a problem if someone's missing time at work. It's a problem if it hurts performance. It's a problem if someone become belligerent and abusive. It's a problem if the lies needed to continue using drugs and alcohol create headaches and heartaches for the people around the user. Falling asleep on the job, spending chunks of the workday meeting up with  an alleged drug dealer friend, showing up at public events drunk--all problems, regardless of whether Rob Ford is an addict or alcoholic or not.

The salacious drama of the crack video--the video! the video! the video!--has distracted people from the central issue. Yes, it's shocking that the mayor of Toronto has smoked crack, that he was in such a drunken stupor that his memories of the experience are vague. I'm sure the video, if we ever get to see it, will be both hilarious and troubling.

But I'm more interested in the problems created by what Rob Ford did in that seedy room. Where should he have been? Conducting city business? Spending time with his kids? How did he get home afterwards? What actions did he take, if any, to obtain and/or destroy the video or punish its owners? How much trouble has six months of his lying about the video caused for his friends, family, co-workers and the citizens of Toronto? How much trust has been destroyed?

It doesn't really matter if it was crack or meth or pot or tobacco in Rob Ford's pipe if troublesome things came of his smoking it.

Ford's opponents like to throw everything they don't like about Ford into a big bag, shake it and offer it up as evidence toward removing him from office. That includes his policies (the man ripped up bike lanes!), his sleazy populist tactics, his slovenly appearance, his crassness, his violation of council rules, his negative attitudes toward LGBT people and other minorities, as well as his substance abuse problem. For these opponents, the crack video is just another embarrassing, frustrating thing, like the "subways, subways, subways" mantra.

This "He's awful and needs to go" generalization confuses the issue. It distracts as much as Rob Ford's own "I am not an addict" shtick.

No matter what you think about the direction Rob Ford has taken the city in, his competence in doing so or his personal style, these are things for voters to decide. We are allowed to vote for incompetent people, even addicts, for that matter. But it is clear from all kinds of evidence, not just the video and the expansive police files, that the man has a substance abuse problem that needs to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed by the people around him who are most affected. His family, his staff and, on behalf of the citizens of Toronto, his fellow councillors.

Toronto councillors can't force Rob Ford into treatment, but they can refuse to stop cleaning up his mess.

How a children’s film out-bleaked the season’s three anxiety-causing hits

A note: This piece contains spoilers.

This season’s three runaway critically acclaimed hits—Gravity, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave—have all leveraged that classic piece of advice about good dramatic writing. Tie the audience to a relatable protagonist, competent yet not inherently heroic. Put that protagonist in jeopardy. Keep him or her there. Put them in more jeopardy. Repeat until the audience can't take it anymore, then go further.

Mortal danger is usually most effective in getting audiences to tense their muscles, clench their jaw and  prepare themselves to look away from the screen if need be, though a filmmaker might go further than that and inflict pain, humiliation, self-doubt and dark pasts upon our worthy avatars. Only when they have totally brutalized us will we accept we’ve seen a great film.

The lightest of this season’s three masochistic masterpieces (which is saying something), Gravity focuses on danger that taps into space-age existential angst. Its harrowing threat is getting lost in infinity, a surprisingly claustrophobic place, more like suffocating in an endless wash of molasses. If Sandra Bullock’s Astronaut Ryan Stone is not attached to something—anything—she will drift into space die. EM Forster probably never imagined so literal a depiction of his maxim “Only connect.”

Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave are more layered and topical, not surprising since both are based on true stories. That’s some reassurance going in—you know they lived to tale the tale. 12 Years even gives you a time limit. Both films lack the technologically produced astral beauty that makes Gravity so watchable. They provide no distraction from their assault.

Tom Hanks’s Phillips, captain of a cargo ship that must pass through Somali pirate territory, faces down humanized blowback from the inequities of abstract global capitalist systems. We in the Western world thought we could hoard the world’s wealth, but, no, the losers in our divided world will find a way to grab something for themselves, putting people who don’t even consider themselves to be on the front lines of this class war in harm’s way. Not of this is spoken. You just pick it up from the setting and the expressions on the characters’ faces.

12 Years a Slave, about a free black man in the US North who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South pre-1865, is even more deeply engaged in social criticism, giving an innocent and naïve free man a dehumanizing guided tour of the savagery that was necessary at all levels to maintain the savage system of slavery. At first Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) suffers under a somewhat sympathetic plantation owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have no recollection of his character’s name is nor do I think I was meant to have one—Cumberbatch is a mere amalgam of everyone who presents themselves as good and kind yet blames “the system” for their failure to act on these supposed virtues. Michael Fassbender, who plays Northup’s second owner is a much more singular character. Who can say whether slavery turned him into a sociopath or whether it merely lured his already warped personality into its horror-filled kingdom?

