In the spirit of “if you can’t beat ’em, emulate ’em”, I am going to shut down Planet Susan. There will be no more pithy posts until the United States government is reopened and the debt ceiling is raised. Planet Susan is a wonderful place, with happiness and thoughtful discourse. I don’t want it polluted with the ugliness and misery here on Planet Earth. So as of this moment, it is shut down. Shuttered. No longer functioning. Kaput. Fini…

You’ll get nothing more from me until it’s done.

So there …{insert Bronx cheer here…}

Don’t Shut It Off

Remember this great scene from Ghostbusters? The ‘man from the EPA’ insists that the spectre-capture team is in violation of some standard or another, and insists the vat of spooks must be shut down. We all know what’s coming, we anticipate it – dread it? – and then it happens.

Well, gentle readers, your esteemed Congressmen and two crazy women of the Tealiban are about to do the same thing by pushing the country over the abyss into default. The horse doc from G’ville who goes by the name of Yoho (ho and a bottle of rum…sorry, couldn’t resist) insists it wouldn’t have any impact. Maybe he’s been injecting himself with those horse tranqs, or has traded in his vet shingle for a degree in global economics from the University of Incredibly Irresponsible. Nevertheless, unless something changes, or someone (Barry O) develops some ‘nads, this will be a shock felt ’round the world, in about the same amount of time it took for the G’buster’s containment vessel to blow through the roof. In fact, unless something major is decided this weekend, I predict you’ll start to see impacts to the market early next week.

Will that be enough to change their positions? Nope. As Marlin Stutzman said, they gotta get something out of all this. That something will be a global financial meltdown. And when it happens? Like the man from the EPA, they will take no responsibility for their actions, and will blame the Dems for the disaster. And their cousin-wedding contingent in those red states will continue to swallow their hypocritical dogma, frankly because they don’t know any better. I sound elitest, you say? Hey, buddy, I got mine. I’m at the age where I won’t feel the pain right away. I’m not looking to buy a house or a car, not dependent on an export business, or even worried particularly about the stock market. In fact, after the meltdown will be a good time to buy stocks, because they will be quite inexpensive.

So after the fall, what will world leaders do? Declare war on us? Invade some third world country to rob them of their resources in an attempt to survive? Interesting notion, but likely no. World leaders will blame us, band together against us and declare economic war. But I predict it won’t come to that. Those folks (Koch Bros) who are funding this clown posse will phone them and say, rather succinctly, “Fix it”. But you can’t put those poltergeists back into the attic, my darlings. Damage done, credibility lost, another major step to self destruction. Well, we lasted 237 years…that’s pretty good, isn’t it?

P.S. The legend under the Koch boys’ picture is “America: meet your new owners”.

Bibi’s Tired Iranian Lines

Here was my response to Roger Cohen’s column in this morning’s New York Times:

Rouhani came to New York to address the UN but really to send a limited signal to the US that the sanctions have worked and Iran is suffering. It’s a limited signal because the hard liners are willing to be Slim Pickens and ride the economic bomb all the way down. Bibi is speaking directly to Barack Obama. Bibi wants to help the Tehran hard liners, knowing that Iran will implode. He wants Obama to delay any substantive discussion about lifting sanctions to ensure that Iran implodes. If Iran implodes, ironically, it opens the way for three possible outcomes: a desperate Iran buying a bomb from North Korea, internal revolution and then external attack from Al Qaeda. Iran is the last bastion of Shiadom that the Sunnis would like to take over to build the putative new Caliphate. Syria is the template for this approach. The challenge for Al Qaeda would be to find enough fighters to carry it off. That’s where Saudi Arabia comes into the equation. That’s the game that’s afoot here. Journalists like Dexter Filkins and Charlie Rose are being used by all sides to bolster their position. I predict the US will drag its feet, and the hard liners will have their way with potentially significant consequences for everyone, but in particular for Israel. Whether Iran gets a bomb or is taken over by Al Qaeda, it still leaves Israel as the last remaining real ‘infidel’ in the Middle East. Bibi, be careful what you ask for: you just might get it.

