Thoughts on 'Fake News'

Classic movies are, admittedly, an acquired taste.

In this era of IMAX, Dolby Surround sound number whatever, CGI and pyrotechnics, an old black and white film from the 1930’s or 40’s doesn’t do much to capture attention. But I appreciate the slower pace, the crafting of the dialogue, as well as the use of shadow. Back in the day, when you didn’t have special effects, that is what you relied on, and I appreciate the artistry of it.

As you can imagine, I am often tuned to the Turner Classic Movies channel, or TCM. Because it is commercial free, they fill the gaps between movies with interviews, classic short films, and some original content.

Every now and then, though, you see something that gets you thinking about today. It’s not always a clear lesson, but something puts your mind to a useful analogy for our times.

Every so often, they air what can only be described as a ‘short documentary’ on ‘Letterboxing.’ As a classic film buff, I found it interesting. As a political person, I found it strangely revealing.

‘Letterboxing’ is a term that refers to the shape of the viewing screen. As with its namesake, the shape is more rectangular. Often, when you see a film broadcast in letterbox, or from a blu-ray disc, there is black space at the top and bottom of the screen.

Many of the films that are presented in letterbox format are ones where the imagery is on a more expansive scale – think the classic chariot scene in Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston, or David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. In these films, the use of background is just as important as the action between the main actors. To appreciate the context of what you see between the protagonists, you need to also have an appreciation of their situation. The chariot scene in the former needs a large colosseum, replete with crowds, pageantry and grandeur. To understand the overwhelming nature of the desert in the latter film, you need to see just how small the people are against it.

Today’s blockbusters owe a great deal to the skill of those directors and cinematographers who pioneered the concept of the ‘larger than life’ film. While ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ had many of these elements, the genre really started to come into its own in the early 1950s.

Just as Hollywood was beginning to develop Cinemascope and Vistavision and all sorts of larger scale cinematography, television was also coming into its own. Studios saw the opportunity to have their films broadcast for the home audience, which was good for both the studios and the networks. There was, however, a catch. 

Televisions of the 1950’s and 1960’s had square screens and not the greatest quality resolution. Taking a film like ‘The Ten Commandments’ and putting it on a black and white analog television whose screen was barely larger than a laptop computer was not an easy process. It was fitting a rectangular peg into a square hole, and it would not work without some adaptation.

The workaround was something called ‘pan and scan’. While the layperson might not have known what that was, it was the reason why some television broadcasts and VHS tapes used to carry the disclaimer at the beginning that what you were about to see was ‘formatted to fit your screen.’

‘Formatting’ is a rather innocuous term for what was really a major reworking of a film. You would look at the film in its unadulterated state, isolate a square of the image that, in the opinion of the editor, captured the essence of the action, ignore the rest and magnify the part you intended to keep.

The TCM short presentation (accessible via YouTube from this link) visually demonstrates the phenomenon well. With graphics, they play scenes from Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Gigi, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. You see both the pan and scan version, which is silhouetted in a square, as well as the rest of the scene that would not be used. After seeing what is done, it is hard to disagree with director Martin Scorcese when he argues that ‘pan and scan’ is nothing less than ‘re-directing the film’.

Other directors in the short, such as Michael Mann and Sydney Pollack, explain that a scene is a composition, with every person and thing on camera meant to convey the story. Change the view, and you change the narrative. By way of illustration, an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is shown subject to ‘pan and scan’, where the square contains Jesus and no more than two disciples to either side of him.

The short documentary appealed to my interest as a film buff, but I believe that its subject matter has import beyond that substrata of the public who are fans of the films of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains. 

As a politically active person, I have had opportunity to see this phenomenon in another place – in the coverage of news events.

Years ago, I attended a political convention in Hamilton, Ontario that was covered by various newspapers. There was one plenary session I attended where the subject was that of ending automatic delegateships for executive members of concordant groups. 

