Putin is poutin', Ukraine is floutin', everyone's shoutin'

Things are getting dicey in Ukraine or as Jimmy Fallon says, “maybe we should start calling it “Twokraine”. But what would you expect of a shirtless, narcissistic autocrat like Putin. He plays hardball and realpolitick and couldn't give a fig what Europe and the US think. Someone told Stalin that the Pope disapproved of his military exploits and Stalin said, with a sly smile: “how many divisions does the Pope have?” We get it. I've just finished a little book called “1913..the year before the storm” that's the storm called The Great War one hundred years ago. Everyone wonders how it started. It was mostly poor choices and the fact that the Kaiser and many others were delusional and had fantasies in their creative and let's stop listening to the jingo nonsense of John McCain who has Teddy Roosevelt's axiom backwards: “Speak loudly and carry a birch twig” It probably comes down to the only person Putin fears and listens to, his wife, the Russian recording star Dolly Putin.

Where to look for work

It's depressing to hear politicians chatter about jobs, jobs, jobs when they have no clue how to create them. Employers are being cautious about hiring and when they do, it's for American salt mines like Wal Mart. The Roosevelt Republic is over and we now live in the Second Rater's Republic. No more WPA or NRA or Hoover Dam or even Eisenhower's interstate highway program. Detroit is still making cars in the middle of a medeval landscape and famine. Silicon Valley is helping create mega wealth for themselves and scarcely any jobs for the rest of the country. This hamlet of High IQ Luddites is gleefully destroying the workplace of millions. In the 1970's we thought we'd get flying cars but all we got was Twitter. During the Depression Orwell discovered that all work had dignity, even picking hops and washing dishes in a restaurant. I leave policy to the wonks but who will actually help people with low skills? There's plenty of work to be done. In Oregon an attendant pumps your gas, both as a courtesy and a wage-paying job. There's a way that government can help manicurists, barbers, hairdressers etc get a foothold by paying the license fees and training they require. Some of this takes local government help but there are actually dozens of ways to help the unemployed if a little creative brainstorming is used. I read where one economic “expert” said not to help workers, only companies that can then attract more customers. Workers are customers, stupid. Longfellow gave us the answer when he said, “We must be up and doing” Every one of us.

Suspicion breeds confidence

That's a slogan from Terry Gilliam's film “Brazil”, a comic take on Orwell's “1984” but with the same gruesome ending (they own his mind). Where to begin, with Orwell of course and what he saw coming before the NSA, drones, listening devices and wiretaps. What he saw was the emerging of the managerial elite bred in WWII—the unelected, unaccountable “experts” who are now in charge of our government. The head of the NSA, the arrogant James Clapper, was the kind of man Orwell feared most. Dave Eggers new novel, “The Circle”has a company credo “All that happens must be known”, which is Big Brother in the guise of Google and Facebook. I'm not on Facebok or Twitter, but my privacy has been hijacked just the same. Edward Snowden should get a medal (he won't) for revealing that the NSA is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world. The public blindness to the harm of our out-of-control technology is baffling. The NSA is there to petrify the population into a permanent state of war, or they say in Newspeak “War is peace”. The Pentagon has an annual budget of $650 billion while Congress cuts food stamps and guide dogs for the blind. American global ambition has reached a tipping point and it is backfiring. This security psychosis is no longer a stable basis for our society. On a more serious note, there is a controversy about renaming the Washington Redskins football team (not politically correct it seems). I have a wonderful, modern, new name for the team the “Washington Stealers”! Too subtle? Too close to the Pittsburgh Steelers? They ran a focus group of 500 million and it was suitable.

Meet the Texas Taliban

The saying is that Pakistan is not a country with an army but an army with a country. That's what we're becoming: a gun-owning army with a country. I saw a piece on MSNBC where four women were having lunch in Dallas to discuss gun control when, out of nowhere, a gang of people armed to the teeth congregated across the street brandishing their assault rifles, other weapons and crude signs about the Second Amendment. This is a scene I couldn't imagine happening in any civilized country. After little children have been gunned down in Newtown and there is a shooting rampage on the news every night, the nation is numb. After all, in 2010 11,078 Americans were victims of homicide with firearms and another 73,505 were intentionally shot and survived. Twenty five other countries with a larger combined population had 1300 homicides. Each of these countries has either removed or restricted the possession of handguns My advice is to keep the Stars & Stripes at half mast every day of the year. The NRA is calling the shots (pun intended) in this country.