I know this is fundamentally a rehash of my previous post about Iran, but Roger’s superficial take on the situation was annoying. He should dig deeper and think more broadly.

Now let’s talk a bit more about the shutdown. Representative Marlin Stutzman truly expressed the situation. Here it is:

We’re not going to be disrespected,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) told The Washington Examiner. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

“We’re not going to be disrespected.” By whom? For what? “We have to get something out of this.” To save face? And finally, “And I don’t know what that even is”. We started this revolution, knowing in our hearts that we were right and the American people were on our side, but now it turns out it’s all gone bad, everybody’s mad and we’re stuck, not sure whether to blast our way out or give up. Sounds like a hostage situation to me. Remember this one? Similar situation.

Finally, baseball: and what happened yesterday afternoon and early evening to the Pittsburgh Pirates playing the St. Louis Cardinals?

Here’s the headline:

Wainwright, Cards blank Pirates, take over first place

Brains over brawn, just like I said…

Two wild card games down. Tampa Bay Rays handily beat the Texas Rangers (good thing) and Pittsburgh Pirates body slammed the Cincinnati Reds. Other words come to mind to describe that game, with reference to the Pirates’ fans: boorish, neanderthals, rude, crude and obnoxious…you get the idea.

Johnny Cueto, the Reds pitcher, was harassed beyond the point of any definition of crowd enthusiasm. While Michael and I agreed that Pittsburgh was likely to take the game, I did not anticipate the rabidity of the onlookers. Reminded one of the old days in the Roman Colosseum with the gladiators. Johnny’s lucky to still have his head. There was no excuse for their behavior.

Having said that, what are the Pirate team’s odds of moving ahead? I say poor. Why? Listen, gentle readers, to Grandma Susan explain the finer points of baseball, based on having watched at least 100 games this season…wow…that’s at least 250 hours spent watching …Michael, take exception to my musings if you will, but this is what I believe to be so.

Baseball is both a physical as well as a cerebral sport. Yes, it requires those gentlemen to utilize their brains as well as their muscles. And based on what I saw from Pittsburgh last night, they have the muscle, but do they have the brains? I say Nay.

The stats show that Pittsburgh hasn’t successfully gotten this far in 21 years. I can see why. It is likely this team plays as did the last one that succeeded 21 years ago. In other words, they have not evolved as other teams have (e.g. Oakland, Boston, Tampa Bay) using sabermetric concepts. They just bludgen the ball. A team that does that cannot succeed.

Watching “sabermetric” teams is like solving a really complex math problem, or a clever crossword puzzle with an embedded metapuzzle. You can observe strategy at work in a physical manifestation.

For example: the A’s know that a particular pitcher has a problem fielding bunts. So what do they do? First batter, first pitch: they bunt. The pitcher messed it up (as they knew he would) and the guy was done for that game. He left within 3 innings. Now that’s strategy, not sabermetrics, per se. But teams whose front office adopted sabermetric methods tend to play with a more cerebral approach to the game. They analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the other team, and take advantage of the weaknesses while trying to avoid the strengths. That’s what it takes to win ball games nowadays. And that clearly isn’t what Pittsburgh has demonstrated. A pox on their house, I say. There you have it, folks.

It’s a long way to the World Series, but I’ll make this prediction here and now: the team that wins will be one that combines brains, athleticism and heart to succeed. We’ll see who that ends up being. The field includes the following teams:

Boston Red Sox
Detroit Tigers
Oakland Athletics
Atlanta Braves
Tampa Bay Rays or Cleveland Indians, depending on who wins tonight
St. Louis Cardinals
Pittsburgh Pirates
Los Angeles Dodgers

Boston and Atlanta have played the best for the longest. Detroit is in the American League Central, which is kinda not so challenging. Los Angeles battled their way up from lots of troubles to take the NL West. So who will emerge victorious? Michael is coming down to visit tomorrow, and we’re going to run the stats and place some fictitious bets. We’ll see. Obviously my favorite is Oakland, but my head says probably not. So if it can’t be Oakland, maybe it can be Atlanta. Or Tampa…Anybody but Pittsburgh!