Under the rules, youth executives, campus executives, women’s executives, business supporters, etc. could send their executive members to conventions – including leadership votes. When you consider that each body could have upwards of 20 or more executive members, the collective number of automatics could be as high as 150 or 200. In contrast, no one riding association could send more than ten delegates to a vote.

The argument to change the rules was driven by a desire to ensure that local constituencies, and not specialized executives, were driving the process. If one looks back to the last US Democratic Party primary race, and the perceived role of ‘superdelegates’ influencing the outcome, you get a sense of where a lot of people’s minds were at.

There were, of course, people who argued against the move. They sincerely felt that while the goal was laudable, it might have the unintended consequence of marginalizing members for whom these associated groups were created to represent.

In the end, we voted to end the automatic delegateships. Being a young university student, I was a member of two of these groups, but supported the change. I felt that if the party stood or fell on how well it did in winning ridings, then ridings needed to be at the core of the organization.

I left Hamilton for home, and thought nothing more of my vote until the following Monday, and a column in the Globe and Mail. The columnist wrote about that particular plenary session at that convention. After reading the content of the 500 or so words that encapsulated the debate, I wondered whether or not I had actually been in the room, or if it was one of those strange out of body, parallel universe moments. The date, the location and the title of the event jived with my recollection, but nearly everything else sounded quite strange. According to the account, it was a much livelier and heated affair than I remembered, and my real motivation for supporting the motion was not what I had thought.

People often remember things uniquely and subjectively, and to suggest that my memory was completely devoid of bias would be a stretch, but even accounting for subjectivity, the account of the event should have been roughly approximate to the recollection of a participant.

Was the reporter wrong? Not totally. It would be hard to argue that of a room with more than 400 people, there wasn’t at least a dozen that would have harboured the views that were conveyed in the piece. On the other hand, it is an equally untenable position that the view presented in that Globe and Mail column was shared by all present, right down to the kind folks running the AV equipment.

Of course, I would notice it, though.

The event was like a motion picture. I had experienced it in glorious IMAX, with Dolby Surround sound and all the enhancements that a James Cameron or a George Lucas could embed in it. What I read in the newspaper was the equivalent of the same film on a small black and white screen, mono sound, ‘panned and scanned’ in order to isolate certain characters at the expense of the rest of the frame. It wasn’t technically ‘wrong’, but it was a suggestive narration.

Today, you cannot go five minutes without being treated to an allegation or complaint about 'fake news', but is it really?

'Fake' suggests a falsehood or fabrication - something patently untrue. 'Fake' is when you say you're sick when you are not, when you say something works when it is broken, and vice versa. Fake is when you say that something is ten miles to the east, when it is actually 100 miles to the west. If we interpret ‘fake news’ to be ‘news that is fake’, then yes – there is ‘fake news’ circulating as we speak. 

On the other hand, strictly speaking, by that same measure, not all 'fake news' is actually 'fake'. A car accident can be described as either 'major' or 'horrific', but it's not technically fake unless there was no accident to begin with.

My point is that this issue has always been with us. We just seem to notice it more.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.

When the responsibility of conveying events to the broader public, and committing them as a matter of record, is left to a handful of individuals, and those recollections are subject to the editorial policies of an even smaller group, you will always incur the danger of getting a story that takes a particular point of view or perspective. It cannot be helped.

When you read or see a recount of an event, you are reading or watching what the communicator has deemed important. The camera points in one specific direction for an extended period of time to the exclusion of other concurrent events, or the article contains two paragraphs about a single aspect of the story, and gives one sentence to another.

Truth be told, there have always been aspects of reportage that have been questioned on veracity. Crack open a history book, or do a little investigation, and you will find that newspapers has often taken a slant. In the early days of the American republic, rival publications skewered John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in equally lurid measure, much based on rumour and supposition. In the lead up to Canadian confederation, George Brown – the chief political rival of Sir John A. Macdonald – also helmed the Toronto Globe, and its editorial policy reflected that philosophical bent.

