Bringing Creativity and Intelligence Together

There is a tasty bit of rumor going around concerning the unrest in the Middle East.

According to the Febraury 23 broadcast of the CBC radio program   ’As It Happens’, online copies of Gene Sharp’s online book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation ( in Arabic translation ), has been floating around the Middle East for the past few years.

Some people would say that the tactics used by demonstrators across the region bear similar resemblances to similar uprisings in Eastern Europe: they occupy symbolic locations of their respective cities; they establish tent villages; and they refuse to leave until they achieved their principal goal — toppling the dictator. And, perhaps most importantly, they avoid violence, even when provoked.

This idea  that these demonstrations are, in fact, the result of an organized plan following a concrete and proven strategy is a perspective that has not been front and center in the news media.  Perhaps this is a case of the image being taken as truth.  Chaos is taken to be spontaneous disorganization when what we are seeing is, in fact, it is the intentioned result of a specific strategy planned over the space of years.

From Dictatorship to Democracy: a Conceptual Framework for Liberation was initally published  in 1993 in the Khit Pyaning (The New Age Journal) the request of exiled Burmese dissient U Ting Maung Win, but because Sharp didn’t have a background on the political situaton in Burma, he wrote a general prescription that identified weaknesses of dictatorships in general.  Since that time, that essay has been revised and simplified into a  final work that is less than 100 pages.  It condenses the collective experiences of 40 years of struggle against dictatorship into a practical manual of action.  The brevity and simplicity of this book has enabled it to be translated into over 25 languages and distributed widely via the Internet.

The thesis of this book itself is quite simple: how does one overthrow a dictatorship?

After exploring and rejecting the options of armed opposition, guerilla warfare and intervention by foreign powers, Sharp goes on to explain a dictatorship in terms of the Chinese parable of the Monkey Master:

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Over the past few months, many of my volleyball-playing friends have pooh-poohed my organizing wallyball for the Calgary Outdoor Club.  They believe that wallyball wasn’t a ‘real sport’ and had no place in pantheon of court sports.

They could not be more wrong.

After playing wallyball for the last 2 years, I can attest to the fact that the game is a great deal faster and more intense than volleyball.  The reason that the sport doesn’t receive the attention it deserves is because it is played inside of an enclosed area where there is no place for spectators to watch and witness the skill and intense play of wallyball.  However, because wallyball is the newcomer to the sports world, it’s up to wallyball to prove its superiority over volleyball.

For those not familiar with the sport, wallyball is volleyball played on a racquetball court.  The word ‘wallyball’, in fact, is a contraction of its original name, ‘wall-volleyball’ or ‘rebound volleyball’.  About 80% of the rules and 100% of the skills of volleyball are immediately applicable to wallyball, with a small portion of new rules to take into account the smaller playing area and walls.

” … one could say that the ‘scoring area’ of wallyball is significantly smaller than volleyball, making it harder to score points.  As a result, rally times are extended, leading to a more challenging workout and greater speed of play.”

Let us assume that, when we compare the two sports, the competing teams are intermediate or better.  They are able to effectively bump, set and spike reasonably consistently.  While beginners do play volleyball and wallyball, sometimes their lack of skill decreases the level of play and intensity for both sports.  However, unlike wallyball, volleyball tends to eliminate evern fairly experienced players through the use of the ‘killer serve’  — a serve so fast that any return attempted by the beginner knocks the ball out of play.

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Last week I took a pilgrimage to the Edmonton Fringe Festival and watched 13 plays over 4 days.   Overhead, the haze from the forest fires in British Columbia cast a pall on the weather — that and the rain.

Fortunately, we had decided against taking our bikes in favor of taking the Edmonton Trolley from Jasper Avenue to the Fringe Grounds.   The trolley with the most character was the Melbourne Trolley.  It is also where we met Gregor the beetle. (more about that later)  Also, The Fringe Festival had made a deal with Edmonton Transit to offer free rides from the grounds every day after 6 pm.

The Edmonton Fringe Festival is the largest Fringe festival in North America and offers hundreds of plays from all over the world.  These plays are  usually composed of one or two actors with a minimal set and last between an hour and an hour and a half.

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Rick Mercer has to be one of the ballsiest Canadians I have ever met.

Between his ankle biting work on ‘Talking to Americans’ to the antics he gets up to with Canadian politicians, it is difficult to know if there’s anything in this world the Rick is afraid of.

This book was a fascinating read.  In doing this review, I surfed around the internet to see if there were any reviews of it.  Sadly, there were no in depth discussions of the book anywhere.  Many sites just cut and pasted from author’s  posting on Amazon.com.  So I feel pretty smug about being one of the first in the world to read this book and communicate my impressions of it.  It’s a real rush to be ‘first’ in anything online.

The reason this book was chosen is because many of my clients and contemporaries depend upon, to a greater or lesser extent, the production, sale, refining and marketing of oil and gas.  And even while some of them may not be directly involved in the oil and gas industry, many of them have oil and gas companies as clients.

Here we go!

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