Iran Staggers as Sanctions Hit Economy

Y’all thought I was going to write about the government shutdown today, right? Nope. Waste of time, as nothing will change until someone at Treasury cuts off House of Representative members paychecks. Then we’ll see how pure their dogma remains!

Back to the point of this post: Iran. On October 5th, 2012, i.e. nearly one year ago, I wrote a blog post that I titled “Contrasts”. You can go to Site Admin and look for it. The contrasts I referred to were the difference between Europe and Japan’s efforts to avoid deflationary spirals with Iran’s inflationary problems due to the government’s move to exchange rials for hard currency for “essential items”. It was intended to stimulate Iran’s private sector to increase the flow of goods like meat and other items that were experiencing shortages. But the actual effect was a wholesale flight from the rial to other hard currencies, which pushed the value of the rial from the posted 12,800 to the dollar to about 38,000 to the dollar. The ‘new’ official listed exchange rate is 24,816 to the dollar, but good luck finding those terms if you’re a Tehran housewife trying to buy dinner. There was a slight improvement in the rate after Rouhani won the presidency, but – as the article above indicates – Iran is still in deep trouble. Which explains why Rouhani was in New York last week and talking on the phone to Obama. The writer, Rick Gladstone, uses a bus manufacturer as an example of the problems brought about when the monetary exchange called Swift was barred from doing business with anyone in Iran. The net result for this bus manufacturer was having to make cash transactions with help from relatives in Dubai to buy parts in China. Sometimes the money got there; sometimes it didn’t. If the parts were defective, he had no recourse to send them back in exchange for good parts. In other words, this previously successful businessman has burned through all his savings, and is now on the verge of bankruptcy. As is the country of Iran.

Ahmadinejad was never candid about the problems that existed in the country. He pointed out the high level of cash reserves the government possessed. But what he failed to mention was the inability of the government to access about 75% of those reserves, since they were frozen in bank accounts in the U.S. And they were barred from spending the other 25% anywhere other than the countries to which Iran sells oil, primarily China. This has effectively ruined the country’s economy, which some predict can only last a few more months. By the way, the caption in French above Mahmoud’s head is roughly translated to Iran has no reason to worry…

So Rouhani has no choice but to try to negotiate for an end to sanctions. He wasn’t shy about that when he came calling last week. But his time line and the rest of the civilized world’s time line may not be on par. But one has to wonder: if things get that bad in Iran, what could happen? Maybe three possible outcomes: revolt of the masses sick and tired of being sick and tired; capitulation on the part of the Iranian government on its nuclear program, and the lifting of the sanctions; or an invasion of a weakened Iran by Al Qaeda, with the express goal of transforming Iran from the primary, remaining Shia stronghold to another element of the purported Sunni caliphate. Wouldn’t that be a surprise, and a big ole’ kick in the head for the boys and girls at Foggy Bottom?

One last note – couldn’t resist this. Ryan Lizza’s piece about the events leading to the shutdown was entitled “Where the GOP’s Suicide Caucus Lives”. Another writer came up with a similar label about them: they’re “lemmings with suicide vests”…funny…hey, gotta see the humor in all this right?

The Shadow Commander

In this week’s The New Yorker magazine, Dexter Filkins wrote a rather astonishing story about a character by the name of Qassem Suleimani. Also this week, Ted Cruz engaged in performance art on the floor of the Senate. He performed 20+ hours of public speaking, quickly dubbed a ‘fauxlibuster’ on Twitter.

What do these two guys have in common? How are they different? Let’s discuss…

First off, who is this guy Suleimani? Iranian…Republican Guard…veteran of the Iran/Iraq war…apparently from Dexter’s piece, the controller of most all things middle east, at least in the Shia world these days. Responsible for helping bring Al Qaeda into Iraq after things started going badly for Americans there (you know: 15 minutes after the fall of Baghdad and the removal of the Saddam statue). Responsible for bringing Hezbollah into the Syrian conflict. Hard liner. Obviously the action arm of the mouthpiece of the Iranian revolution, Ahmadinejad.