There's bad news tonight

We're in the grip of our own failures. Our failure to understand the world we live in. Our failure to understand our own foolishness. A government shutdown with almost a million innocent people thrown out of work. A refusal to honor our debts. We are a dysfunctional, pompous, ignorant people led by a bunch of blowhards. Our insufferable vanity; our permanent ignorance. Our pointless wars, our little children forced to go hungry, or worse, be killed in their classrooms. The Tea Party keeps spiking our drinks with arsenic but we keep gulping it anyway. DeTocqueville wrote that whenever he met an American (in 1831) that he was told that our country was the greatest in the world and then that person would saunter off to contemplate himself. It would help if Americans would contemplate their vulnerability to chaos. Who are the voters in these red states? They seem to have no concept of bigger issues than owning guns and drinking corn liquor. And so we stumble across the world stage while other rising powers look back at us with pity. Don't blame Washington. Pogo Possum had it right when he said, “We has met the enemy and he is us.” We're too dumb to be governed.

The cynical Syrian circle of death

To bomb or not to bomb, that is the question. How do we get stuck in these tar babies? The wise John Adams said, “America does not go looking for monsters in the world.” He didn't count on a lethal lamebrain like George W. occupying the White House. Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to check out the history of Syria. I started with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916. The British and French would divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire...sort of carving up Turkey. It had the assent of Tsarist Russia who would get Istanbul as a leftover while Britain and France got big spheres of influence and could decide state boundaries. Great maps colored red, blue and light green decided over brandy and cigars in some London club. This undercut the promises made by Lawrence of Arabia to create an Arab homeland in Greater Syria. And in the movie they got Alec Guinness, Obi Wan Kanobe himself, as King Faisal but he was booted out. Ah, but what a tangled web we weave when first we aim to deceive. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power and they published the terms of the agreement and it is the fatal turning point in Western-Arab relations. Even in 2002 the British Foreign Office admitted “a lot of problems are a consequence of our colonial past”. So where do we come in: we didn't partition the Arab world, or help create Israel. In 1956 we were the good guys who paddled the backsides of Britain, France and Israel for invading Egypt. Why should we go into Syria with guns and missiles firing like we did in Iraq? Orwell was dismayed to hear American military leaders in WWII insist on a “Carthaginian Peace”, in other words total obliteration of the enemy. As for the use of chemical weapons, that's how they fight. A billion Arabs couldn't send a man to the moon. It isn't in the Koran. And as that compassionate dictator Joe Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.

Jasmine French deserves our sympathy

She is the tragic heroine of Woody Allen's new movie, “Blue Jasmine”. It opens with her flying First Class, which she can't afford, from NY to live with her half-sister in San Francisco—someone who has never tasted First Class in her life unless McDonalds had a test of a Caviar McMuffin. Jasmine got in this fix of being homeless, husbandless and broke through her own jealous impulsiveness that toppled the house of cards built by her husband's shady financial dealings—today's villain du jour. But in my experience these beautifully coiffed and clothed Park Avenue women have always had more moxy and cunning than poor Jasmine. Woody has stacked the deck against her. No money, no family and no marketable skill and no sense or sensibility for the life ahead of her. Her only support is the sister who bags groceries and dubious lovers. Even her son and husband have abandoned her. The funniest scene is a bit of farce when the aptly-named Dr. Flicker, a dentist she works for, declares his love and makes a pass at her and she knocks him to the floor. She's not going to leave the Four Seasons lifestyle for The Olive Garden without a fight. There is no Mr. Right for her, including an unctious man who wants to run for congress. If Woody is detailing infidelity and divorce he's on sure ground he knows well. If he's showing us the gulf between the 1% and the 99%, he's not in the same league as George Bernard Shaw. I guess this is a story of modern manners and morals except you won't find either in the script. Woody leaves her broken, dispirited, alone and talking to herself on a park bench. Chekhov went backstage after one of his plays ended and found the actors in tears. He said, “but this is just a little comedy”. I suppose Blue Jasmine is just a little comedy where everybody loses, especially the husband who commits suicide in prison.