Transit Police: The Idiocy of Arming Bureaucrats

“... bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.” -- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Having an armed guard tear my ticket stub and direct me to “Theatre 2, on your left” altered my view about how we deal with policing and social problems in our culture. This was the mid 1990s, and I had been visiting San Francisco with a couple of friends. You might question why we couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do on a vacation than go to the movies, but nothing on that trip left an impression as indelible as the man with the gun taking movie tickets. 

I didn’t doubt he was there for a reason. It was probably a bad neighbourhood, the theatre likely had some ongoing problems with violence, and this is what it came to. But I still treated this as a sociological benchmark of sorts: When a society needs armed men to take tickets at a movie theatre, that society is fucked up.

And of course, the subtext of that thought was: Thank god I live in Canada, where that kind of thing would never be seen.

Flash forward to 2005, and Vancouver hits that benchmark. Armed police start performing the routine administrative work of Translink, our transit authority – checking tickets on trains and buses. This caused me a bit of intellectual angst. I had to either adjust my benchmark and admit that there was nothing wrong with arming our civil servants to conduct bureaucratic work – that it was okay to threaten bus passengers with potential violence for not paying a $2.25 fare – or I had to admit that Canada was going down the toilet.

I ended up justifying the existence of the transit cops. I figured, well, sometimes there's crime on the train, and the police probably make the system safer for everyone. But I could never wrap my head around how non-payment of a fare of less than $3 necessitates being threatened with 9mm pistols, tasers, batons, and pepper spray – weapons carried by Vancouver’s transit police.

You might take exception to my use of the word “threatened.” After all, transit police don’t actually pull out their weapons during fare checks. But isn’t the mere presence of a weapon a threat? If your neighbour knocked on your door and asked you to turn down your stereo, and he made a point of drawing back his jacket to reveal a gun in his belt, wouldn’t that be a threat? Well, of course, the police are supposed to have weapons. But the fact that they have weapons is exactly why they are put on the transit system. It’s Translink’s way of drawing back their jacket and revealing a gun in their belt. 

This isn’t to say that the transit police have no business patrolling our transit system. There are incidents on the system that require a prompt, effective response by the police. They do have a legitimate role in public safety. That said, when those moments occur when you'd want police intervention, it's certain they won't be present – you'd still need to press the emergency call button. When we do see police on the transit system, it's most commonly (always, in my observation) to check fares, not to perform safety patrols.

What I find disturbing is that unarmed civilian Translink staff can be seen on almost every train platform far more frequently than the police, but they mostly seem engaged in socializing with one another. These are the employees who should be checking fares on a routine basis. The fact that Translink has confidence in these employees to perform fare checks on rare occasions is evidence that there are no real concerns about the safety or efficacy of civilian fare checks. When you consider that Translink has the staff and resources to conduct ongoing fare checks on passengers before they enter the system (fewer police would also free up more resources for this as well), one might conclude that Translink is intentionally encouraging fare cheating as a form of entrapment, preferring the cheaters be engaged in police confrontations rather than be prevented from entering the system in the first place.

I don't believe this to be true. Translink is not willfully trying to entrap vulnerable people. It is simply that weapons are the most direct way to get results, whether you are a robber trying to take someone's wallet or bureaucracy trying to get someone to pay $3 for a service. One is criminal use of a weapon and the other is seen to be justified. But just because one is within legal means doesn’t mean it’s right. We don’t need the threat of violence to make us pay our taxes or put money into parking meters. So why is a violent threat required to put money into a fare box?

If fares were checked on the system by civilian employees who have the authority to deliver fines – in the same manner as a parking enforcement officer (“meter maid”) – we would have an equitable response to what is essentially a bylaw infraction. Should a fare evader run away from a civilian enforcer, then all we have is an individual who got away with a theft of a service worth pocket change – and a service at that, not a possession, not a theft that caused anyone a direct hardship.The chance that fines would even have to be doled out would be greatly mitigated by fare checks at station entrances.

Yes, this type of system would require more staff, yet it would also require fewer police officers, who are paid roughly three times as much as civilian Translink staff. But of course, the more staff you have on payroll and the fewer weapons present, the more difficult things become for administrators.

David Graeber is an anthropologist who has studied and written about bureaucracies and their relationship with violence and law enforcement. In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, he writes:

“…violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.”

Having civilians enforce fares and fines would require what Graeber refers to as "interpretive labour," the emotional and intellectual work required to understand a person's motives, habits, and circumstances. Weapons eliminate the need for interpretive labour on the part of everyone involved, from the civilian employees (who can carry on socializing with colleagues on the platforms) to the board of Translink (who are left with more streamlined budgets and black-and-white solutions to the politics of social problems that make their way onto the trains).

Bus drivers, on the other hand, must engage in great degree of interpretive labour with their passengers. Translink police very rarely make their way onto the buses, preferring to focus on the train system. Bus drivers use their discretion when enforcing fares. Based on my observations, my guess is that they refuse entry to about half the passengers who don't pay fare. With the other half, drivers make a judgement call and choose to allow the fare evader to board. Translink allows drivers to use such judgement, and they consider the loss to be a cost of doing business. Why then cannot Translink deal with a few more lost dollars on the SkyTrain? The budget for the transit police force is about $32 million annually. Eliminate fare checks and cut police by a third (it should be cut more, but let's start there) and we have $11 million right there that could go toward civilian enforcement and perhaps leave a million or so extra to make up for lost fares (which aren't really lost fares anyway – most fare evaders would simply stop using the system if they were prevented from entering without payment).

Weaponized fare-checks makes life easier for a great number of people at Translink, but at a great social cost. This heavy-handed approach ensures that innocent and non-violent passengers will be on the receiving end of violent take-downs. Take a recent example: 29-year-old Jordan Dyck was beaten and pepper-sprayed by two Translink police officers. His offense? Sitting on the steps of the station entrance while playing a game on his smartphone. The cops asked him for ID, he asked why, and the situation ended with Dyck in a hospital bed. If the officers had simply told Dyck he couldn’t sit on the steps and he should move along, he might have been more responsive. In fact, a civilian employee would have done that job with just the right amount of authority. Instead, the police went “full cop” on him for the simple act of being idle.

Dyck’s version of events was considered accurate after it was discovered the officers fabricated evidence to support their case. They were convicted of assault, but no penalty was issued for the fake evidence. The fact that the police were convicted and taken off duty may seem to negate my argument – justice prevails – but my point is that the assaults are made possible in the first place, and for every conviction there must be several other victims who choose not to press charges, or don't have the resources to do so.

Stories of police misusing their power are endless, and Translink is no exception. All police forces have growing files of encounters with officers that started over trivial matters and ended in violence; Translink's own records contain notes such as: “Subject became uncooperative and would not identify himself while being checked for fare on SkyTrain. During arrest subject became uncooperative and grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go. Taser was deployed after several warnings."

Knowing this, we are creating criminals and injuring innocent civilians to facilitate Translink’s indolence. This is the trade-off we have made: occasionally brutalize non-violent passengers in order to help a bureaucracy take the lazy way out of difficult decisions.

A point that should be covered in this discussion is a defense often used by the police when using heavy-handed tactics to deal with petty offences – that their sweeps often catch those who have outstanding warrants for arrest. I don’t doubt this is true, and it’s a positive aspect of the police fare-checks. But just because a certain practice might have some benefit doesn’t mean the practice is ethical overall. We could also use the police to check tickets at sporting events, concerts, and movie theatres to shake down any patron that looks suspicious. We'd certainly find criminals to legitimately arrest, but we’d also find such practices offensive, menacing, and perhaps unconstitutional. Are weaponized fare checks on transit any different, and why are we so tolerant of it?

