The Zeitgeist

The Current Incarnation of ISIS is No Joke. Should the US Stop the Spread of Evil in the Middle East Yet Again?

   

The Isis TV show from the 70s, the ISIS logo from the TV show Archer and ISIS fighters in Iraq this week.

Back in the mid 70s there was a groundbreaking female superhero on Saturday morning TV called Isis. An American high school science teacher found a magic amulet on a archeological dig in Egypt  that allowed her to turn into the ancient goddess Isis who had superhuman powers to control the elements and use these powers to fight evil. The show only lasted a couple of seasons, not enough time for Isis to rid the world of all its bad guys.

For the past several years the word “ISIS” has stood for the “International Secret Intelligence Service,” the employment domicile for a clueless, cartoonishly suave James Bond-type of secret agent named Sterling Archer. Archer is quite literally a cartoon character. The series Archer is one of the adult animated comedies running on FX and Fox. Archer, the agent, and his team at ISIS are out to save the world for fun and profit. The characters on the show lack any moral grounding whatsoever, which is what makes it funny. 

Unfortunately in the last couple of weeks a whole different version of “ISIS” has burst upon the world’s consciousness. It also lacks any moral grounding, they’re not into acts of violence solely for kicks, they’re not here for our amusement and unlike their namesake super heroine, in their world view women have no rights whatsoever.

The ISIS that is dominating the news is the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant, meaning Syria, Lebanon, Israel) a brutal neo-Maoist group so extreme that they were booted out of Al Qaeda  .  Although thoroughly Sunni Muslim in its presentation, it could be a dead-ringer for the Khmer Rouge in their tactics, and strategy. Wiping out vast swaths of the Shiite Moslem population in Iraq and elsewhere doesn’t perturb them all that much. In fact, to realize their dream of a resurrected Sunni Caliphate any expediency is acceptable. This has been demonstrated by a series of videos detailing their unabashed brutality.

In the past week ISIS, with just a few thousand soldiers has conquered more than a third of Iraq as the Iraqi army in the Sunni parts of the country melted away as fast as the former South Vietnamese army did in the spring of 1975. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops just ran away, abandoned their equipment and abdicated their duty. Had even a fraction of them stood and fought, ISIS probably could have been thwarted. It remains to be seen whether the remnants of Iraq’s US-trained and US-equipped armed forces will make a stand in Baghdad and in the South of the country as the Kurds successfully have in the Northeast. If they don’t, it sure won’t be springtime for the Shiites who comprise about 60 percent of the country.

The utter collapse of Iraqi national institutions and of Iraqi national will in the Sunni regions of the country is highly edifying. As in South Vietnam it shows that a sense of nationhood, pride and purpose often can’t be imposed on people, it has to come from within. But sometimes that takes time.

Iraq was artificially created out of various and sundry provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I by Great Britain which was given that swath of territory as spoils of war (the French got Syria and Lebanon). 

As was typical in the colonial era, nations and borders were created by the Western powers without regard for the ethnic, religious, cultural or political cohesion of its inhabitants which has been the cause of much global bloodshed in the past 100 or so years.

In the case of Iraq, as we know, the Sunnis and the Shiites hate one another with a profound passion. However, it bears noting that this ISIS explosion is not a grassroots home-grown revolt against Shiite rule. The ISIS fighters have been recruited from across the Moslem world and imported to the region with an express goal of conquest and igniting conflict between Sunnis and Shiites to force a collapse of the state.

The conundrum for America (and it should be one for the European Union) is what to do about all this. Allowing Iraq’s vast oil reserves to fall into the hands of the most extreme Muslim terror group in the world is just not good for world stability. Allowing a Killing Fields type of ethnic cleansing of Iraq is not good on pure humanitarian grounds. Allowing the complete subjugation of Iraqi women is deplorable. Abandoning allies (hello, Ukraine!) like the Iraqi government does not one whit of good for US credibility around the world. Allowing Iran to fill the vacuum and in effect conquer Iraq won’t be good for US interests as it will set-off a humanitarian crisis with the Sunnis, it will put Iraq’s oil into the hands of the Iranian Ayatollahs who are building nuclear weapons and who already threaten stability in the region through their proxies Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and it would give Iran complete control of the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. That also wouldn’t be too good for Israel either. Allowing the waste of so much American blood and treasure (forget debating the wisdom of going into Iraq in the first place) if Iraq falls is a disgrace to the memory of our fallen soldiers and an admission that aside from Germany and Japan, we can’t straighten out any other countries for the betterment of their citizens and the world.