And this guy Cruz? Ivy League law graduate, Hispanic roots, Senator from Texas and Tea Party darling of the moment..an identified troll.

How are they alike? In some ways, they are both terrorists. Both use ‘it’s my way or else you’re evil’ rhetoric. Both seem to strike fear in the hearts of their colleagues.

How are they different?

Ted is all about becoming the New Newt, making outrageous statements that are extensively covered by the media, and generally trying to be the center of the Tealiban universe. Qassem prefers to maintain a low profile…in fact, you must admit until I wrote this you’d never even heard of the guy, right?

So why am I writing this piece?

Because I believe both of them will be pawns in a major chess game that could well change the arc of current events.

What is happening in Syria is the tip of the iceberg atop a boiling cauldron of change throughout the middle east. What is happening on the floor of the Senate with the “Ted Talk” is the tip of the ice cube atop a big gulp of liquid nitroglycerine. I would argue that, metaphorically speaking, the GOP and Iran are about to pass each other on the road to transformation. Let me explain.

Why all of a sudden did Dexter write about this guy? Did someone put him up to it? Are the conciliatory overtures currently coming from Iran a direct challenge to Suleimani’s influence and power? Sure has all the appearances of a power struggle to me.

Ted is a one man 24 hour news cycle. Insightful articles have been written about him and his aims by Molly Ball of The Atlantic and Alex Pareene of Salon. Reading both articles, one could come to the conclusion that Ted and Rand Paul are currently in a power struggle to be “The Big Dunker” of the Tea Party. The Republican Party is struggling to figure out who it wants to put up in the next election cycle. Two ‘safe’ candidates have failed to capture those GOP hearts and minds. Is it time for a bomb-thrower to make it to the top? Ted and Rand are striving to see who can be the more outrageous and alienate the most GOP mainstreamers to earn the title of “The Biggest Loser”. In doing so, both hard-liners expect to take over as the party favorite in the 2016 Presidential election.

Conversely, Iran is struggling to figure out how to transition from the bomb-thrower Ahmadinejad to an establishment candidate. They apparently figured out that the isolationist, bombastic and scary point man got them sanctions and threats of attack from stronger neighbors, both Muslim and Jewish, even if the U.S. turned out to be a paper tiger. So maybe they see the same handwriting on the wall I described in my previous piece. It’s better to compromise in order to survive. The Tea Party thinks in order to survive, it must never compromise. Interesting, eh?

I’ll finish my piece with a last, big thought:

Words Really Do Matter.

Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels knew that well, and ensured that the putative Fuehrer continually offended the elites, and used anti-Semitic rabidity to appeal to the baser instincts of his following. In 1990’s Russia, a guy named Vladimir Zhirinovsky behaved the same way, until it was determined that his father was Jewish. Cruz has taken a page right out of Goebbel’s and Lenin’s playbook. He accuses his opponents of allegedly doing what he is in fact doing; of believing what he himself espouses.

Here’s a verbatim comment on John Cassidy’s piece about Ted in the same on-line edition of the The New Yorker as Dexter’s. The author’s name is Carlian Schwartz. Note: the ACA is the Affordable Care Act, affectionately (or otherwise) known as Obamacare.

I was offended by some of Ted Cruz’s comparisons of the ACA to the Nazis–as was Senator McCain, who, unlike me, didn’t lose his family in the Holocaust.

Mr. Cruz should have tried “Dancing With the Stars” instead of showing what a discredit to the Senate, to Princeton, and to Harvard Law School he is with his mouth.

Who is this woman, you ask? This is the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Latin America. She was a socialist guerrilla, arrested and imprisoned by a military dictatorship. After she was released, she went to school and became an economist. Who is this woman?

She is the sitting President of the up-and-coming country of Brazil.

Why am I speaking about Dilma Vana Rousseff today?

Because she has cancelled her yearly trip to the United States.

Why did she cancel her trip?