This leads back to my point about a society reaching a “fucked-up” threshold when the threat of violence is used to enforce public behaviour or administrative matters. Let me turn to another quote from Graeber's book:

“Most human relations – particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies – are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view... Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (cross this line and I will shoot you, one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid.”

The preferred weapon of the stupid. Does that apply to Translink? They had and still have the choice between providing a Passenger Service desk at each station entrance, and fare-checks at all the station gates, but they opt to spend that money on police – the choice between "complicated" human relations and the "threat of physical harm" type.

And we can see where that stupidity manifests in other aspects of the organization. The fiasco over the newly installed fare gates in our SkyTrain stations comes to mind. The gates were installed in late 2012 with implementation planned for spring of 2013. It’s now two years later. After an overrun of $23 million and ongoing problems reported by beta-testers, the gates are still not in operation, and no date for a full roll-out is planned. The fare-card technology Translink is using is a tried and tested one, having been used successfully in most major cities across North America, Asia, and Europe for at least 15 years. No one can say that this is new, untested gear – it’s a system perfected by others after long-term use. A few bugs and minor delays should be anticipated when adapting the system to another location’s needs, but the problems Translink has been having are the kind of errors one would expect from an untried innovation – mostly regarding overcharging and card readers unable to detect the debit cards.

It might be harsh to call this debacle the product of stupidity, but it’s obvious this is an abnormal screw-up, the result of poor research and botched execution. This might have been predicted by the very fact that Translink currently relies on the threat of violence and arrest to collect fares, given that “violence is the preferred weapon of the stupid.” Any bureaucracy that needs guns to deal with $3 transactions probably doesn’t have the institutional smarts to implement a constructive, multifaceted alternative – the same way that the neighbour who needs the gun to get you to turn down your stereo doesn’t have the intelligence to negotiate a simple solution via diplomacy and human courtesy.

(I will qualify the above by recognizing that Translink has demonstrated intelligence and competence in most other areas of their operation, such as planning routes and delivering service. Their efforts on fare collection and enforcement, though, have always been riddled with huge lapses in judgement. Fares that sometimes cost more for shorter distances than longer ones, or cost more for crossing a non-tolled bridge, are part of a structure I have long considered unprincipled for penalizing passengers who live too close to arbitrary zone boundaries. Equitable distance pricing is another feature of the fare-gate technology that Translink won't be utilizing; willful negligence at the public's expense.)

Looking at this more broadly, consider the social class of those who get caught in Translink’s net. Let’s say someone steals a towel from a hotel room. The hotel notices. Do they send the police? No, they either forget about it or bill the guest’s credit card. Similar story when it comes to dodging $100 of freelance income on your taxes, or failing to put a dollar in the parking meter, or not tipping your waiter. If you’re caught evading the people who enforce these payments, you don’t find your face planted on the sidewalk while getting handcuffed. Nor do innocent parties get mistakenly brutalized in, say, a parking-enforcement crackdown.

The possibility of being fined by an unarmed civilian officer would be enough of a deterrent for anyone with a livable income, in the same way patrons reliably pay for restaurant service (via tips) when they have no legal obligation to do so. Those who have some social standing know that it’s not worth the risk, the hassle, or the shame just to save a few coins, whether the penalty is a fine or a scowl from wait staff.

The reason we use the threat of violence against the lower classes over a $2 or $3 fraud and not against the middle class for a $20 fraud is because enforcement without violence requires interpretive labour – communication, empathy, and knowledge of the community. A parking enforcement officer doesn’t need a gun to write a ticket to a car owner who didn’t drop a dollar in the meter. If the owner confronts the officer, both of them can argue it out because they are likely of similar social classes. They understand each other’s motives and needs before any words are exchanged.

Under no circumstance would that civilian officer be allowed to inflict violence on the offender for challenging his authority.

But a bureaucrat making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year (whether a Translink board member, a civilian staffer, or a transit cop) can’t identify with, and doesn’t want to identify with, the motives and needs of those who cannot afford cars, restaurant meals, or hotels, or those who don't have enough income to have taxes to cheat on. The larger the gap between social classes, the more interpretive labour it takes the higher class to understand the lower one. If you’ve ever changed the channel when one of those World Vision commercials confronts us with the faces of poverty, you can understand why the police don't negotiate with fare evaders. Brandishing a weapon is the easiest way for authority to "change the channel" on a class of people they have no empathy for.

If it ever became routine practice to taser those who ran away from a parks board officer or who argued with a "meter maid," there would be massive protests in various forms, threatening the rule of any government that allowed the practice. That's because the middle and upper classes can relate to those who own a car or who might open a bottle of wine on the beach. But we view public transport as the environment of a lower social class that we don't understand, even though the vast majority of those on the system are actually middle class. I once worked in an office of liberal elites who often referred to the bus as the "peasant wagon" and SkyTrain as "CrimeTrain", even though these were the methods about half of us used to get to work, without ever experiencing any crime or peasantry along the way. 

Allowing armed personnel to do Translink’s administrative work should make us all question if this is appropriate for the kind of community we want to live in, and if their use is a sign of a cancerous stupidity at the highest levels of the Translink organization. Police checks of bus and train fare would have been unimaginable ten years before the practice existed. It would have been seen as an element of some kind of dystopian fiction. If we're so willing now to take the lazy and violent approach to disputes over a few coins in a fare box, what will we be willing to use the police for when tackling small social problems of the future? We should consider where to draw the line in utlizing police enforcement, and whether or not Translink has crossed it. 

Inhuman Resources

I recently spent four years in Vancouver looking for gainful employment. Vancouver is my home city, and it's not a job market I'm inexperienced with. I moved to Asia for a few years to broaden my skills and understanding of the world, and returned in 2011 with the assumption that finding work would be as easy as it had been in my younger days – perhaps easier, now that I was a more experienced, broadminded individual with a greater sense of Vancouver's place in the world.

What I discovered was a newly formed Human Resources culture that is surely the tenth circle of hell.

Let me go back a bit. My first job, in 1987, was at a video rental chain. I filled out an application at one of their stores and was called in for an interview with the district manager. No HR department was involved. The entire interview was conversational, talking about what movies I liked and how I'd make recommendations to customers.

I then pursued my interest in radio with random resume-drops to various stations in Vancouver. The program director of a talk-radio station called me in for a chat and hired me on the spot as a technical operator. In the two years I worked there, I was not aware of an HR department.

After graduating from BCIT in 1989, I dropped off an application at the reception desk at CBC Radio and a manager called me the next day. Again, purely conversational. My only contact with Human Resources – an open-plan office that welcomed interaction with employees – was to get enrolled in the proper benefits programs, and to answer my questions when I needed to utilize those benefits.

Even in 1997 when I went to work for the Canadian government (a body notorious for bureaucracy) I was interviewed by a woman in a small staffing office and I was assigned within days to Veterans Affairs, and later to Health Canada. I did not meet with HR until my first day of work, to complete the requisite paperwork for payroll and benefits.

Today, HR departments are massive and ubiquitous, yet more inaccessible than ever. During my time with the federal government in the 2000s, that local staffing department was closed down. Responsibility for interviewing and hiring went to the HR offices of individual departments. A few years later, our own HR at Health Canada was moved to a building several blocks away, behind a locked door, and only accessible with an appointment. The welcoming HR department on the second floor of CBC Vancouver (I will never forget the ever smiling, delightfully named Joy Cinnamon, who handled my timesheets) has been outsourced to Toronto and only reachable through a 1-800 number or a generic e-mail address. 