Unfortunately, what’s needed is for the West to man-up and send in a multi-national force (Americans, Brits, French, Germans, etc.) and squash ISIS (which has ambitions of spreading their Islamic revolution to London and New York). It won’t take many planes or drones. ISIS has no air force. It won’t even take many troops to confront the several thousand ISIS fighters. What it will take is will power and if there’s absence of that we will be left only with the words of the 18^th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

The Zeitgeist

No More Mother’s Day for Me:

I Remember Mom

    

Mom circa 1954 (left) and in 2007 (right)

To paraphrase the Soup Nazi character on Seinfeld, “No Mother’s Day for you!” That’s because on Tuesday afternoon April 29^th my mother passed away. And that was kind of a good thing because her suffering is now at an end.

During the past two years of her life Mom faded out in a fog of dementia exacerbated by a series of mini-strokes which robbed her of her memory, much of her personality and her ability to live life in any kind of vital way. My mother was the personification of vitality, so to have had that taken away was a cruel punishment.

“Who are you? I’m Alice. Where do you live?”

“Mom, I’m your son Howard, I live two blocks away.”

“You do?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“You look a lot like my son Lewis. How is that? It’s uncanny.”

Call it Alzheimer’s or dementia, the effects are pretty much the same and this exit from the superhighway of life is becoming increasingly clogged with millions of Americans who overcame so much else in their lives but who ultimately are unable to defeat this insidious mind stealer.

My email is clogged with spam from florists, jewelers, chocolatiers and restaurateurs all reminding me that this Sunday is Mother’s Day. Special offers besiege me all over the web as well but, alas, there is nowhere for flowers to go, no one to wear anything, no one to enjoy sweets and no one to fete at a special meal. The poobahs of online marketing didn’t get the memo about my mother, yet these missives are in my face everywhere I look. It doesn’t have a calming effect.

Alice Steinfeld (who would become Alice Barbanel) was born on August 30, 1934 at Long Beach Memorial Hospital on Long Island, New York to the exceedingly bright boulevardier attorney Lewis Steinfeld and his young, pretty and gregarious wife Lee. They were summering at Lee’s parents’ house headed-up by the larger than life “Big Harry” Schwartz who made a fortune manufacturing distillation equipment for bootleggers during prohibition.

Mom saw her first movie in 1939 at the Laurel Theater in Long Beach. It was The Wizard of Oz and the gleaming and glistening Emerald City would make a lifetime impression on her. In one form or another, my Mom spent her whole life trying to get back to Oz or to Wonderland. Everything she did was about making life wonderful, wondrous, beautiful and memorable.

She created beauty as a fashion designer in the 50s and 60s, as an accomplished artist in oils and watercolors into the 90s and in all the many kind things she did in a second career as a social worker. Mom was a very pretty woman but was not vain or materialistic, never snobby, never uttering an unkind word about anyone, not a gossip, always soft-spoken and generous to a fault with her heart to her immediate and extended family and monetarily to charity.

She was infused with a joy of life and constantly sought out ways to make others happy. Your birthday was cause for celebration on a magnitude of the Royal Family. In some ways she was like Julie the Cruise Director on The Love Boat, always planning fun activities for everyone. I have so many thousands of happy memories that it will take years to recall them all.

Mom loved me unconditionally and believed in me. She was the last woman on this Earth who loved me that way. There were others like my late Grandmother and an aunt, but they too are gone now. That leaves an enormous hole in my heart that I don’t know how will ever be refilled as I’m unfortunately single again these days and didn’t have children.

Whenever I was confronted by a setback or disappointment, Mom had a way in just a few minutes to make everything seem OK. She had unflagging optimism even for herself in the face of several bouts of serious cancer throughout her life. She beat that disease sometimes by sheer force of will and never complained, was never dour and didn’t let it impede her life.

At the end she was battling with eye problems, serious weight loss from a lack of eating, pulmonary fibrosis as a consequence of chemotherapy, the loss of her ability to take care of her personal needs and for the last few days a rampaging pneumonia. Thanks to my Dad’s devotion, she was able to live the last year of her life in her own home, sleep in her own bed, wear her own clothes and be surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She was embraced with the kind of love she gave everyone else and as her soul departed this world, I felt a piece of me leave with her.

Because I live close by, this past year I’d visit Mom most every day, even if for just a few minutes. When concluding my visit I’d always give her a kiss and tell her “I love you Mom.” And almost until the end she’d kiss me back and from somewhere find the presence of mind to say “I love you too Howard.” And so it is that a mother’s love lives forever in your heart even if there’s no more Mother’s Day in your life.

The Zeitgeist

Play Ball! Play Ball! Instant Replay Makes Its Debut for Baseball’s 2014 Season

(Or to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it will seem like déjà vu all over again).