Because of Little Eddie’s revelations about the NSA spying on her and others in the Brazilian national oil company, Petrobas.

Why is the NSA spying on Brazil and Petrobas?

Apparently, because they say it’s necessary.

We can go through the back and forth relative to this, and I’m sure Brazilians aren’t the only one whose emails are being examined by ‘gran hermano’ (Big Brother in espanol). In Portuguese, older brother is irmao mas velho with a tilde over the first a…I know, TMI.

Here’s the point: who the devil do we think we are? I seriously doubt Congress had the depth and extent of spying in mind when they approved the much-abused Patriot Act back in 2001. It was passed as a knee-jerk reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center Buildings, in an attempt to prevent another. If the attack was a once in a millenium success, which I maintain it was, then we have given away our reputation as a world leader and gotten nothing but grief in return. And this time I cannot blame the hapless Republicans for this coup d’etat. The current administration has allowed – nay encouraged – the NSA to run roughshod over the rest of the world, civilized and otherwise. Maybe not overtly, but by being distracted by the nonsense being shoveled out in D.C. and not exercising real executive authority to rein in snooping.

But the interesting part of all this is: how has the NSA reacted to these damning revelations? Are they chagrined? Chastened? Concerned about the long term implications of other world leaders refusing to meet with the President? Nope. They are plugging the holes that gave Little Eddie access in the first place. They are not addressing the morality of their actions; they are trying to ensure we don’t know about what they intend to do next time.

But I have the solution (of course…) What is wanted here is the Point of View gun, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Oh, if only it could be held by an intelligent woman, and aimed at the collective set of ignorami that make choices about who to target for eavesdropping. What would be the result?

Boom!
(These would be the next set of words spoken by these dolts, in unison):

We have hidden behind non-existent threats to security to satisfy our need to control the uncontrollable. We must stop thinking like neanderthal cavemen and start realizing our broad-based data collection hurts more than it helps.

Pretty good, huh? Recall you don’t get more than a couple sentences from a guy hit by the POV gun, so you gotta hit him more than a few times to get a whole paragraph.

Boom!

We will admit to the world the depth and extent of our spying, and apologize to everyone we targeted unnecessarily, like Brazil, everyone in the EU and the penguins in Antarctica. We will discontinue this unnecessary monitoring and send flowers and a free pass to Disney World to Edward Snowden.

Wow, this is cool – one more, just for fun?

Boom!

Drones are bad and we’ll stop using them to blow up American citizens.

If only such a weapon of mass construction actually existed…

Swimming in the community pool yesterday with Erik and Emily the mermaid, I got to thinking about the cast of characters in the current Syria ‘crisis’. The more I thought about it, hanging on the edge in the deep end of the pool, the more confused I got. So Monday mid-morning, I went to the Internet to get something of a score card, or a ‘who’s who’ in the area to try to sort this out. This is a summary of what I concluded:

Alawites run Syria. Alawites are an off-shoot sect of Shia Islam;
Syria is aligned with Iran;
Iran is Shia-dominated;
Iraq is now dominated by Shia;
Lebanon is Shia;
Hezbollah runs Lebanon;
Iraq, Hezbollah and Iran are aligned to help Syria;
Saudi Arabia is Sunni;
Pakistan is predominantly Sunni;
The Taliban are Sunni;
The Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni;
Chechens are Sunni;
Chechens are, have been and will continue to be a real problem for Russia;
Egypt just threw out the Muslim Brotherhood, and is currently supported by Saudi Arabia…likely because of inroads Shia are making in the Egyptian Parliament;
Pakistan is nuclear;
Syria harshly put down a Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama, Syria in the 80’s;
Israel is not any kind of Muslim;
Israel is nuclear;
Israel reacts strongly to perceived threats.