From anecdotal evidence heard from friends and from what I've witnessed in my job search, this is the norm in most organizations – Human Resources offices generally don't welcome interaction with humans anymore, be they employees or job seekers.

Amid this bureaucratization, HR departments have somehow flipped from being the last stage of employment to the first. No longer can managers find new hires and send them over to HR to go on payroll. HR has now convinced the corporate world (in Canada at least, but I'm assuming this is true in the Western world) that managers do not possess the skills and qualifications to do their own hiring.

Take my recent experiences with temp agencies, for example. In the late 1990s, when I used these agencies between the CBC layoff and the government job, I was given assignments to employers based solely on my tested skills and my interview with the recruiter. In 2011, there was a strange twist. In one of my first contacts with a temp agency, I was given an assignment at a government tourism office. The next day, the offer was withdrawn. The recruiter said, “The HR rep thinks you're over-qualified.” Whoa. Why is HR involved? If HR is reviewing resumes, then why are they using a temp agency and not doing their own hiring? Many government departments, I discovered, have signed exclusive contracts with temp agencies that are more costly than just hiring term or casual employees at union wage – this in a time when governments and large corporations are slashing budgets and staff.

Using an agency is an excessive cost, about double an employee's hourly wage for the life of the assignment. An agency charges about $30 an hour, for which the employee gets about $12, when a temp could be hired directly for that same $12. Or in the case of a unionized employer, even $25 an hour would be less of a cost commitment. 

The concept of temp hiring was originally to serve employers lacking in HR resources. But when agencies are utilized by HR departments themselves, the job-seeker suffers with a lower wage and elimination of benefits just to keep HR largesse within the family.

HR's involvement with temp agencies, I discovered over my subsequent encounters with agents, is now the norm. Even when I passed through the agency's interviews and technical tests, the client's HR rep still wanted to see my CV for approval, or meet with me for their own interview. 

I would find my employment hopes quashed once HR got involved. In the case of the tourism office, I asked what was meant by over-qualified. “They're concerned you're not going to stay, that you'll just look for another job.” Which struck me as doubly odd. It was a 30-day assignment -- was I supposed to retire after 30 days? Were they concerned I would be doused with offers from other companies after seven days on the job? If the market had been that great, I wouldn't have been using a temp agency in the first place.

I heard “over-qualified” a lot. I was consistently told to “dumb down” my resume, which I did, but then it only left questions about certain gaps on my resume, or why, at my age, I hadn't achieved much.

There was a good reason I was applying at temp agencies for work beneath my qualifications. When I applied for jobs within my skillset – jobs in the areas of technical editing, publishing, communications – I could not meet the HR criteria of a perfect candidate, or beat the online systems used for sorting applications. The advice I'd get was to lower my expectations and take office work. When I did that, I'd then be deemed over-qualified, or lacking in self-esteem. These were judgments based on personality-profile characteristics that HR reps are trained to glean from applications – they are not conclusions based on an applicant's own wants and needs. Having lived in various spots in Asia, I came to accept that working in jobs beneath my qualifications was a trade-off I was happy to make for the opportunity to live in a city with civil liberties, an intellectually engaged population, and a healthy environment – and simply to be home. No employer gave me the opportunity to put that forward.

A bureaucracy that dehumanizes job hunters

I call the HR industry a bureaucracy because it has all the hallmarks of one. They are organizations that have grown into a monoculture of uniform rules, systems and procedures that serve their own needs and their own careers at the cost and detriment of the people they aim to serve.

The difficulty in defining or criticizing the HR industry is that you can't say who they serve. In reality, they serve the companies they are attached to. Their only obligation is to their employers. Does HR serve job-hunters? No, they have no legal obligations to us. But is there an ethical obligation? It's sadly ironic that a profession that was created to look after the welfare of people now treats humans like commodities, inanimate pieces on a chess board to be toyed with and knocked off at will.

Online job-application systems are the most obvious example of this dehumanization. They are cumbersome and full of redundancies, creating more work for a candidate (requiring new accounts, registrations, re-writing a resume each time in painstaking drop-down menus and data boxes, agreements to terms and conditions – try filling out one of those every day for a year and see if you stay sane). The software is then looking to eliminate candidates from a competition based on keywords. You might have called yourself a District Manager, for instance, but the system tosses your application because you called yourself an Area Manager.

HR departments will say these systems are necessary to deal with the hundreds of resumes and applications received for each job – there's no way the staff can deal with them all individually. But there's a simple solution. Post the job online, but don't give an option for online applications. State: “Interested applicants should deliver a resume and cover letter to our office at…” Only the most serious, best-qualified candidates will apply. HR would immediately eliminate the half-interested and the lookie-loos, those who would hesitate when he or she is required to address an envelope and buy a stamp.

Why must electronic applications be the only way to apply for jobs these days? Simply because the HR industry profits from multitudes of applications. The avalanche of resumes keeps HR professionals in business by increasing their budgets for software, equipment, and developers, it inflates their importance, and protects their jobs by creating work. Individual HR reps will surely disagree, but imagine how small and unsophisticated their offices would become – and how less stressful, less important, and redundant their jobs would seem – if they only received 10 or 20 serious applications (on paper) for each posting rather than 500 frivolous ones. HR reps would say they don't want to deter the “right candidate” from applying, but anyone who would turn down an opportunity because they don't want to take their hand off their mouse is not the “right candidate”. 

Simplifying the process would not only eliminate some HR jobs, it would also decimate their budgets. As we've all witnessed in those end-of-fiscal-year spending sprees, bureaucracies fight to the death to protect their budgets from being slashed, even when the surplus is unneeded.

Questioning the questions

If you're successful at getting an interview, then be prepared for a bureaucratic Groundhog Day. In every interview I went to in the past four years, HR reps would ask the same questions, or variations of such. “What is your greatest strength? What is your greatest weakness? Describe a situation of conflict and how you resolved it. How do you handle stress and pressure? What was one of your accomplishments?”, etcetera. The thing is, these questions have become so stock that you can find books and internet sources to help you formulate the answers HR advisors are looking for.

This means that HR reps are no longer hiring people who know how to give authentic, genuine answers to relevant questions, or who can hold their own in an interesting conversation about their profession. There have literally become “right answers” for job interviews, which don't allow recruiters to consider informative answers that tell you something real and true about the person up for consideration. What this does is weed out the most creative individuals and only let through those who have blandly studied the qualities HR is looking for. Creative people are necessary in a workplace to find new solutions to problems, develop new products, and find efficiencies where others haven't looked. But creative people are also more likely to not give pre-scripted answers.

In addition to discriminating against creative thinkers, introverted personality types are also overlooked in favour of extroverts, who do much better at “selling” themselves and appearing to be a “good fit on the team.” Introverts tend to be good listeners, well organized, and lean toward productivity rather than socializing at the water cooler, so they have inherent value to an employer. What introverts are not good at, like creative thinkers, is putting themselves forward in the disingenuous, formulated way that HR practices demand.

Certainly, there are stupid things that a candidate shouldn't say in a job interview, and there are positive ways to spin negative answers. But the list of “wrong things” to say in an interview has become so suffocating that candidates are being coached to present themselves as a facsimile of an impossibly wart-free employee. For instance, the question, "What is your greatest weakness?" demands something positive for the employer spun into a negative for the employee. "I'm too ambitious and sometimes I stay in the office too long to accomplish everything I want to do." Since there's no way to give an answer that contains any genuine honesty ("I have problems being punctual," "I'm lousy at giving presentations"), the candidate is being forced to please the interviewer with a lie or a half measure. It's a question that shouldn't be asked at all because the candidate will be penalized for the truth and rewarded for being insincere, when an employee with the opposite values will do much better at fostering ethics in the workplace. 