In all three films, Stone, Phillips and Northup find inner courage and tenacity, if not always to get themselves out of their predicaments, then at least to make the best of it, practically and soulfully. These films’ power comes from their relentlessly sharp focus—the filmmaker’s decision to cut away most of the padding that usually goes into building a world, building characters, explaining context, creating a framework of relationships the audience can grab onto. For directors Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass and Steve McQueen, it’s all peril from the word go.

Unlike last year’s Life of Pi, for example, which also dropped its protagonist into mortal danger and kept him there, there’s little time spent on the characters’ lives before or after the story’s crisis. Gravity’s biggest flaw was the tacked-on feel of Stone’s backstory (thank God there were no flashbacks to her daughter before her death) while Captain Phillips’s misstep was the perfunctory and clichéd introductory scenes of Phillips’ home life (and Catherine Keener’s bad hair). 12 Years a Slave’s quick introductory sketch of Northup’s family life was certainly the most treacly part of an otherwise unsentimental film, though director Steve McQueen’s worst decision was to cast Brad Pitt as the Jesus-y looking Canadian who “saves” Northup; that role should never have been deified by star power. The films work best when they keep the audience in the moment. Gravity and Captain Phillips, especially, operate almost in real time; 12 Years a Slave just felt like it was that long.

As tough as these films were to watch, their makers realize the pleasure of viewer masochism comes not in the torture itself, but in the release from it. And release they did. All three films deliver short, sharp and astonishingly uncomplicated happy endings—Disney could hardly do better.

Once adrift, Stone returns to Earth’s loving pull; the mud virtually hugs her. Phillips, once he calms down, will go back to his messy haired wife, his cleverness acknowledged and respected, his uptightedness vindicated. When Northrup leaves his slave labour and hops in the carriage that has come to rescue him, we know in that moment that he is free because his white friend has a bigger hat and a more steely-eyed gaze than crazy, crazy Fassbender. We gasp in relief. The momentary worry that Northrup’s wife may have remarried—that his family may not want him back—is quickly pushed aside. Like Hanks in Captain Phillips’ final scene, the audience finally exhales and shudders like a panic attack has just ended.

Tense films, but their happy endings betray their intentions. They want the audience to leave satisfied. Case closed. Our surrogate is home safe. None of them as bleak as Ender’s Game, which messes with the recipe to deliver a darker message that should follow filmgoers home. Yes, darker than slavery because its ideas inform slavery and world history before and after slavery.

Based on a 1980s novel, Ender’s Game is not a well-made film. It had the rushed, clunky feeling of a work that compensates for overcompression of the source material with clunky overexplanation and uneven pacing. Its effort to attract both younger and older audiences leaves it satisfying neither. Many of the performances are laughable—the talented Viola Davis looks like she had no idea what movie she’s in.

But the film’s ending—the revelation that concludes young Ender Wiggin’s (Asa Butterfield) tests and torments as a trainee to lead the Earth’s forces against possible alien invaders—is as far from Hollywood happy as you can get. Most films are about love, courage, strength and trueness to oneself. This one’s about power, tactics and deceit. It nod to empathy as a virtue, but it doesn’t have a heart. Perhaps it hopes the audience has one, but even that’s not certain.

Despite his savvy in combat both personal and intergalactic—perhaps because of this savvy—Ender is bullied by his brother, his peers and his handlers in the future Earth’s military-industrial complex. He’s been recruited as their saviour but, like Harry Potter, is left to figure out the “how” on his own. Excessive violence usually works.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, though, which reveals itself to be a satire of fascism, and which attempts (unsuccessfully, one might argue) to make its audience feel bad for cheering on the humans in their aggression toward the enemy, Ender’s Game’s POV on its fascistic future society is not so clear—are we to despise or admire it?

As a good messiah should, Ender cleverly navigates through all the obstacles put before him and even wins allies. But then, in startling reveal, discovers he’s been had—the obstacles were not what they seemed. What should be a triumphant Hollywood movie ending—he and his team of misfits succeed in a computer simulation of a war against their insect enemies—turns into something radically different. The simulations were actually real. He was not playing an elaborate videogame, he was waging real war. In demonstrating that he could, theoretically, destroy an enemy planet, Ender does destroy an enemy planet. And is filled with not with joy, but remorse. There were other ways of winning, he suspects, that would not have caused so much harm.

The Ender books have been criticized for depicting a protagonist who commits violence but who remains innocent because harm was not his intention. But just because the saviour is untainted, culpability doesn’t vanish. It moves elsewhere. It moves onto the system which lied and manipulated him. The systems humans create are perfectly capable of destroying us, even if those pulling the strings have created technicalities that depersonalize that culpability. Tactics wow us but they are not our humanity.

In Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave (Gravity doesn’t think so much about these themes—how we wreak evil on ourselves), our protagonists are reborn merely by escaping the trials the system has thrown in their way. Once Phillips and Northup are happy, we’re happy.

Ender’s Game doesn’t let us off the hook so easily. If we’re uneasy with a child being manipulated into genocide, the manipulation itself must be unpacked, even if the peril faced by the child has ended.

By delivering their heroes to such clear safety, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave relieve of us of our worry for the individual we have bonded to. They allow us to put their peril behind us, even though the world that created their troubles continues. Domestic contentment is restored in the foreground.

For all their seriousness, this kind of thrill isn’t so different from what you might get from a roller coaster. Once it’s done, it’s done. In Ender’s Game, we still have much to work through.

Building community and excitement

The one thing I regret not including in this piece for Yonge Street Media--you can only fit so much in one story--is one of the triggers for Playing for Keeps and other programs designed to generate excitement about the Pan Am/Parapan Games. 

That is: Organizers, including some city councillors, attended the Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2011 and saw how excited people were about the Games. The city was abuzz. And Canadians started to worry that Toronto would look blasé by comparison.

So, a lot of the windup to the Games was motivated by fear of looking dull and boring.

Not an unuseful fear.

A loyalty program only for the affluent and tech savvy

About 56.4 per cent of Canadians have a smart phone, which is a lot of Canadians. But that means 44.6 per cent don't have them. And that 44.6 per cent might as well forget about engaging in the Loblaws PC Plus reward program.

Launched in March, one of Canada's highest profile retailers has created the lowest profile loyalty program.

Admittedly, there are signed offers in stores. I found three points offers after about 45 minutes of searching around the Loblaws at Dundas and Bloor in Toronto. For example, I could earn 400 points buying $5 worth of bottled curry. That's about 40 cents worth of shopping when I hit a points threshold--20,000 points get you $20 in groceries.

But the real action is on your phone. Each week I get supposedly customized offers in an online account. There, the point accumulation can be impressive. 1,000 points for each $5 spent on fresh produce--that's about 20 per cent off. Buy $100 worth of produce and get $20 back. Or 1,000 points for a $2.29 bottle of flavoured water--that's 40 per cent off. The digital offers are far superior--and far more abundant, from what I can tell--than the bricks and mortar offers.

But unless you a master memorizer, you must carry a smart phone with you to exploit the rewards. Otherwise, you'd have no idea what your offers are as you wander the aisles.

Which raises the question: who is PC Plus for? Not for everybody. Lower income Canadians can't afford cell phones. Seniors often don't have them. And even then, who walks around a grocery store flicking through items on their phone to see if they match up with what they might buy? Probably not parents with their kids or people in a rush.

It is certainly following a trend. PC Plus is a step toward gamefication--it makes shopping like a treasure hunt, where you must match the items you're sent with what's available. But it's needless complicated. The threshold to entry is way too high.

Technical glitches make things worse. When I bought my $6.02 worth of produce, I saw that I hadn't received my points. I was told that "digital produce offers" (ask someone from 1992 to parse that term) sometimes don't register properly. So I had to call customer service which, moments after I went through the checkout, was able to call up my receipt to see that I had bought more than $5 in produce. They promptly issued me my points and I thought, wow, he exactly what I'm having for dinner!

Obviously, chasing loyalty points is something you need money to do. But introducing a loyalty program that serves only the most diligent and connected Canadians seems ridiculously exclusive for a mainstream retailer. It's almost as if Loblaws is saying: If you can't afford a smart phone, you can't afford to shop here.

The devil in disguise

My first official piece for Canadian Business magazine just went up, about the arms race between Canadian pharmacies and their illicit imitators. 

Last problems standing

When I hear the "Oh no, the US is going to meddle in the Middle East again" reaction to the discussion about intervention in Syria, I think of something one of my professors said in a lecture during my first year of journalism school.

One of the reasons we're so obsessed with cancer and AIDS (this was 1989), he said, was that modern medicine had eradicated most of the other diseases that killed us. They were the last killers standing and so we ascribed them with special meaning and special status.

When you look at how many conflicts there were in, say, Latin America or Southeast Asia and the many US interventions, for better or worse, in those countries right up to the early 1990s, the metaphor seems to apply to geopolitics, too.

Not that we're at the The End of History. But it does feel like the clash-of-civilizations trope that feeds Middle Eastern fatalism is shortsighted. All we know for sure about Middle Eastern problems is that they have so far last a couple of decades more than serious conflicts in other regions. A couple of decades is not much in the span of human history, though it certainly is horrific when measured in a lifetime. The immediate cost of these problems is awful, but that does not mean they are different category of problem.