Closer to our time, one could consider the rather pro-active editorial policy of William Randolph Hearst which, some suggest, drove public sentiment during the Spanish-American War, and also creating a legend around the exploits of future President Theodore Roosevelt and his ‘Rough Riders.’ In Britain, one can also look at the policy of discretion employed by press barons during the 1930’s as it related to the coverage of King Edward and Wallis Simpson.

Today in Canada, various large newspapers – the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Postmedia chain of papers – are routinely accused of favouring one side over another. One paper declares the glass to be half full, while another decries that it is half empty, and yet another questions why it has to be a glass to begin with?

There have been a number of fine journalists and commentators, editors and publishers, but to suggest that there was some mythological golden era of news would be a stretch.

Think about yourself, and how you interpret events in your personal life – at home, at school, or at work. How do you recount the who, what, when, where and why? Would someone else with first-hand knowledge tell it exactly the same way?

There are those who blame social media for the rise of ‘fake news.’ They are correct, but not in the way they think. Social media, instantaneous information, and the 24-hour news cycle means we are exposed to more – more content and from more sources. Each one of those sources is, like a movie production, going to record the action from a particular vantage point.

Individual editors control the camera angle from their specific piece of equipment, but the consumer gets to see the film from all the cameras. In many ways, we have all become the director.

In the proverbial ‘good old days’, when there was only one vantage point, there was no opportunity to compare and contrast. It was an argument over who made the best cup of coffee in a town with only one restaurant. But, as more and more competition has been introduced, and there are more blends of coffee to be had, the choice naturally evolves.

The change in how news is reported has been no less dramatic, and the effect of competition no less profound. In truth, like most revolutionary change, it is neither wholly good nor bad. We have seen a proliferation of voices and perspectives, which has been a positive. We have also seen the decline of professional news gathering organizations in favour of the citizen blogger, whose own perspective may not be any better than that of the reporter they compete with. Quantity is no reflection of quality.

In the end, like the ‘pan and scan’ editing of classic films, the news we consume is unavoidably edited – for length, for content and emphasis, as well as perspective. It has always been that way. We only notice it because today’s story comes to us in many versions, and often competing with one another - like siblings arguing that it was the other one who spilled the juice on the kitchen floor, or broke the vase on the living room table.

So what is to be done?

The promise of more and more information does not make your life easier, but harder and more complicated. And quantity is not a harbinger of quality either. You have more and more voices, but not all of them are professional, diligent in their conduct, or even attempting to be neutral in their narrative.

The answer is, unfortunately, a paradox. The easier that information can be obtained, the harder you need to work to - politely speaking – separate the wheat from the chaff. Imagine people promising a system that will allow you to go paper-free, only to find that your office doubled its supply order and your recycling bin needs to be dumped twice as often!

That’s not easy. Even with a degree in political studies, I confess that I work up a sweat trying to dig up more information on stories I see, comparing write-ups and looking for similarities. I’m not sure how you do it if someone in an ivory tower didn’t give you the short-hand to break the code. 

In the end, though, the answer may just lie in the two things we are all born with from day one – innate curiosity, and a desire to know the truth. How we use it can be trained and honed, but it’s a gift each and every one of us has.

We just have to use it a little more often than we used to.

On a guilty pleasure

This post marks the end of what I would refer to as 'radio silence.' Since the last entry, life has pursued many twists and turns - all of which have pulled attention away. In addition to my family, work, my duties in municipal government, and work on a 12th anniversary re-issue of 'The Case for Commonwealth Free Trade', I said goodbye to my father. For those who have dealt with loss of this nature, it is easy to appreciate the process required to find a 'new normal.' In some ways the selection of this topic, while out of keeping with other posts, fulfills this need.

This Monday evening, I will be sitting in a local arena watching professional wrestling.