In my job search in the past four years, I have felt pressured against revealing my true values and work ethic. For instance, when asked to describe an instance of personal conflict at the workplace, I state the truth, that I avoid conflict by not engaging in it. In today's HR pop-psychology, avoiding conflict reflects poor judgment. Conflict must be dealt with and resolved. There is also a sense of disbelief that I never had an all-out blowout with a colleague. However, I stick to my guns. I explain that if a co-worker approaches me in a hostile manner, I try to respond to that person's concern rather than their tone. I listen to what they are trying to communicate. If I am offended by their approach, I might talk to that person about it later after the situation has calmed down. If the person continues to be a problem after all reasonable efforts, I speak with my manager.

Whether or not that's the best method of dealing with conflict, who's to say, but it's certainly not harmful or regressive. However, no matter how often I present my technique in job interviews, the HR advisor presses on. "What if that person doesn't respond to your approach? What if that person becomes physically abusive? What if the manager doesn't want to be involved?" The answer I've always wanted to give: "You hired these people. If you have a relentlessly abusive employee and a negligent manager, isn't this an HR responsibility? How does this become my problem to solve?" But if I ever gave such a response, the interview would be over. I've never been able to give a satisfactory response when HR questioning goes down the conflict rabbit hole. I believe that my approach is ethical and diplomatic, but it's not the one in the HR handbook.

The most absurd criterion I've been judged by is my handshake. I've been coached by recruiters that my handshake is too passive and that I should firm up. Well, I just don't do firm handshakes. I don't like receiving them, and I'm considerate of the fact that the person on the receiving end of mine might have a sprained wrist (or arthritis or such), and might only be extending a hand because in our culture you just have to. My inclination for soft handshakes, however, is judged as a form of weakness, rather than that of someone who is considerate or introverted (right there, they've eliminated the good listener and productive worker based on a weak grip). The handshake rule is the ultimate of the BS pseudo-psychology I've heard from the HR industry. The fact that someone doesn't give a strong grip indicates nothing about how well that person will function as a secretary, project manager, or an architect.

From there, everything from eye contact to body language is analyzed to determine if you will "be a good fit on the team." One common trope I've come across in various Linkedin articles and other sources for refining interview skills: "The decision to hire is made in the first six seconds. Give a firm handshake, smile, and make good eye contact." Generally good advice – basically, don't enter the room like a schmuck. But if hiring decisions are being made based on the first six seconds, HR is defeating their own raison d'etre of neutralizing bias in the hiring process. Of course, folks will inform me, "The six-second rule is subconscious, it's just human psychology." But if HR professionals are writing about it and it's become common knowledge in their trade, it's not subconscious anymore. 

Body language should not be entirely ignored in a job interview, but far too rigid emphasis is placed on it. So what if you don't make eye contact well in an interview. This could mean you're shifty and not to be trusted, or it could mean you're from a culture where sustained eye contact is considered rude. And if you're applying for an accounting job, does it really matter if you're shy? 

Bias and hypocrisy within the HR industry

The rules and procedures created by the Human Resources industry, as with any bureaucracy, have their roots in honourable intentions – to eliminate favouritism, nepotism, intuitive decisions, and unconscious bias in hiring decisions. However, in my encounters with Human Resources departments in the past four years, I found that they continually violate many of the ethics that their rules are meant to uphold. Age bias, for instance. If I left the year of my college graduation off my resume, HR would phone and ask for it. If I didn't list experience going back more than 15 years in order to keep my age vague, I would be verbally asked to list any other experience – "And what did you do before that?" – until they got back to high-school graduation. When I would get the inevitable “over-qualified” or “you won't be happy with this job” remark, I often took it to mean "too old."

As for intuitive bias, the "first six seconds" and body-language matters discussed above shows that they are aware of such bias, making it the job-hunter's responsibility for countering. Also, I often found that after applying for jobs at certain organizations, my Linkedin profile would have been scanned by an "unnamed HR professional" at that employer. We're told by the HR industry that Linkedin is a must-have in today's job market, and we're counselled to keep our social media profiles clean. I know, it's common sense. But I have to wonder, if HR pros in Western countries strive so hard to adhere to human rights codes, saying they will shred applications that contain photos and personal info in order to protect themselves from accusations of bias, why would they violate the spirit of the law and go looking for prejudicial material from other sources? 

I was once asked flat out for my full date of birth (yes, including the year) by an agent at a global recruiting firm. I asked why it was important (surely that was noted as a sign of my belligerence), and I was told it was required by the client, a multinational insurance firm that was looking for a disability benefits advisor. So here we had two HR professionals violating HR 101. I gave her my birthdate because I wanted the job. The next day, the recruiter told me that the client had put staffing on hold. Whether that was the truth, or a way of eliminating me from the competition while mitigating their liability for age bias, I will never know.

In another instance, an HR department wanted me to sign a contract that contained an illegal clause – that I wouldn't work for their competition for two years upon completion of my assignment. Such clauses have been struck down by Canadian courts, because you cannot forbid a person from pursuing their livelihood. That type of clause can be tied to severance packages, but certainly not because a temp contract has expired. I pointed out the illegality of the clause and said I would sign the contract if it were removed -- after all, it was a four-month assignment, and if the company didn't see fit to extend me after that, I was going to make my living using every skill at my disposal. An hour later, I was told the company had a budget freeze on temp employees. I was stupid, I should have signed the contract regardless, since the clause couldn't be enforced.

But here's the thing: HR advisors are the ones who are trained to uphold employment laws. It's a fundamental pillar of their profession. In practice, however, HR professionals use their position not to uphold the law, but to find loopholes to subvert it. The clause in that contract for instance. HR likely knew the clause was illegal. They just threw it in there to intimidate the majority of employees who don't know any better.

All of the rules and systems the HR industry has put in place to protect themselves from bias have grown into a strangling bureaucracy for job seekers – a bureaucracy that allows HR to practice that bias under the radar.

The futility of reference checks

References have been a staple of the hiring process for time immemorial. But, in recent years, HR has elevated this to a wasteful art. One of my references was reportedly kept on the phone for 15 minutes, subjected to a relentless list of meticulous questions. He told me, "Sorry, but I had to end the call. I couldn't answer all of her questions. Hope this didn't hurt your chances." What it did hurt was my relationship with that particular reference. I sensed that he was implying, “Please don't give my name out again.” And in a broader way, it made me thereafter hesitant to even list my references on employers' paperwork. My references had been “bothered” too many times by agencies that would do such checks and then not offer work. I asked one agency, "Did I get a bad reference?" No, they were all glowing, but the HR people whom they forwarded my resume to kept saying "no" for various reasons. So as I kept applying at agencies in search of that elusive job, my references kept getting calls even when I was not being put forward for a particular job. Which, at a certain point, probably became a nuisance to them. 

In the most extreme example, one employer wanted me to sign my rights over to a private company, in an unspecified foreign country, that specializes in reference checks – another layer of the self-serving HR bureaucracy. The form (click the image to read it) was very heavy on legalese, and the fine print authorized every employer I've had, whether listed on my resume or discovered in their own "background check," to hand over pretty much everything on my HR files. It was too invasive, especially since I had no way of knowing to which country or to which parties my vital details would be going. I called the HR rep and said I would be willing to sign it upon getting an offer – in other words, if I'm the successful candidate, "you can make a job offer contingent on my reference check being positive." Upon hearing that, the HR rep said, “We've actually offered the job to another candidate.” I think she made that decision about five seconds into my phone call. This is an example of how the HR industry has the power to impose unjust practices upon job hunters, who have no bargaining power in such situations, and are eliminated from gainful employment for exercising reason and caution.

