Saturday, August 31, 2013

Bark or Bite


The good news is, American missiles won’t be flying toward Syria today. The bad news is, we just kissed most of the credibility we had in the bank goodbye with President Obama’s decision to seek approval from Congress for a strike on Syria -- after all the run-up that has already taken place. If Congress says no to an attack, President Obama will have little choice but to follow British Prime Minister David Cameron’s lead and stand the military down.

Does that mean we will have given Mr. Assad the green light to continue to use chemical weapons? We have green-lighted innumerable atrocities up to this point, so we might well wonder what’s different now.

Personally, I feel the time for messaging has long since passed. If Mr. Assad personally gave the orders to use chemical weapons, as we have charged, he is already a war criminal of the first order, right up there with Hitler and Pol Pot. If he sees a green light here and resumes the use of such weapons, that should be a green light for us to send a lot more than a message. We will have no reasonable choice – if we want our credibility back -- but to take out Assad – or arrest him and put him on trial. Will that be Iraq II? Can we remove Assad from power, face down Iran and Russia, and let the remaining Syrian factions determine their own fate (which means fighting it out)?

We cannot effect real change, unfortunately, without getting our hands dirty – and if we’re not prepared to do that, we should indeed stay out of Syria and take our credibility lumps. The last war we can take credit for winning (and not solo credit) ended almost 70 years ago. We’ve been tinkering around with war since then, at a great cost to the lives of our young men, and these days, women.

A Syrian woman interviewed on the radio this morning quoted a proverb to the effect that the louder and longer a dog barks, the less it’s apt to bite. We need to stop barking and bite something, or else put the muzzle on and go back to bed.


Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Hearing the Dinner Bell


For the better part of two years, the Obama administration has told us that all options are on the table to deal with the crisis in Syria. The table is set, and dinner is about to be served.

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry’s words of warning were clear: there was no question that chemical weapons had been used on civilians – a moral obscenity, and the clear crossing of the so called red line had occurred.  It wasn’t all that long ago that another Secretary of State, Colin Powell, displayed graphic evidence, or so we were given to believe, of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Ah, but this is different, right? Syria really does have chemical weapons. And apparently, the regime no longer has compunctions about using them. But as for moral outrage about this, do you think it might be possible that at least one of the 100-thousand-plus civilians who died by what we might call conventional means may have suffered equally horrible or even more agonizing deaths than the current nerve gas victims? The red line was drawn in a strange place.

What we have been learning the hard way about the Middle East is that dictatorships have served as artificial lids on boiling pots. Military action on our part won’t turn down the heat in Syria.

Is the red line really about U.S. credibility? In the case of Syria, we lost it two years ago. So is firing off a few missiles really going to send the message to Iran and/or Russia that we’re not to be trifled with? They’ve been trifling with us a long time. What is different about this moment?

To my mind, there is only one justification for military action: obtaining control of the chemical weapons or destroying them so that the Assad regime can’t use them on civilians anymore and so that they don’t fall into the wrong hands. Unless military force attains those goals, it’s a waste of time and resources. Our attention might better be paid to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by this conflict, many living in desperate situations in countries that can’t handle them.

If we really have to sit down to dinner, it might be a good time for someone to say grace – and pray hard before we pick up the knife and fork.








Monday, August 19, 2013

Thankless Jobs



These jobs I would never do. I don’t care how much I was paid. Am I talking about cleaning sewers or working in a mortuary? Nope

OK, well I probably wouldn’t do those either, but today I’m talking about customer service work – being on the other end of a phone line with someone who has a problem with a product.

The thing that amazes me is how cheerful and cooperative most of these folks are. Their jobs largely consist of saying the same thing over and over to a succession of callers, some of whom are angry. It’s not the customer service person’s fault that something was wrong with the product or it wasn’t delivered, but these are the individuals who have to absorb customer frustration, belligerence – and even threats.

True, you sometimes get connected to one of these folks who are trained to dodge your questions or not listen to you. But that’s because the company they work for has trained them to deliver that message. I’ll bet relatively few of them enjoy it.

Just because I hate doing this dance, if it seems like it’s welcome, I try to chat up these folks a little bit. Maybe I’ve been to the city or town where their call center is. Often, they have unusual names, especially the women. I talked to one this morning, for instance, whose name was Timber. No, she told me, neither of her parents worked for the Forest Service – it was just the only name they could agree on when she was born.

Yes, I even try talking to the people in India – but to Western ears, they all have unusual names, which they often ditch in favor of something American-sounding.

Look, these folks go to work every day – even on the days when they have serious problems of their own and don’t feel like being nice to anybody -- but they somehow manage to do it. This is true not only of call center people, but of anybody who has to wait on others. If I were a waiter in an Italian restaurant, the first customer who gave me a problem would have a lap full of clam sauce, and I probably wouldn’t bother to close the door on my way out.

So if your job involves serving others, and you can do it well and be consistent about it, you have this writer’s deep sympathy and undying admiration.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Send Out the Clowns



 The flap over the now infamous Missouri State Fair rodeo clown’s spoof of President Obama is not just a simple tempest in a teapot.  It only adds to my wonderment at the nature of humor. For years, I have asked myself why some who make one quip perceived as racist have to quit their jobs, weep and gnash their teeth in eternal banishment while others get away with it, even make a way-more-than-comfortable living at it.

