Sinners With No Way Out
The "Masters of War" are doomed in film and real life
The Oscars near their 100th anniversary, 99 years after the first talkie.
After threatening a rogue takeover, Paramount Skydance recently announced an agreement to merge with Warner Brothers, the fabled studio, which released that first talkie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927.
The merger is subject to regulatory approval and is being contested by some attorneys general in the U.S., including in California.
It is being contested primarily on antitrust grounds, but there are other reasons to block the merger.
If Paramount Skydance, which is owned by the Ellisons, friends of Trump, does indeed take over Warner Brothers Discovery, CNN, a property of Warner Brothers, will become Trump TV, which in turn will become Russia TV, as I wrote in several pieces in December, such as “Is It Chinatown, or Curtains, for the Movies?”
It has long been clear to some of us that Putin has kompromat on Trump.
I was thinking about all of this, as Hollywood’s biggest night beckons, and as cultural sites have been destroyed in Iran.
Ancient mosques and palaces, made of turquoise tile and engraved with Persian calligraphy, have been bombed, as have historic gardens and other Iranian heritage sites. Many of them have been severely damaged in Operation Epic Fury, which was, of course, instigated by Trump.
As we all know, an elementary school for girls was also destroyed, and according to reports, at least 175 people, most of them children, perished in that bombing.
Like Beirut, which Netanyahu is attacking with brutality, Tehran is turning into rubble.
Trump has disdain for almost all of us, but he saves his most savage cruelty for people of color, for Muslims, for immigrants, and for anyone who is different.
He clearly does not care about the Iranian populace, nor does he know that many Iranians descend from Persians, an ancient people, steeped in education, who have enriched humanity with their contributions to religion and astronomy and poetry, among other fields.
I have discussed Cyrus, the great Persian leader, in a few pieces, including a June 2025 post, “Zohran Mamdani Wins Our Hearts.”
Cyrus, who ruled in Persia roughly 2,500 years ago, was a friend, not an enemy, of the Jewish people, and he famously sent the Israelites back to Jerusalem after Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, destroyed the First Temple.
As I wrote in my last piece, “Operation Epic Fury Is a Tragic Mistake,” Cyrus was a visionary, a prophet.
So was Rumi, the Sufi mystic, who wrote verse in the Persian language in the 13th century. A poet revered around the world, Rumi had wisdom for the ages. He might be best known for the Masnavi, considered by some to be the Persian Quran.
In one passage, Rumi wrote, “I died to the mineral state and became a plant. I died as a plant and rose to animality. I died as an animal and was human. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die human. To soar with angels blessed above. And when I sacrifice my angel soul, I shall become what no mind ever conceived. As a human, I will die once more. Reborn, I will with the angels soar. And when I let my angel body go, I shall be more than mortal mind can know.”
Yes, Rumi is one of the most cherished poets in the history of the world. And he wrote in Persian, his mother tongue, though he lived in other countries and wrote in other languages, too.
Yet, as I say, Trump reserves his greatest cruelty for people of color, Muslims, or anyone who is different.
He has disparaged so many of us.
To be clear, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a murderous dictator, who slaughtered his own people.
But Trump and Netanyahu are slaughtering Iranians and their ancient cultural heritage sites, too.
And who is benefiting?
Putin.
Yes, Fortinbras Putin, as I have dubbed him, is the beneficiary.
He and Netanyahu have been playing Trump for some time.
But it is Putin, who is benefiting the most from seeing our country and the world in such disarray.
Russia is, after all, a petrostate.
And it clearly has a vested interest in seeing oil and gas prices rise with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran.
In the midst of this chaos, Putin, who is losing his war against Ukraine, is getting not only a financial boost but also a geopolitical one, for America is losing face and ground in the eyes of the world.
For almost 250 years, America has been a great country.
We have been the envy of the planet.
Iranian kids have loved our music and our movies.
Regarding our movies, I have not seen too many of the Oscar nominees for this year’s Academy Awards, though I did just watch Sinners, the Ryan Coogler film, which has been nominated for a record 16 Oscars.
It happens to be a Warner Brothers picture, and I enjoyed it, particularly those aspects that conjured August Wilson’s play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon.
Yes, I love a movie about the blues and one that touches upon our eternal fight against evil, though I am not such a fan of zombies and vampires.