So given all those facts, here’s some likely realities for the near term:

Congress will reject the call to strike Syria with some form of attack;
That rejection will send a strong message to the Saudis, the Taliban, & Pakistan that the U.S. is no longer going to be manipulated into fighting their battles for them; so just as Tom Cole, Congressman from Oklahoma said this morning on NPR,

Syria represents a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia

Al Qaeda is Sunni;
Al Qaeda is the real strength in the forces fighting Assad.
Al Qaeda is behind the continuing civil strife in Iraq with daily car bombs aimed at Shia neighborhoods;
Hezbollah has left Lebanon to its own devices while it goes to Syria trying to defend the nearly last bastion of Shia dominance;

So When (not if) Assad falls, then
Iraq falls; and then
Lebanon falls.

So that leaves Iran as the only Shia stronghold left.

In the not-too-distant future, Iran will possess the capability to build a nuclear weapon. If they don’t have it now, they’re going to buy it from North Korea.

The entire region will have become a nesting ground for Al Qaeda with the exception of Iran and Israel;

Iran has been weakened by years of sanctions, which were heavily promoted by the U.S.;
Iran’s only option left is the nuclear option to threaten its Sunni neighbors (recall the uprising in 2009 hastily put down by the Republican Guard in Iran);
Threatening their immediate neighbors anywhere close by with the nuclear option spells massive destruction for all of them, including Iran; and thus I come to my baffling conclusion:

Iran, Israel, Russia and the U.S. now have a common enemy in the resurgent Al Qaeda and should band together to find some reasonable solutions to the immediate problems in Syria

Having come to that conclusion just before lunch, I return from Fajita Salad at Ay Jalisco to find the headlines from the New York Times:

Kerry Floats a Deal on Arms, and Russia and Syria Seize It

Maybe Russia has begun to figure all this out. It would appear that we haven’t. Or have we? My really cynical side says that Obama, being the clever man he is, has figured this out. Further, he realizes – like me – there really isn’t a bloody thing the U.S. can do about it. So why not make hay at home while the sun still shines? Obama is playing a three-steps-ahead game of chess while the Republicans are playing Candyland. He thought he was luring the Republicans into the trap of voting against this ‘Brer Rabbit’ punch. But Kerry’s goofball response and Russia’s jumping on the suggestion changes the equation considerably.

So will this change the inevitable outcome? Nope…the inevitable will occur when it occurs. The impact on the U.S.? A spike in oil prices because of instability in the middle east that affects 10% of our imports – imports that could be made up elsewhere, but the price will still be higher. The impact on Israel? Good question, but over the longer term, it’s likely that Israel will be fighting for its life when Al Qaeda emerges victorious in the region and can turn its attention to getting rid of the ‘infidels’. When this occurs, and Israel is surrounded by the resurgent Al Qaeda fighting machine, who will be held to blame? Why the U.S., of course. And who will everyone recall that wouldn’t approve a simple request to fire a few cruise missiles at Syria? Obama will be long out of office by then, and the new Republican President Jeb Bush will have to sort all this out.

Post-script: Charlie Rose snuck into Damascus apparently on Friday and had a live interview with Bashar Al-Assad on Saturday. That’s why Al Hunt from Bloomberg had to substitute for Charlie on Friday night with talking heads Jackie Calmes (I think Al was calling her Jackie Collins), Mark Halperin and David Ignatius of the hair implants. What a coup! That man is nothing if not amazing…

Post-post-script: Watched the interview. Assad believes everyone in Syria loves him and the terrorist rebels were responsible for the chemical attack. Guess he and the Paulster have a lot in common in their thinking…Dangerous place to be right now, Randy boy…

Click on the Blue Words, Cry Havoc. Then hit the return button and come back for the rest of the story.
Cry Havoc

Those words, now referred to as “cliche” by Wikipedia, are from Act 3 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In that play, Shakespeare is referring to the ‘dogs of war’ as Mark Antony’s troops, battling Brutus and Cassius to avenge the death of Caesar.

My, my – do we not see a similar tragedy playing out on the steps of the Capital building in Washington, D.C. over the issue of how to deal with Assad and Syria?

So for those of you who have been in a coma for the past ten days or so, let’s recap:

On August 21st, nearly 1500 men, women & children were hit with Sarin gas by the government of Bashar al Assad. The regime launched the attack on a suburb of Damascus in the early hours, killing mostly individuals in basements trying to avoid falling victim to ordinary shelling.