From experience, this admission will elicit one of three responses – admiration, hostility or indifference.

For those who are fans of wrestling, or ‘sports entertainment’ as it is often called – little needs to be said. Fans of anything share an unspoken affinity, like two people driving the same sports care or motorcycle giving each other a smile and a knowing nod. For those who are indifferent, even less needs to be said.

Critics of the sport, on the other hand, do not content themselves with taking a polite pass - a ‘thanks, but no thanks’. Any indication that you are a fan or are even mildly curious about the whole thing, and you are treated to a litany of catty, passive aggressive shots that start with the ‘fakeness’ of it all, but quickly degenerate into a critique of educational level and socioeconomic standing that are none too complimentary. Given my dislike of eating liver, it would be akin to me launching into a litany of ad hominem invectives against those who might enjoy the dish with a side of onions, or attempting to organize a protest to shut down any restaurant within a 30 mile radius that deigns to cook and serve the delicacy.

It is not within my power to persuade anyone of anything they vehemently oppose, nor should I feel the compulsion to defend what I honestly enjoy as a fully legal public pursuit. I do, however, want to share some thoughts about wrestling, and why I am a fan.

To begin, I am simply in awe of the men and women who are part of it all – that rarest of combinations, of brawn and brains, of spirit and determination, of personalities larger than life. Consider what those at the top of their profession need to do in order to be just that.

You are required to have the physique of a professional body builder, the toughness of a rugby player, the endurance of a marathon runner, the acrobatic skill of a Cirque du Soleil performer sans wires or nets, and – after you have spent fifteen to twenty minutes exerting yourself, you are required to then grab a microphone and address a cheering (and jeering) crowd numbering in the tens of thousands with the timing and delivery of a comic who learned improve at Second City. Furthermore, if you are a WWE wrestler, you are doing it 300 nights a year – across North America and around the world.

The nature of the contest may be ‘scripted’ (or ‘fake’ in the less charitable view) but it is rather difficult to use computer graphics or green screens to replicate this action – particularly under the klieg lights of a live event. And yes, wrestling fans suspend disbelief for a period of time during a performance, much like many of wrestling’s critics suspend disbelief that Robert Downey Jr. does not have a flying metal suit or that British actress Emilia Clarke is not, in fact, the ‘Mother of Dragons.’ Wrestling is escapism, like a Hollywood blockbuster, video game or an engrossing novel or television show. It might not be your preference for escapism, but to rest your critique on the ‘authenticity’ of it is to suggest that you live your life free of the encumbrances of indulging your own imagination.

To succeed in this milieu, you have to be in peak physical condition. Gone are the days where a tall guy with a large girth and a bad attitude could be a star. You need to be muscular, flexible, and the master/mistress of endurance. When I was a kid, the only wrestler that would climb to the top of the corner ropes and do a mid-air somersault was Edouard Carpentier. Now, you would be hard pressed to find any who don’t. In the case of a wrestler like Adrian Neville, you see mid-air moves reminiscent of an Olympic diver doing a half-pike off the 5 metre board. Of course, the diver has water to land on, as opposed to Neville who has a combination of the mat and an opponent for their soft landing.

This goes to another point, related to both the mental and physical conditioning, of wrestlers ‘playing through the pain.’ In a WWE match that inaugurated the ‘Universal Championship’, the Irish wrestler Finn Balor prevailed to win, despite fighting a third of the match with a dislocated shoulder. It reminds all that as tough as these individuals are, and as easy as they make their moves look, it is a serious business that has resulted in many an injury. Having said that, injuries that would routinely have the rest of us book of work for weeks on end result in temporary absences and rehabilitation, if that.