In another case, I asked for a reference from a manager for whom I did a three-month assignment. She passed my request to HR, who said they would not allow her to speak on behalf of the organization. HR said that only they could give a reference. However, HR had no record of my performance because they hired me through an agency, who was officially my employer. The agency would not give me a reference because, alas, the person requesting it was from a competing agency.

Companies on the receiving end of reference requests are increasingly refusing to participate, partly because they don't want to exhaust their time and resources when there's nothing to gain. Another part of it is legal. Lawyers sometimes encourage candidates to sue former employers for vindictively untruthful bad references. Companies are more often protecting themselves by not responding to reference requests, or by only disclosing dates of employment, nothing more.

It's a defeating situation. Human Resources departments are asking for an increasing amount of information from former managers and HR reps, even when their own profession is telling them not to release that information themselves. HR plays whichever card suits them and punishes the candidate for the practices of the HR profession itself.

Pre-interviews

There have been many cases where an HR rep has called me to conduct a pre-interview in order to qualify for an actual in-person interview. Sometimes these calls have been unscheduled. Twice I was called on Sundays while I was socializing and completely unprepared. Another time during a scheduled pre-interview, the HR rep put me on speakerphone while she typed my answers. Her keyboard clattered in my ear while my own voice echoed back to me. It was so distracting that I got flummoxed in my answers and I flopped the pre-interview. Why couldn't I just be called in for a proper conversation? 

I'm sure the pre-interview is another example of HR creating another layer of bureaucracy for job-hunters to pass. The circumstances of most of the pre-interview phone calls I received were unprofessional and did not give me a chance to prepare or present myself in a professional manner.

Posting jobs that don't exist

When I did a practicum recently at an international shipping company, a job came open and I thought I'd be an ideal fit. When I approached the HR advisor, she said the job was filled. “Oh, I suppose it's a glitch that the job is still posted?” No, she said. "I keep all the jobs posted for an extra month." Why? “Oh, you never know.” You never know what? Really, is it just to look like your department is active? To torment job seekers who are going to spend half the afternoon drafting a good application for a job that doesn't exist?

Many organizations stick all of their job postings up on their websites without indicating which ones are for internal or external applicants. The reason for this, I was told later by people in the know, is that they want to have extra applications ready in case the internal search doesn't pan out. But when you hear the common complaint from HR reps – “We don't have time to read all the applications, so we have to skim for key words” – why would they go out of their way to solicit work they can't handle? All this does is further exhaust the energy of job-seekers, who already undergo enough unnecessary anxiety as it is. It's one more phone call that doesn't come, furthering the sense of rejection and defeat.

Taking decision-making powers away from managers

At the top of this post, I recounted stories of my early job-hunting days, where my only contact was with managers, who also did my reference checks. When I speak about these issues with friends and acquaintances who hold management positions, they all talk about their own frustrations with HR. One problem that I've heard more than once relates to managers who have a position to fill on their team. They ask HR to see the resumes of applicants as they come in, but they are told no; HR will forward only the screened-in applications once the pre-interviews and background checks are done. The managers themselves want a greater role in the screening process but are denied. Hearing these stories has been upsetting to me as a job-hunter, as I know that there are managers who would like to hire me, but I'm being prevented from meeting them because I don't fit a bureaucratic personality profile. 

Postscript

The position I've taken in this article was influenced by David Graeber's new book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. I had been wanting to write an article about my hardships with Human Resources departments for a few years now. The awareness that something was different and wrong with current HR practices came about a year into my job search and snowballed as more time passed, but I found it difficult to articulate my experiences. Without any framework for understanding the kinds of walls I was hitting, my complaints sounded like a laundry list of self-pitying grievances.

A lightbulb went off when I watched an interview with Graeber on The Keiser Report (12:40 into the video linked here). An anthropologist and academic, Graeber describes our world as the most bureaucratic society in all of history, where the public and private sectors have become indistinguishable from each other, and capitalist economies have been built on enormous Soviet-style bureaucracies that have imposed unnecessary hardship, and sometimes poverty, on average citizens.

Graeber talks about this in terms of the global economy. For example, he cites how financial institutions have lobbied governments to impose rules and regulations on the banking industry, which allow them to increase their internal bureaucracies (and create more jobs for themselves) and in turn charge fees to customers. Yet, in front of the customer, the banks blame government regulations for all the “red tape” the customer must face -- red tape the banks themselves lobbied for. In another example, he mentions how the European Union, in response to the current recession, printed enough money to give every European about 760 euros a month for a year to every citizen in the union. He asks, why not just give every person in the EU 760 euros a month for a year?  Well, because the financial institutions wouldn't get to move the money through their systems and justify their bureaucracies and fees. The bureaucracy becomes the purpose unto itself, rather than serving a purpose outside of itself.

Graeber calls this the "Sovietization" of capitalism. During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union that was known for its Kafkaesque, punishing bureaucracies that looked for any reason to send citizens off to the gulag for not following rules that were opaque and unrealistic. Today we have capitalist systems that look to throw anyone under the bus if doing so creates wealth or expansion within those systems. One could cite the sub-prime mortgage scheme in 2008, in which the banks used the de-regulation they lobbied for to bankrupt some of America's most vulnerable citizens. Or the “debtor's prisons” that have popped up in America in recent years. These have trapped poor citizens who have paid fines or completed probation for municipal violations, but have been unable to pay the high fees charged by the private companies that were contracted to administer the collection of fines or monitor the offender. For non-payment of fees, these citizens end up with utilities cut off or, at worst, a prison term.

As Graeber and host Max Keiser dished about these issues, I couldn't help but see my own encounters with HR departments in the same light. The bureaucratization of the Human Resources industry is just part of a much larger, global trend towards bureaucratic expansions in all industries, in which a growth of red tape serves the administrators more than the purpose of the system.

As one academic whom I discussed this issue with told me by e-mail, "The problem [of HR] wouldn't exist if there were full employment, but since there aren't enough jobs, the system functions as a way of sending people off to the figurative gulag."

Leaving Vancouver

This is a personal post I addressed to my friends via Facebook. It might not be of much interest to the general public, but I shall leave it here as a bit of biographical info.

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In my three years since having returned here, I’ve heard that endless complaint – “Vancouver people are so unfriendly!”

I never understood that particular whinge. Meeting friendly, generous, welcoming folks here has not been my problem. Sure, I’ve met my share of difficult personalities, but what place doesn’t have those? And just because we don’t “fit” with certain people doesn’t mean they aren’t friendly. Does everyone have to roll out the red carpet for each other?

I have lived in other cities around the world, and I can attest that it’s hard to find any metropolis where the population appears to be generally happy and affable. My philosophy has been: If you can find five or ten friends wherever you go, you’re set. You don’t need to be on supreme speaking terms with everyone you pass on the street.

But that brings me to my particular problem with Vancouver people, and it’s a good problem to have – I have too many friends. Make ten friends, you meet their friends, get close to one or two of those, then meet their friends, and on it goes exponentially. I had lots of good mates here before I left in 2007, and without trying very hard since my return in 2011, the number has grown considerably.

