Old So What

  Bashar al-Assad was a very bad boy. Well, he was very bad…period. He and his wife, “The Rose in the Desert, (now known as “the first lady of hell”), lived a life of luxury and plenty. How many Hermes scarves can you wear at one time (?), while his people lived lives of hunger, despair and desperation. How do you do that?   How do you live with yourself and do that? How do you go to a family pot roast on a Sunday when you’ve tortured, exploited and starved your fellow Syrians on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through Saturday. I won’t even talk about the torture prisons and the graves where hundreds of thousands were flung in an effort to dispose of their bodies.   Apparently, these were mostly average citizens grabbed off the streets and checkpoints never to be heard from again. Disposing of human beings. After a while you must become inured to it. All of it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Bashar decided to sell his people and the world, the Captagon (a highly ad...

  When you live in a house with lots of people and pets, and you walk into a room that’s a total mess, you might ask the question: “What happened here?”   I was strolling through a cable channel video with no particular place to go. The subject was ghost or near-ghost towns, based on stories without happy endings. The town I zeroed in on was literally being swallowed up by its own vegetation. Sometimes a porch or a roof would stick out in protest. (You could look at a clump and think: Is there a “there” there under all that ugly, non-specific greenery?) Sometimes someone had seemed to sneak back into town to plant a few flowers or mow a lawn (showing that relatives of the original residents, or more than likely, other residents were still around), but you could see that this was a very sad place in a very sad situation, in the aftermath of some unhappy happenings.   Some place you don’t want to think about. Some place you don’t want to be.   A place you don’t e...