Of course, like a musician, actor, or comedian, you need to pay your dues. Listen to the interviews of any top star in the field, and you hear stories all too familiar. It starts with the young boy or girl who grows up as a fan of an individual wrestler, or of the sport itself, and the dream to succeed. There are the years of taking on low paying jobs in order to pay for wrestling school and training, the requisite time in the ‘indies’ where you are just as likely to be selling tickets and t-shirts, sweeping floors, and helping crews put up and take down the ring as you are to actually wrestle a match. You stay in cheaper accommodation and share with the others. You travel from town to town in a van, trading off on the driving and dealing with rain, mud and snow.

After years of the circuit, smaller companies, or wrestling in Japan or Mexico, you get your shot to join the WWE at their Performance Center, which is akin to a professional team’s spring training camp for a college athlete. If you don’t get cut, you find yourself on the roster for their NXT brand – and months or years proving your metal – until you get the chance to perform in one of the two marquis brands, Raw or Smackdown.

From the moment a budding wrestler comes out of a training school to the moment they walk out on the main stage, ten to twelve years can pass. Not ten to twelve easy years – years of sprains, injuries, fatigue, loneliness and, most likely, self-doubt.

To rise to the top of the industry requires a mixture of physical and mental prowess, and no shortage of personality. It comes as no surprise, then, that these athletes excel at pursuits beyond the ring.  More than a few have sought, and/or attained, political office (namely former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura), have pursued higher education and advanced degrees (Harvard law graduate David Otunga and PhD candidate Xavier Woods), stand-up comedy (Mick Foley, Dolph Ziggler), or leading roles in Hollywood movies (Dwayne Johnson, John Cena, Dave Bautista).

For those who haughtily dismiss those in the profession as knuckle-dragging thugs, consider the case of Glenn Jacobs, who in his ring persona ‘Kane’ dons a leather facemask and appears to be a 7-foot tall hybrid of Friday the 13^th protagonist Jason Voorhees and a minion of a Mad Max villain. His Wikipedia page reads, in part, that:

“Jacobs … is actively involved in libertarian politics and publishes his views via a blog. Jacobs supported Texas Congressman Ron Paul for President in 2008. He is a member of the Free State Project and delivered a speech at the organization's 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum. He has also spoken at the Ludwig von Mises Institute… promoting the Austrian school of economics…Outside of wrestling, Jacobs also works as an insurer and he and his wife own an Allstate agency in Knoxville, Tennessee…In March 2017, Jacobs announced that he was officially running for the mayoral seat of Knox County as a Republican.”

He has appeared on CNBC and referred to himself as a ‘Rothbardian.’ Ironically, I would venture to guess that a great percentage of the very people who cast dispersions on the intellect of a man like Jacobs would have to look that term up on Google to know what it even means!

But the critique against professional wrestling is as likely to be leveled at its fans as much as its luminaries.

When one attempts to speak for a large number of people, you can easily get yourself into trouble. It is far better to speak for yourself.

Modern society, to a large extent, is one dominated by shades of gray. Every day, whether it is in our home life, our careers, or our relationships or in our civic engagements, we are exhorted to seek out and promote nuance. It is a world where every thought, idea, preference or predilection is subjected to codicils and qualifiers.

Grey is not a primary colour. To get gray paint, you need to mix white paint with black. Grey exists as a compromise between the two, giving just enough to satiate, but never enough to fully satisfy.

Professional wrestling is athletic skill and prowess wrapped up in a Manichean parable of good and evil, of ‘face’ and ‘heel’. In the ring, there is black and white. In the seemingly brutish pantomime, we see the kind of contest we are deprived of in other parts of our lives. We see the contest, and we either see the triumph of good or of evil. If we are duly emotionally invested, we are either happy or disappointed, but we are never frustrated. Frustration comes from a lack of resolution, and in the ring things do get resolved – if not at that moment, one soon to follow.

Two of the most popular television shows in the world are ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Walking Dead.’ The worlds they paint do have a fair amount of grey, but whether you are Jon Snow or Rick Grimes, you are all too often presented with challenges and dangers not resolved by a committee meeting. Like wrestling, they provide the viewer with the kind of clarity and definition that the modern world often does not.