I think that’s how it’s been for most of my friends and acquaintances. Since there’s a limited number of people we have time to be close with, there are multiples more who we only see at parties and social events – acquaintances we know we could be best chums with, but it’s not feasible. Even so, for all of the “party pals” I know-but-don’t-know-well, I have this to say: You’re all a part of my community, and seeing you around has strengthened my sense of belonging.

And this is why it’s been so hard to leave Vancouver again. Many of you have heard me say, “If I don’t have a job by the end of the year, I’m heading back to Asia.” I said it in 2012, I said it in 2013, and again in 2014. If I were a careerist or more ambitious, it would have made sense to flee long ago. But what kept me here?

My friends.

The kindness and generosity of the people in my life have been my anchor. But the moment has come where it’s no longer practical to stay. Finances are one issue. I’m far from broke, but broke is what I’d like to avoid, so I’m using what cushion remains to resettle in a place where jobs are easier to come by. My state of mind is another issue. The avalanche of rejection from employers has battered my self-esteem to the point where it hurts to keep looking, and it hurts more to keep talking about it. A negative feedback loop develops – the less that goes right in my life, the less I have to share with my friends, and simple questions of concern like “How’s the job search” only open up a litany of complaints. The empathy and caring I’ve received in hard times has been heartening, but I also don’t want the need for sympathy to define who I am and become a permanent element in my friendships.

I don’t want to dwell on my difficulties finding work. It’s something no one can really understand unless one is currently in the same boat. Anyone who hasn’t had to look for a job in the past 10 or 15 years has no idea how Kafkaesque the job market has become. The last time I had to look for full-time work in Vancouver was 1999, and it was a buffet of decent jobs ready for the taking. Today, it’s not just the economy that’s reduced the options, but the attitudes of employers who are engaging in unethical (and sometimes illegal) tactics. There are other factors, too, but I don’t want to dwell on them – my observations on the job market are another subject altogether. The bottom line is, it’s time to move on.

I’ve had some promising leads from companies in Asia. When I enquire with employers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, I get responses – something I don’t get in my home city. The advice is always along the lines of, “We always have openings. If you’re here, we’d be happy to consider you.” A logistics company in Singapore actually gave me a 30-minute phone interview in preparation for their next hiring intake. What’s clear is that if I’m located in a specific place, the offers are more likely to come.

My plan is to head to Singapore in early February. I will do the job-hunting circuit that I became familiar with on my previous ventures in that city. If a job doesn’t pan out in Singapore, I’ll backpack my way through other parts of Asia in search of sustenance.

Until then, I will be honest – getting ready to leave Vancouver is not making me happy. My previous escapade in Asia was meant to be an odyssey to build up life experience and new vocational skills, not a permanent relocation. Returning to Vancouver to settle for life was part of my plan. But now it turns out that living abroad might have to become a permanent part of my life.

View from room 2502, Denman Inn, 1975

This city is a place I feel undyingly attached to. When I was a child growing up in Toronto, my family made two visits here, both of which became etched in my soul. It was like a playground. The gondola up Grouse mountain, the hotel by the beach, feeding ducks in Stanley Park... I find it no coincidence that I ended up living west of Denman, within the view of room 2502 of the Denman Inn (now the Coast Plaza). The photo I took from the balcony in 1975 shows two of the buildings I’ve since lived in, the building where my dad lived for 20 years, and the park where his ashes are scattered. This is not some dead town I have been waiting to escape from. It’s a place I have cherished and felt rooted in for most of my life.

After those childhood vacations, I begged my parents to move the family here, little knowing that this was their plan. After we arrived, I never took it for granted. I lived in a house at the foot of Grouse Mountain, and my brother would take me hiking up the various trails leading from our back yard (years before the Grouse Grind had been developed). I walked to school through a trail in the woods. Deer, raccoons, and sometimes bears would wander through our gardens. Hang-gliders would soar over our roof, and I would zip down to Prospect Park on my 10-speed to watch them land. It was a dream life far removed from the flat, cookie-cutter streets of Scarborough.

Living in other countries, other cities, was something I longed to do for my own personal experience. I learned more about the world and myself than I would have through any formal education. It’s something I don’t regret. But if I had known that I couldn’t have returned home, I’m not sure I would have decided so lightly to leave when things got rough. The “fuck-it-I-can-always-go-home” attitude was miscalculated arrogance.

Despite how torturous the last three years have been for me, the time here has only bonded me stronger to this place, because I didn’t take any good moment for granted – I knew how quickly it might slip away one day.

A quick rundown of some of the things that have made me grateful to be back in Vancouver:

• Anthony & Donny’s wedding on Vancouver Island. A memorable sojourn in a location a bit out of the ordinary, giving so many of us a chance to connect on a little weekend holiday outside the city. It meant a lot to be included and share the milestone with you guys.

• Camping in Pemberton with a few old friends and many new ones on that first summer back.

• Houseboating for the first time, with friends new and old, seeing parts of BC’s lake country that I’ve never had the privilege to see before.

• Re-joining VGVA volleyball and discovering “Absolutely Badminton”, both at King George Secondary, not to mention all those post-game coffee chats at Blenz.

• Marching in my first (and second) Pride Parade with the volleyball crew at VGVA.

• Getting called back to work at CBC Radio. Unfortunately, the job was dismantling and archiving the beloved record library. Although it was tragic to see the heart of the local radio operation ripped out, I was grateful for the chance to return to my first workplace and reconnect with so many wonderful co-workers from my past.

• Learning to play mahjong with Daniel and his buddies. All those years in Taiwan, China and Singapore, yet I have to come back here to learn the joy of yelling “peng!”

• Summer hangouts with Jacyntha, a Canadian I met in Singapore. Our long conversations during your holidays back home were heartening as always. Those long chats on Ann Siang Hill just joyously flowed on over to the West End!

• All of the Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas meals, New Years parties, birthdays – I was included in so much, and will never forget.

• Finally, getting reacquainted with Wilfred. A chance meeting on a club patio in Singapore continued when we met again on a friend’s patio five years later here in Vancouver. How was I to know, when we were casually acquainted for an evening those years ago, that I would be attending your wedding and then your funeral in my home city. Your calm, sanguine spirit will live in a part of me forever. Your husband and the friends who flowed in from Singapore (and elsewhere) to say goodbye have reconnected me full circle back to that part of the world.

There are many wonderful places on this planet, and I will be perfectly fine wherever I land. But wherever I happen to settle, I will hold Vancouver and my friends here close in my heart.

Interstellar vs. 2001

“I’m not going to say 2001 is a great film just because you explained it to me. If it has to be explained – if the plot is some mystery that only certain people are allowed to get because they read some article about it – it’s simply not a good movie.”

That was the sentiment one friend expressed when debating the merits of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a film that baffled audiences when it was released in 1968, and to this day it’s often dissed as some kind of esoteric, elitist “art film” that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

For those people, there’s a remake of 2001 that explains the whole plot. It’s called Interstellar. And it provides a good argument in favour of 2001’s lack of obvious narrative. I loved Interstellar, but it also reminded me that sometimes a director is wise to leave some things to an audience’s imagination.

I

2001's monolith orbiting
Jupiter, and Interstellar's
wormhole near Saturn

'm being cheeky calling Interstellar a remake, but the parallels are obvious. An alien intelligence of mysterious origin places a “calling card” of sorts near a planet in the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2001 it was the monolith orbiting Jupiter; in Interstellar it’s a wormhole plonked near Saturn. A crew is dispatched by a secretive government to investigate. By the end of each film, a lone astronaut has been hauled into a special-effects laden “alternate dimension” which eventually leads him back home to save a doomed Earth from man-made catastrophe. In 2001, the astronaut was reborn in spirit form as the “star child” to avert a nuclear war (the nuclear bit explained only in the Arthur C. Clarke novel, written in tandem with the director’s screenplay). In Interstellar, it’s a whole other mind-bending phantasma that saves mankind from drought and plague. Both films are an ambitious blending of science-reality and imagination.