Galarraga has him out, but umpire Jim Joyce called the runner safe, blowing Galarraga's perfect game

As baseball’s 2014 season gets underway, fans, players, managers and umpires are faced with the specter of the game becoming both faster and slower at one and the same time thanks to the new Instant Replay rules that have been put in effect for the first time this year.

During Spring Training I got to see baseball’s new replay rules live and in person. While attending the Mets-Nationals pre-season game on Sunday, March 23^rd (a delightful 86-degree afternoon at the Mets’ Tradition Field) I witnessed a successful challenge by Washington’s manager on a call at second base. The umpire had ruled the runner “out” but on video review the call was overturned and the runner was deemed “safe.” Because the Nationals’ challenge was correct and successful, they got one more “bonus” challenge and they took advantage of this by challenging a photo-finish called out at first base a couple of innings later. This time, upon going to the video, the umpire’s called “out” was upheld. You never saw a happier home plate umpire. First pumps and everything. You would have thought he’d scored a game-winning run.

As a fan in the stands I found the challenges disconcerting. I wasn’t sure whether I was at a baseball game or a football game. Maybe baseball managers should be given challenge flags like their football counterparts? Aside from having a call overturned (which can be infuriating if you’re on the wrong end of it) the process completely stalled the game for a few minutes which actually seemed like an eternity because of the uncertainty.

Instant Replay is likely to create a new set of exacting accuracy metrics for umpires as the human eye and its connection to the brain and mouth will come under increasing scrutiny. An umpire’s career trajectory may now be influenced by how often they’ve had their calls overturned. This has to effect the game in yet to be seen ways.

A prime example of a routine play to first that was called terribly wrong was the famous “Almost Perfect Game” on June 2, 2010 where the Detroit Tigers’ Armando Galarraga was denied a no-hitter in what should have been the final out of the game when umpire Jim Joyce mistakenly (by his own later admission and by the video evidence) called Jason Donald of the Cleveland Indians safe at first when in fact he was out by at least a full step. (http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=300602106). These kinds of blown calls have bolstered the pro-replay advocates.

Baseball is not a game that in the past has lent itself to uncertainty. In fact, one of the heretofore great certitudes of American life has been the finality of the baseball umpire’s call – good, bad or ugly. There used to be a time when life in America was more black and white (television, newspapers, values) – baseball was ensconced within the pantheon of rock solid things you could count on, like mom, apple pie, the almighty dollar, Chevrolet, doctors and lawyers always being right, the ice cream man, the milk man and candy bars for a nickel. America isn’t like that anymore and often for the better.

So now baseball Luddites (like internet Luddites, and there may be a significant overlap in this category) will have to reconcile themselves to a changed landscape in “America’s Pastime.” Just as fans have gotten used to $8 beers and $20 parking at ballparks, Instant Replay is now a part of the old ballgame. Purists will say baseball’s not the same game anymore. But ever since the advent of the designated hitter in the American League and aluminum bats for amateur play, the game’s been very different anyway.

Some of the salient features of the new Instant Replay rules are:

• The replays will be monitored at Major League Baseball’s headquarters in New York by an eight-mean crew of actual umpires who will rotate in and out between stadium work and the video gig. The on-site umpires won’t be making calls based on the video, New York will.

• Only two manager challenges per team per game and the second challenge is only allowed if the manager prevails on his first challenge. If the first challenge takes place during the first six innings and is turned down, no new video reviews will take place until the seventh inning. Questionable home run calls are exempt from this.

• Challenges have to be made by the managers before both the hitter and pitcher are ready to go, whatever that means in terms of actual time. This may lead to some controversies and stalling by batters while managers decide on a doubtful call.

• The same 12 camera angles will be standardized in all 30 MLB ballparks so that the video is the same for all games. Every team will have a video specialist to look at potential challenges and communicate these to the managers in the dugout, but they’ll have to call down there quick before the next batter steps into the box.

• Fans will finally get to see the replays of bad calls and challenges on the big screens in the ballparks (now it’s only been available to TV viewers) which should increase emotions and drama for fans in the stands as perceived bad calls will be repeated several times for all to see again and again.

• In addition to calls on bases, ground rule doubles will now be able to be challenged as well as fan interference, foul calls, trap/catch balls in the outfield, hit-by-pitch calls, touching or missing stepping on a base, ball-strike counts and other minor issues, although I don’t envision managers squandering a precious challenge on little stuff that won’t have a meaningful impact on the possible outcome of a game. 

So, as the umpires used to say and will still probably forever say irrespective of Instant Replay, “play ball!”