In my political writing, I am often frustrated by the level of nepotism and cronyism that has infected our private and public institutions. While the children of poor and working class families scrape and claw to get a chance at a better life, we are all too often treated to stories of the son/daughter/nephew/niece who is parachuted into some sinecure. The idea of paying your dues seems to be an endangered ideal.

Wrestlers, by contrast, succeed by paying their dues – night after night. This even extended to the son of the WWE Chairman, Shane McMahon, in Wrestlemania 32. In the ‘Hell in a Cell’ match, McMahon jumped off the top of a 20-foot steel cage and landed on a table, which promptly collapsed, earning him a trip out of the arena on a paramedic’s stretcher.

Was it an extreme act? Yes. Was it dangerous? Extremely so. But in a world where the ‘boss’s son’ is often an overpaid, overworked, obnoxious lout who looks down on the front line staff with haughty disdain, it was the ultimate portrayal of ‘lead by example’. Just as soldiers are fiercely loyal to the commander who fights alongside them rather than sitting in the base camp, people respect the matching of words with deeds. Nicholas Nassim Taleb has written extensively about the concept of ‘skin in the game,’ and the tendency of elites to insulate themselves from the consequences of their policies and decisions. In wrestling, no one is exempt, and in that knowledge is a harsh beauty.

In a world where many of the people at the top seem to exempt themselves from the rules, regulations and edicts they put in place, there is a clear and visceral attraction to a world where no one gets a free pass.

Beyond all of the larger themes, though, it is also a touchstone for me.

As a kid, when the Maple Leaf Wrestling circuit used to come to the area, I would go with my father and my grandfather. We would sit in the stands of the old arena and watch the stars of the time – Killer Kowalski, Edouard Carpentier, Mad Dog Vachon – compete. My most enduring memory was during a match involving the iconic Andre the Giant, when an irate spectator leaped out of the audience and grabbed him by the back of his trunks. From that moment until the security officials intervened, Andre calmly began walking around the ring, pulling the older, slender man like a boat pulling a waterskiier. It took about ten seconds for my grandfather to exclaim “Hey, isn’t that so-and-so?!” naming a character who lived a couple of miles up the road from us, who I would see on a rocking chair on his front porch every day as my school bus passed by.

Wrestling was an outing – but it was a bonding experience as well. Those who have known all three of us as adults could be forgiven for believing that very little common ground existed. We lived different lives, pursued different goals, and had very definite personalities – but there were things we shared, and wrestling was one of them.

My grandfather left us in 2006, and it has been scarcely six months since my father has passed. As for me, I fell away from watching or even following wrestling for the longest time. And yet, next week’s show will be the second one I’ve attended in less than a year.

Like the last time, I won’t be alone. I’ll be with my own son.

Wrestling, for me, is like bringing together various threads and strands. It ties the past to the present, the departed with the living. It connects 1977 with 2017, and reminds me of a time when the world was a lot less complicated and nuanced than it has become. It is also a world with clarity and definition, where there is a connection between cause and effect, where hard work and sacrifice meet reward, where the good guy or gal stands a chance of winning the day. For a brief period of time, it is a world that corresponds not to your head, but to your heart and your gut. It is a world of no excuses – where the BS that often confounds and complicates our lives can go down for the ten count.

Of course, I am doubtful that anything I have written would dissuade any individual that ‘professional wrestling’ is some cultural shibboleth for low-brow or uncouth predilection. Of course, I’ll be too busy having a good time with my son and cheering on Shinsuke Nakamura to worry about that.

International Propriety Day

Mark your calendars!

On August 11^th, 2017 - one year from today - I would like one and all to celebrate ‘International Propriety Day’. 

Now, I understand that this may not make any sense to anyone, so I’ve prepared a brief FAQ section to explain:

Q: What is ‘International Propriety Day’ anyway?