2001's orbiting space station

Director Stanley Kubrick intended 2001: A Space Odyssey to be cinema’s first serious science fiction film. Prior to 2001, all depictions of aliens and outer space were only found in cheesy B-movies – laughable exercises in bad taste with titles such as The Man From Planet X or The Brain from Planet Arous (and let’s not forget Plan 9 From Outer Space, the first movie to gain a “so-bad-it’s-good” following). 2001 was the first film to show an audience a faithful portrayal of moon landings and what it would be like to orbit the earth in space stations. Moonwalkers from the original Apollo missions to today’s “rock star” astronaut Chris Hadfield have called it the most realistic space sci-fi ever made. What’s most remarkable is that production of the film was completed before man ever stepped foot on the moon – which meant that 2001’s shot of the Earth from the moon’s surface was seen in theatres only a few months before the real thing was viewed and captured by humans. Both the film and the astronauts’ photos looked nearly the same.


At Clavius moon base in 2001

Kubrick didn’t intend for 2001 to be such a vague and ambiguous film. He and pioneering sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke started off with a more literal story. Their collaboration was intended to result in Kubrick's film and Clarke's novel being released as complementary projects. But Kubrick altered the film significantly during production when certain elements didn’t translate well from page to screen. The original script for 2001 had narration to guide the audience through the action, but this was dropped when Kubrick found the voiceover trite and distracting. The film worked much better, he thought, left in the abstract. Those who love the film would agree.

So now we have Interstellar, which gives us an indication of what 2001 would have been like with every detail explained along the way. And, to be honest, I found myself thinking “huh?!” just as many times as I did the first time I saw 2001. Despite the near-three-hour running time, Interstellar is packed with enough ideas to fill another hour’s worth of movie. Which is funny, because 2001 has a nearly identical run time, but where plot exposition could have been crammed in, we got lengthy, introspective sequences devoid of dialogue (40 minutes of speech in the entire film) – and the experience is far richer for it.

And I’m not dumping on Interstellar at all. It’s a wondrous piece of cinema full of bold ideas and imagery like I’ve never seen in any film before. By its end, I felt completely displaced – mostly awed, partly disturbed – in a way the original audience of 2001 might have been in 1968. In that regard, writer-director Christopher Nolan achieved the ultimate success a director could hope for.

Interstellar’s strengths transcend its flaws. But those flaws are nonetheless distractions. One is its editing; I had trouble at times figuring who was doing what and why. And then there’s the attempt to cram too much explanation into the dialogue. I appreciated that Nolan wanted us to identify with what we were watching. Some of the exposition enhanced the fun of the movie – for instance, the descriptions of why a wormhole would appear as a three-dimensional sphere, or the various ways in which time moves slower when travelling around different types of phenomena in space. But there were many other details thrown at us with such haste that they only created further questions and gaps in logic. Which made me wonder why this approach would have made 2001 a better film. If we still don’t entirely get what we’re watching, then why not just let us revel in the mystery?

From the stargate sequence in 2001

This especially goes for the ending (which I can’t give away, because it’s byzantine and nonsensical). Let me say that the finale of Interstellar was one of the most rapturous, illusory, and enthralling  moments I’ve seen in a cinema. The final act of 2001 had a similar mind-blowing final reel. Nolan’s great achievement is in creating a spectacular view into new dimensions that rivals what Kubrick gave us in 2001’s “stargate” sequence – considered the foundation of special effects in the decades before CGI came about. (One of the reasons Nolan’s cinematic worlds look so inventive, whether in original works like Inception or the comic-book Batman movies, is that he shuns CGI whenever possible).

The only downfall to Nolan’s approach in Interstellar’s grandest sequence is that he employed a narrative device to explain what our astronaut was experiencing in the new dimension. Which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing had the explanation made sense. But when you’re travelling through new dimensions, how can any rationalization be comprehensible? In that regard, Kubrick did the right thing just letting us experience it. In both films we leave the theatre scratching our heads, but Nolan's attempt to translate the action felt silly at best, insulting at worst. Insulting, how? With Interstellar, we feel stupid for not getting all the science thrown at us. With 2001, we can blame the director, if we feel so inclined.

There were many other moments throughout the film where the details and descriptions took me out of the moment. I don’t have the benefit of being able to re-view the film and quote dialogue for specific examples, but, in general, I found that characters were verbalizing particulars and procedures that would have, in reality, been discussed and drilled into their heads during mission training or other appropriate moments. For instance – the fact that the onboard computer, TARS, was programmed with a sense of humour, or that he was programmed to be dishonest when it was warranted and wouldn’t hurt the mission; I don’t think the crew would be discovering this stuff during liftoff. It was just thrown in for the convenience of moving the story along.

Astronaut Bowman doing a little maintenance on HAL in 2001

You could say that this was artistic licence. Then again, Kubrick took artistic licence by not explaining at all that his onboard computer, HAL, sabotaged the mission because of a neurosis caused by being programmed to both be honest 100% of the time and yet lie about the mission’s purpose – a detail only available to those who read the novel. Some would say that unrealistically timed explanations in movie plots are more satisfying than drawing them out in realistic-but-lackluster scenes. It's easier to have Joe Explainer show up on the scene in the form of a detective or long-lost relative to utter, "It's a shame Bob killed his wife for the insurance money, because she had a terminal illness anyway, but he didn't know that, and now he has to spend the rest of his life in jail."

Others would say that Kubrick’s method compliments the audience’s intelligence by creating a sense of wonder and mystery. No human in 2001 understood why HAL took the actions he did, nor did anyone on-screen understand the monolith’s origin or meaning, nor did astronaut Dave Bowman comprehend his transformation in the stargate. To have the reason exposed by some contrived plot convention would have felt false.

I will be honest and admit that I didn’t like 2001 all that much on first viewing, though I was fortunate that my first experience seeing it was on the big screen during a revival in 1980. The fact that I was 12 years old probably contributed to my befuddlement (I grew up with the action and splashy effects of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).  It wasn’t until the next year that something clicked. Channel flipping on TV, I caught the film at the beginning of the “moon” sequence and was entranced right to the end. I still didn’t entirely get it on a conscious level, but some deeper part of my mind was understanding something. I knew it was leading to that psychedelic fall through the alien stargate and into the surreal bedroom where Dave Bowman would die and be reborn. When the film finished, it was the same feeling I had at the end of Interstellar – stunned by the beauty, but wondering if I’d sleep that night.

Over the years, I came to understand 2001 by reading the novel and delving into all the articles, critiques, and books written about the film – and through countless discussions with fans and detractors, and realizing its influence on the sci-fi movies I grew up with.

The difference was this – after first viewing, I knew I’d want to see 2001 again, but Interstellar, despite its originality and splendor, doesn’t seem to demand a second go ‘round. 2001’s lack of dialogue made me fall in love with its images and ideas, whereas Interstellar’s barrage of verbosity and jam-packed plot will probably make for a tiresome exercise to sit through a second time. I want to see the film again, but I don’t want to hear it.

I’m sure many will disagree with that assessment for legitimate reasons. I know of many people who grew impatient with 2001’s pace (what I call quiet and meditative others call slow and frustrating), and I guess those folks would enjoy delving into Interstellar's dialogue a second or third time to try to grasp all the details.