Sinners deals with racism, with the repercussions of slavery in the Jim Crow era, repercussions that are still felt to this day, since we have a racist, who runs our country and who encourages or initiates policies that racially profile people of color, immigrants and Muslims in places like Minnesota.
Of course, Trump’s hateful policies are harming all of us in so many ways, including, as some thoughtful commentators have pointed out, the “opportunity cost” of his spending billions of dollars on a misguided war when we have people in need of housing, food and affordable health care in our nation.
While Trump crushes the lives of so many people on our planet, art can help us deal with this evil.
And there are films from the past that may be on point right now.
In the 1987 Kevin Costner movie, No Way Out, one of his first starring roles, Costner plays a Soviet spy, who has infiltrated the ranks of the U.S. military, to the point that he is quite close to the Secretary of Defense, played in the film by Gene Hackman.
Costner’s character, who has been playing a double-game, has nowhere to turn at the end of the movie.
He has had an affair with a woman, played by Sean Young, who is later murdered.
During the investigation of her murder, he tries to save one of the woman’s friends from being arrested or deported.
If memory serves, this woman is an immigrant.
Costner’s Soviet spy, furious at the corrupt nature of the investigation, shows a conscience not only in trying to protect this friend of Sean Young’s character. He also thwarts the investigation in other respects, before the defense department’s chief counsel, who is on what one might term “a power trip,” takes his own life and is defamed as a Soviet spy, a Yuri in the Pentagon.
While the Oscars approach, and a hideous war, instigated and provoked by Trump and his minions, engulfs much of the world, I repeat, as I have long contended, that Putin owns Trump, that the Russian leader has kompromat on the solipsist-in-chief, who may have been born in this country, but who has for some time now seemed to me to be the Muscovite candidate.
The press is now writing of the possible threat of Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S.
No doubt, there is such a threat.
But again the person, who benefits the most from the war against Iran, is Putin, who, like Fortinbras in Hamlet, hopes to take advantage of our country.
Yes, our country, for all its merits, is rotting to an extent, like Trump’s ear, or the ear of Denmark in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Even as Putin is reportedly giving intelligence to Iran on U.S. naval and air movements, he is also receiving a boon from the U.S. Treasury Department, which is permitting India to buy oil from Russia for 30 days.
As we all know, gas and oil prices, of course, are also rising, because of Trump’s incompetence and his failure to take into account Iran’s shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz.
The “Masters of War” may think that they play a long game, but they are very short-sighted.
God plays the longest game of all. As the Gospel singers chant of the Lord, “He’s never lost a battle, and He never will.”
Yes, God sees everything that the so-called Masters of War have done, all the deaths that could have been avoided, all the destruction of civilian infrastructure and cultural heritage sites, all the “metastasizing evil,” as I termed it in my last piece, an evil spawned by Trump and Netanyahu and Putin.
There are other evildoers, who are benefiting from this hideous war as well.
Whether they operate in windowless mausoleums or bunkers, these so-called masters, who, in Bob Dylan’s words, “have never done nothing but build to destroy,” will indeed be hoisted on their own petards, as I have written over the years.
In The Good Shepherd, a 2006 film directed by Robert De Niro, Matt Damon plays a Yale graduate, a member of Skull & Bones, who is recruited to join the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.
It is well known that Skull & Bones, a secret society at Yale, was deeply involved in the formation of the CIA, as well as the OSS.
In that film, Damon, who attended Harvard in real life, does a fine job of playing a Bonesman, who interfaces with the Soviets during the Cold War, including the Bay of Pigs crisis.
As in real life, the Soviets in the film try to get kompromat on everyone, including a Yale professor as well as the son of Damon’s character, another Yale graduate and Bonesman, who joins the CIA.
Of course, it is also well-known that Skull & Bones gets kompromat on its own members, as the film depicted.
In The Good Shepherd, other Bonesmen urinate on Damon’s character, while he lies naked in front of his colleagues and confesses to the most painful or embarrassing episode in his life.
There are some people in this country, who think that they can trick God, who think that they can perform a kind of trompe l’oeil.
But they are doomed to fail.
The sad truth is that there are apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere, hacks and former officials who have podcasts, or write occasional articles, or appear on TV.
Their allegiance is not to God or to our country.
Rather, they are loyal only perhaps to those who have put them in positions of leadership.
They may not have started out completely evil, but they have been tested. And they have failed because they crave power, and they cling to it with a blood-thirsty cowardice.