For decades, Don Rickles packed auditoriums in Vegas. Bill Maher would seem to be his logical successor, with shtick full of comments about blacks, Asians and others that are clearly racist -- but most of us laugh anyway. On the female side, there are Joan Rivers and perhaps her successor, Sarah Silverman, whose main goal seems to be to shock us.

Many comedians work “dirty” these days, with shtick full of f-words. Personally, I think Robin Williams is a stitch without the injection of such language, but he does it in concerts. Maybe that’s just me. When I was young I laughed very hard at Red Skelton, from whose lips a dirty word never issued on stage or screen.

In one of those famous Woody Allen movies whose titles all run together in my head, Alan Alda, playing a TV star, is seen telling a group of up-and-comers, “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny!” Sometimes it’s about the material. The joke just doesn’t work. Or the comedian can’t make it work.

Is it about conscious – or even unconscious – intention? The Missouri rodeo clown could have been just plain mean. But were those who made fun of Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, Clinton or Carter any less mean? Does Obama “deserve” it any less than they? I return to Bill Maher, who makes jokes about Obama’s race on practically every show.

Maybe it’s about the comedian internally laughing along with us, bringing to the surface attitudes many of feel we have to suppress or are afraid to recognize in ourselves. Prejudices, if you look at them from a distance, are actually fuuny, largely because they make no sense. But there’s a chord that has to resonate someplace in us to bring out the laugh.

As you can see, I haven’t begun to figure this out, but I’m not sure the myriad of minds out there better than my own have figured it out either. Don’t even think about applying concepts like fairness or consistency to this problem. You will fail miserably, as I have.


Monday, August 12, 2013

Real Journalists


California Senator Dianne Feinstein may have put her foot in it up to the ankle as she introduced a bill that would shield journalists from criminal investigations related to their work. She made it clear that her measure was intended to protect real reporters, defined as those who draw a salary -- as opposed, I guess, to screwball bloggers with 10 or so faithful readers....er...like me.

There are lots of people out there who would love to be “real” reporters and be paid a decent salary, though such positions are fewer and farther between, as traditional news organizations that could actually pay salaries have drastically shrunk.

But I do know what DiFi is trying to say. Now that journalism has been democratized, anyone can have a platform, like the one I’m standing on right now. Journalism is one of those professions that many people think they can do without the least bit of training. They have eyes, ears, noses, and may be plugged farther in than the lame-stream media people in the big building down the street.

I used to work in a tourist town. Tourism involves promotion and marketing, and it seemed that at every public meeting, somebody would stand up and offer some whizbang magic bullet that would double the number of visitors to town overnight, and wondered why those in the business didn’t have the brains to see a solution that was right in front of them. It didn’t matter that the head of the convention and visitors bureau in the city had a degree or two in this subject, or that those running hotels actually had gone to a university to study their industry, and might even have a decade or three of experience in it.

Many parents are experts on how to educate children, and wonder why their kids’ credentialed teachers can’t do it and why they pay taxes to support overly compensated school district administrators, some of whom have doctoral degrees. Or your great aunt has a family recipe that has healed what’s ailing you a lot faster than the Harvard-educated doc with all those expensive pills.

But isn’t there something to be said for journalists whose passions have prodded them to get the training and put in the time practicing their craft, who’ve been around the block a few times, know when they’re being flim-flammed and where the bodies are buried, and have learned how to tell you the stories you need to see, hear, or read? They probably wouldn’t be in that profession over a period long enough to have acquired those skills unless someone paid them along the way.

So Senator, I hear what you’re saying. But maybe there’s a better way of saying it.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Wake-Up Calls

So I’m minding my own business, getting ready for bed, when the smartphone makes the most God-awful sound I’ve ever heard. It’s an alert tone, and the phone vibrates, too. I thought, earthquake? Tsunami? Al Qaeda? No, it was an Amber Alert, coming from a town more than 500 miles away, about a suspected child kidnapping.

Now I am all in favor, of course, of rescuing children and bringing kidnappers to justice. But do I want to be jolted into a heart condition by what amounts to a “be on the lookout” advisory? Such warnings should be limited to threats that could affect my or my neighbors; or community’s immediate safety, IMHO.

Fortunately, I can turn the Amber Alerts off on my phone (not that easy a task!). I also learned that there are several gradations of alerts – vaguely reminiscent of the Bush administration’s infamous color-coding system to warn us of a terrorist attack. I believe many institutions, and even a country or two, still use this kind of scheme. They also seem to agree that red is a bad thing – no political statement intended.

But the smart phone’s gradations include "Severe" alert. The next highest one up is "Extreme" alert, though I can’t for the life of me decide what the heck’s the difference between those two. Then there’s the "Presidential" alert. That one is apparently mandatory – the phone won’t allow me to turn it off.  I guess if we get one of those, we’re in really deep doo-doo.

My phone is special. It can display a little icon of seven guys in white robes with wings, all blowing trumpets. That really is Game Over. I wonder what that’s going to sound like. Trumpets, probably. But I’m sure when that event comes along, I won’t need the smartphone to play that sound – it will come from another source. Guess it will be OK to set the phone to “vibrate.”