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"I don't want to [give my own interpretation of the film] because I think that the power of the ending is based on the subconscious emotional reaction of the audience, which has a delayed effect. To be specific about it, certainly to be specific about what it's supposed to mean, spoils people's pleasure and denies them their own emotional reactions."

– Stanley Kubrick interviewed in Eye magazine

(Agel, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Modern Library, pp. 248-49; date unavailable)

The monolith prepares astronaut Bowman for rebirth in 2001

Why politicians shouldn't sue each other

The headline made my heart sink: Robertson Sues LaPointe for defamation.

While living in Singapore, I made a mental note of large and small differences that set our cultures apart, for good and bad. During the infrequent times I had trouble coping, I looked forward to returning to Canada, where I was convinced certain practices just wouldn't happen. Once back home, though, I discovered that things weren't as ideal as I had thought. For instance, I was critical of Singapore's reliance on foreign workers for cheap labour, a policy that does not allow outsiders to feel any belonging to the country they are contributing to, and only makes locals feel resentful toward newcomers for undercutting their wages. I wrote a long blog post comparing the immigration policies of Canada and Singapore, highlighting how Canada recruited immigrants on much healthier terms. But alas, we have long had a "temporary foreign worker" program that I hadn’t been aware of until recent years, and it has been expanding rapidly. Now I witness a fomenting of the same resentment toward foreign workers in Canada.

Another example was Singapore's lack of democratic safeguards, which in Canada prevent ruling parties from intimidating voters or rigging the system in their own favour. And yet I came home to watch our ruling Conservative party employ disinformation campaigns to prevent opposition supporters from voting, while weakening and disparaging Elections Canada, and dismantling many of the public institutions that keep the citizenry educated and informed.

This morning I awoke to yet another reminder of how misguided I was in my criticisms of Singapore. In that city-state, the ruling party has frequently sued members of the opposition for merely expressing the banal opinions and criticisms that are standard in election campaigns in the West. A Singapore opposition leader was famously sued into bankruptcy and eventually jailed for repeated accusations of ruling-party corruption, and the country's history is rife with stories of citizens and politicians who have had their government use the courts to suppress their freedoms of speech and assembly. "That's not supposed to happen in functioning democracies," I would say to whomever tolerated my rants.

It's one of the unwritten tenets of an egalitarian system of government, and something that everyone who goes into politics learns to accept – to deal with slander in the court of public opinion. It's up to those running for public office to provide their own defence, with the electorate acting as jury and judge. Calling an innocent private citizen "corrupt" should certainly be cause for legal action, but for a politician to hide behind a lawyer and the protection of the law is bad political sportsmanship. Making rivals fearful of expressing legitimate viewpoints only stifles democracy at large.

If you think any given elected official is corrupt, you or any other citizen should have the freedom to run for office and make him or her defend that charge in the public arena.

And yet here we have our mayor, Gregor Robertson, launching legal action against his opponent, Kirk LaPointe, for calling him corrupt. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from the current crop of federal Conservatives, who seem to view democracy as a nuisance that threatens the indefinite power they believe they deserve (the number of times they have threatened to sue citizens and opponents is too rich to get into here).

The reason my heart sank at this particular headline is because these kinds of defamation suits are spreading across the political spectrum, to parties I would expect to stand up for democratic traditions. Earlier this year, the Liberal premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, launched a lawsuit against the province’s opposition leader and one of his backbenchers for suggesting she may have been “possibly” involved in a scandal of her government’s making. And now we have Vancouver’s left-leaning mayor, a former New Democratic member of the province’s legislature, suing his right-leaning rival for digging up that old chestnut – “he’s corrupt!” – which has long been an old trope in election campaigns (and one to which the public pays very little heed. I recall Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien winning two of his three majority terms with the "corrupt" label being flung at him from all corners).

It’s not that LaPointe’s accusation has merit. It doesn’t. His charge stems from a secret recording leaked from a union meeting, in which Robertson’s right-hand man on council promised that the city would not expand the contracting out of jobs at city hall. After he left the room, the union decided to make a substantial donation to Robertson’s party, Vision Vancouver. On the surface, that looks shady – trading political favours for donations. But (as pointed out by the Vancouver Courier’s Allen Garr) slowing the contracting out of services has been Vision’s policy since around 2007. And unions have been legally donating to political parties that favour their agendas for as long as unions and political parties have existed. So there’s nothing corrupt about a political party sticking to its public platform, and attracting donations from organizations and individuals who support that platform.

But if LaPointe stands by his charge, then it can be thrown right back his way. One case in point is the former vice president of the Non Partisan Association, the party LaPointe now leads. Rob Macdonald donated just a few dollars shy of $1,000,000 to his party in the 2011 election, which raises the question – was his vice-presidency of the NPA contingent upon the donation? And since Macdonald himself is and was at the time working as a property developer, was that not a conflict of interest for him to be both in a leadership position and a monetary contributor to the party that could, in turn, favour his property development applications?

It certainly stinks, but it’s legal, and there is enough “corruption” on both sides to call the playing field even. But here’s the thing: it’s Gregor Roberton’s responsibility to lay out the above arguments in public debates. Vancouver’s media can easily blow the cover of bullshit off LaPointe’s hackneyed accusation of corruption. Ultimately, however, it’s Robertson’s job to do that for himself. He had the chance at a mayoralty debate on October 26, but as Globe and Mail columnist Frances Bula noted on her blog, when Robertson was confronted about the union donation, “The mayor could have come up with a number of reasonable-sounding arguments and even a counter-attack... Instead, he flopped and floundered... He didn’t even seem to know that it’s been his own party’s longstanding policy not to add to what is already contracted out. He said there was no iron-clad commitment on that.”

Robertson had plenty of time to formulate a counterattack in time for the debate, because LaPointe made the same accusation in the press and on the NPA website five days earlier. But because he lost a debate he could have easily won, Robertson is now being bitter and petulant, using a defamation lawsuit as a “re-do,” to imply, “I was totally caught off guard by that dirty, personal smear, and now I’m doing the rightful thing.” In reality, it’s his way of trying to silence the topic by legal means (expect all those involved to say, “I cannot comment on a matter now before the courts”) simply because he is unable to silence the topic with facts and intellect.

The public should be disturbed when candidates use lawsuits to hush critics and, especially, rival candidates. Certainly, there should be exceptions. Personal defamation along the lines of drug use or spousal abuse should be responded to harshly. But when debating policy and a politician’s actions in office, there needs to be a wide berth to allow for opinion and criticism. The idea accepted in most Western countries is that speech relating to the performance of government is vital to a healthy democracy. Therefore, holding politicians to the same standards of defamation as private citizens only discourages such dialogue.

In the court of public opinion, political candidates should have the skills and fortitude to be their own defence lawyers. Resorting to the courts mid-election is a sign of weakness, not leadership. But I sense that we’re just going to see more of the “sue-me-sue-you blues” in politics, simply because it’s easy and effective. I remember a time when suing political rivals would have been appalling to the electorate, and would have been a sure vote-loser. Today, it seems to be more palatable, and as long as the public doesn’t scoff at the practice, we’ll see much more of it.

Singapore’s ruling party has held on to power for almost 50 years via judicial threats and intimidation, and I witnessed how the tentacles of that operation inflicted damaging forms of suspicion and paranoia on its citizens. I understand that the few examples I outlined does not put us on par with Singapore's abuse of the judiciary, but we could one day end up being no different if we continue to reward politicians who use the courts to fight their political opponents.