In a speech on August 20, 2012, President Obama said this:

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized…that would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

That would change my equation – it’s difficult to say exactly what that means. But over most of last week, there was an assumption that it means the use of retaliatory strikes on military targets in Syria by cruise missiles launched from American ships in the Mediterranean Sea. So let’s take a peek at a map of the middle east area and see what that looks like:

Obviously it wouldn’t be hard to access Syria for those ships. Obviously there would be fallout, political, economic and possibly physical, on the adjoining country of Lebanon, and potentially on Israel. The facts are by now fairly indisputable except to those apologists for the regime, primarily Russia and Republibertarian candidate Rand Paul. At a time when we should be having honest and factual debate, Rand suggests that the rebels bombed themselves in order to pin the blame on Assad. Guess it’s possible…but extremely unlikely … and tres gauche being verbalized by a sitting Senator in the United States Congress.

The Republicans won’t be back in town until next week, and they’re in no hurry to get dragged into this mess. Most are all over the map in response to the call for retaliation. But the reality is: by the time they debate it and vote, the impact will be lost and the misery will drag on in that unholy circle of hell called Damascus. Launching a few cruise missiles to blow up a few buildings that will likely kill a few – or many – civilians is a mistake. Nothing will change on the ground in the battle between Assad and his opposition. Nothing will change until one or the other emerges victorious, with the other side annihilated – along with lots more innocent civilians. But let’s take a step back away from this situation, and return to Julius Caesar.

In the play, Shakespeare explains to late 16th century Londoners how Julius Caesar, a decent and honorable man and leader of his country, was brought down politically and ultimately lethally by some jealous conspirators. The result was retaliation from the other side in the form of Marc Antony, his trusted army general, and Octavian, Caesar’s son. The retaliation was successful, leading to the deaths of the conspirators. But in the play he wrote 7 years later, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare informs the masses about how the Antony/Octavian partnership fell apart, leading to just about everybody’s demise – except maybe the snake. By the way, if you aren’t interested in wading through the challenges inherent in Shakespeare, you can watch the old HBO series Rome to see how this tragedy took place. You can catch it on HBO-GO, and watch it on your Ipad.

And so, gentle readers, we take instruction from history and good theater. Here it is: from chaos comes only more chaos and misery, and in the end everybody dies and the empire falls.

The political football du jure is bombing Syria. Congress will return next week and likely vote down any retaliatory strike, amidst braying commentary and despicable posturing. As such, this means we will do as much for the Syrian people as we did for the Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1941. Thousands if not tens of thousands more Syrian citizens will be killed by their own government in the coming weeks and months. The opposition is radicalized, but frankly so is the rest of the middle east, in case you haven’t noticed. Egypt, Yemen, Libya – every country in which the “Arab Spring” took place has either returned to dictatorship or is now run by warlords. Saudi Arabia has been radical since its formation, but we don’t talk about that. But what about Turkey? Lebanon? Israel? Jordan? I find it difficult to believe that they will remain unscathed by this brouhaha. All this chaos will just produce more chaos, and the loss of life for innocent civilians. How does it end? More than likely with the implosion of nearly all the countries in the middle east, including Israel.

Sometimes I feel like the child version of the Woody Allen character, Alvy Singer, in Annie Hall. Recall the flashback scene when his mother takes him to the doctor because he’s depressed. Little Alvy says he’s depressed because the universe is expanding, and that means someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything. His mother’s response? “What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!”

In my case, whatever happens in Syria, there is very little, if anything, I can do about it, other than to be like the soothsayer in Julius Caesar, whose famous line is: “Beware the Ides of March”. I say beware the implosion of countries that have unstable next door neighbors with nuclear weapons. Those nukes could end up in some very angry people’s hands, and then the universe will be expanding in Vero Beach, and most everywhere else in the U.S. of A. I know, there I go again: I just need to just get over it, right?