Yes, these spineless, pencil-thin men and women betray God and our country, as well as the light and the truth.
These people have never believed in God. And to the extent that they have sworn an oath to our country, they have done so only provisionally.
As I often point out in my articles, I recognize that not everyone believes in God. But God knows who is a good person and who is telling the truth.
In the Book of Job, Elihu, who has a preternatural wisdom, says, “There is no darkness, nor the shadow of death where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.”
Yes, there are people, who think that they owe their careers to so-called Masters of War, whether those evildoers toil in the White House or ooze out of secret societies or the Pentagon or anywhere else.
But Pharisees cannot trick God.
And it will not end well for people like Eliphaz the Temanite, a so-called friend of Job.
Eliphaz the Temanite does not believe in God and has no loyalty to anyone.
As Bob Dylan sings in “Precious Angel,” a song from his Christian period, “My so-called friends have fallen under the spell. They look me squarely in the eye, and they say, ‘all is well.’ Can you imagine the darkness that will fall from on high, when men will beg God to kill them, and they won’t be able to die.”
Dylan, as I have written before, is not only the voice of a generation; he is a voice of the generations, one of our greatest prophets.
And he is absolutely right, for the Bible teaches us about the fate of those so-called friends, like Eliphaz the Temanite.
It is worth repeating that, like Job, all of us are being tested.
These are difficult times.
Let us all remember that Job passes God’s test and is rewarded doubly at the end of his life.
And lest we forget during Lent, which is taking place now, Jesus passes His own test and defeats the devil on Easter Sunday, which occurs next month.
In the end, Putin, who is essentially the devil, and those with whom he interfaces and who have compromised our country, will be revealed as traitors, as the Yuris of our world.
They can think that they are playing the long game.
But God, as I say, plays the longest game of all, whether you call God Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, the Great Spirit or any other name.
Rumi, the Persian mystic, tells us to “listen to the reed, how it complains of separations.”
The Sufi poet wants us to connect with one another in a holistic way, to experience life and its beauties and to stay true to love even when we are surrounded by evil.
And we do receive signals from the universe.
When fires devastate Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, we are being tested.
When Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians offer their sophisticated anti-drone technology to assist our troops and to help other countries in the Middle East, Zelensky and Ukraine are passing their own test with flying colors.
When hurricanes increase in severity and frequency due to climate change, and Melissa decimates parts of Jamaica, these too are signs from God.
They are signs that we are being tested, and we must choose the side of honesty, if we are to be whole. Yes, we must stand up for what is right, because God demands it even if some friends or relatives may try to sway us to the side of evil.
When leaders of universities and law firms, film studios and media networks cave into our disgraced chief executive, a Baalist as well as a bully, they are failing their own tests.
When members of our judicial, legislative and executive branches, who claim to believe in God and Ronald Reagan, enable Trump, a lackey of Putin, those enablers, like Trump and Putin, are all failing their tests.
They can think that their decisions are shrouded in darkness. But the truth always comes out.
This does not mean that we should not rejoice in art.
God wants us to appreciate all forms of art, movies, music, literature, as well as food, nature, exercise, friendship and good conversation.
We should remember that, in difficult times such as these, filmgoers do not necessarily want a drama or a “serious” picture.
Sometimes, people just want to laugh, as Joel McCrea’s fictional film executive discovers in the 1941 movie, Sullivan’s Travels.
That film is set in the Great Depression, when the peril we faced was different from the evil that we confront now.
Back then, we had a president in Franklin Roosevelt, who was a patriot, who was loyal to our country, and who led us out of the Depression and to victory in World War II, a war that we entered only because we were attacked by Japan.
Putin and his sleeper cells, as well as Trump and his enablers, may think that they can fool us.
But God, as I say, has seen through them all along. And some of us have seen through them for a while, too.
As Bob Dylan sings, “I just want you to know that I can see through your mask.”
By all means, enjoy the Oscars, while we still have an independent Warner Brothers and a CNN that retains editorial control of its news division.
Have a laugh or two, whether you are a studio executive named Sullivan, or whether you go by Kevin or Matt, or any variant of those names, in or out of the industry.
At the same time, we might remember that we are all sinners to a degree.
And this is a holy time for Muslims, who celebrate Ramadan, as well as for Jews, Christians and others, as Passover, Good Friday and Easter approach.
Rumi would tell us to unite in our love, so that we can ascend to the state of an angel.
And God is love in every religion.