A:  First, thank you for asking. ‘International Propriety Day’ was borne out of one middle-aged man’s frustration with a world that is increasing self-absorbed, nay dare we say ‘narcissistic’? When the founder was a child, there were only 4 television channels on the dial. Today there are at least double that number dedicated to 24 hour programming involving a cast of characters who seem to marvel at how beautiful, etc. they are. That doesn’t count social media where people revel in posting ‘selfies’ and regaling the world with tales of how sexy they are, how nice a car they drive, and guess where I went on my vacation.

Q: Quite frankly, he sounds a little cranky to me.

A: He is, and the combination of a bran muffin and a good night’s sleep should fix that, but there remains the broader question of whether or not the constant parade of flaunting one’s good fortune, nice clothes, etc. in a world where not everybody is lucky is a bit tone deaf. In his defence, he’s only asking for one bloody day for people to tone it down, for pete’s sake. It’s not like he’s asking people to donate a kidney…sorry…what was your next question?

Q: Okayyyy…. So what do we do if we want to ‘celebrate’ – if I can call it that…

A: Well, you can if you want. Actually, do nothing.

Q: Nothing?

A: That’s what I said. Is there an echo in here?

Q: We celebrate ‘International Propriety Day’ by doing nothing? I don’t follow…

A: Don’t post glam shots on Facebook or Twitter. No faked poses or pictures of you and your friends and partner trying to look like Beyonce and Jay-Z at the Vanity Fair post-Oscar partay. No triumphant “Look at me and my well-toned body as my sexy spouse and I get in our luxury automobile and head to an exclusive bistro and drink expensive Cabernet derived from grapes stomped by vestal virgins before hopping on a plane to Martinique and allow the gentle rays of the sun to bronze my thong clad arse that is as firm as that of a 20 year old on account of my multiple hot yoga sessions”…okay, that was a tangent.

Q: Moving on, so no vanity pictures or bragging of any kind?

A: Yes.

Q: Doesn’t that eliminate a lot of social media posts?

A: Nobody has a precise number, but I would say 75%

Q: So, what’s the alternative?

A: You are allowed – and strongly encouraged – to simply post a line from the David Bowie song “Ashes to Ashes”

Q: Which is?

A: “I’m happy – hope you’re happy too.” It says you’re okay, you hope others are okay and it fits in less than 140 characters.

Q: What about pictures? People are likely to post pictures as they are text.

A: Flowers.

Q: Flowers?

A: You heard me – flowers.

Q: Why flowers?

A: Because they’re beautiful and natural.

Q: Any flower?

A: A-ha – that’s the thing – not just any flowers…Wildflowers.

Q: Why wildflowers?

A: Because we’re all about simplicity and a lack of ego. Prized orchids and long stem roses are as much a symbol of ego and showing off as anything. In the cosmic sense, a flower is a flower, but with those you are saying “Look at how much money and trouble I went to” as much as anything. Wildflowers grow on their own, with only nature to depend on. They are the epitome of natural beauty. They are simple, and they exist with or without us.

Q: Ok – so next year, pictures of wildflowers and a quote from a David Bowie song. That’s it?

A: Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’m about realistic expectations.

Q: What else?

A: Probably a Facebook page, if I get around to it. Maybe people can take the money they save on their elegant dinner and kick it to a food bank or a charity. That would be really nice.

Q: Do you think people will embrace this?

A: Don’t know. I will. Hope people join me.

Q: One last question – why ‘propriety’?

A: Because if I called it ‘International Humility Day’ people would think they should be crass and insulting to others and ‘humiliate’ them. If I called it ‘International Modesty Day’, it would sound like I was the Preacher in ‘Footloose’, telling the town kids they weren’t allowed to dance. I can’t dance, but I like it as a theoretical construct. Propriety seemed to capture the intent without a lot of confusion.

So, that's it. The hashtag, by the way, is #IPD2017

Enjoy!