P.S. The .wav file at the beginning is from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, voiced by the wonderful Christopher Plummer. Just tidying up details…

It’s the summer of 1977. I am a full year away from graduating from college, poor as a churchmouse, but excited about the fact that I just might finish college and get a real job making real money. Movies are shown on the lawn at the student union. First Carrie, then Network. Finally, Annie Hall. Annie’d come out the previous April, to so-so reviews in still-provincial Gainesville. But I talked my friends into going to see it, because we’d seen Take the Money and Run and really liked it.

Annie Hall was hilarious, and sad and poignant and complex. My friends hated it. I loved it.

So here we are 36 years later. I’m flipping through the channels, desperately seeking some distraction from boring late-night television (I am a chronic insomniac, so I have to be totally exhausted to get to sleep and STAY asleep). I happen on some obscure channel like Current TV before it became Al Jazeera and there’s a conversation going on between Ed Norton and Elvis Mitchell.

Now those two names together just sound funny. If you’re old, you think of Ed Norton as Ralph Kramdon’s buddy and neighbor. Elvis…well, is Elvis.

But no, Ed Norton is a fabulous young writer/actor/director and Elvis Mitchell was the movie critic for the NY Times for a while. Ed Norton is incredibly talented, having saved Salma Hayak from excess and sloth (good combo, eh?) in editing and finishing one of my favorite movies, Frida, about the Mexican artist Frida Calho. Elvis Mitchell has the longest dreadlocks I’ve ever seen, and is a really lousy interviewer…but I digress.

Here’s where I’m going with this. In the course of their conversation, Ed mentions a book to Elvis, When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins
by Ralph Rosenblum. I downloaded the book on my Kindle, and was astonished at what I read. A couple of my favorite movies were likely saved by the editing of this guy, Rosenblum. A Thousand Clowns sort of started the movie look that led to Butch Cassidy-type insert of sepia-toned photos and old video to liven things up. Ralph invented that. He made The Producers for a totally insane Mel Brooks (no big surprise there). But he saved the best for nearly the last chapter in the book: how Ralph and his editing transformed Woody Allen’s neurotic ramblings into Annie Hall.

Ralph explains that the rough cut of Annie Hall was “an untitled and chaotic collection of bits and pieces that seemed to defy continuity, bewilder its creators, and…held the least promise for popular success.” Doesn’t sound very encouraging, does it? Woody wanted to call it Anhedonia, meaning the inability to experience pleasure. The first cut of the movie wasn’t much about the character Diane portrayed; it was all Woody all the time. It was two hours and twenty minutes long. It was supposed to take place in Woody’s mind. Picture spending that amount of time running around a small, Jewish man’s brain. Too much…

The story Ralph tells in this book is filled with outtakes from the movie that are really, pretty funny … but apparently didn’t work in the final cut. Marshall Brickman, Woody’s frequent collaborator, said “…all that stuff that Woody and I had written was cerebral, surreal, highly intellectual, overliterate, overeducated, self-conscious commentary.” Oh, let me have some more, please!

So Ralph goes on to tell the story of how he, Marshall, Woody and Ralph’s assistant went on to edit the film into what eventually became the final version of Annie Hall. I think these lines sum up what happened: “…the quality was all there in the first cut. Anyone reading the unabridged shooting script would be overwhelmed by the authors’ comic genius. The special job in editing this picture was to find the plot amid all the brilliant skits.”

I have made small videos in the past – a couple of them are on this site. I can assure you that my amateur efforts are just that – but from the heart. However, the process of making 4 to 8 minute videos often took multiple hours to finish. This taught me a lot about how hard it is to make a story work on a screen. Editing is tricky, and sometimes you have to just jump in and hope for the best. Sometimes inspiration hits in the middle, and you completely change what you were trying to say. Other times you think what you made is fabulous, only to have people turn to you and ask, what were you thinking? So, Ralph Rosenblum, wherever you are (Ralph died in 1995 at the young age of 69), bless you. Your talents made Annie Hall a pleasure to watch. I hope you’re still working that movieola in heaven.