As a lifelong professional musician, I can appreciate the Syrians' instinct for knowing when they're being bullshitted. You spend years and years dealing with agents, cokeheads, drunks, egomaniacs, wannabes, hustlers, know-it-alls, frat boys, all manner of people who have apparently never heard the word "no" - well, you develop a super-sensitive Bullshit Alarm. I remember this movie from the 60's, "Topkapi," where these guys pull off (or fail to, I forget) a heist in this museum where the burglar alarm is so sensitive that you could bounce a pingpong ball off the floor and set it off; that's kind of how a lot of us are wired. It can make us come off like pains in the ass I'm sure (in my case I'm doubly sure), but we've just gotten used to keeping our dukes up.
The New York Times was rather more gullible: "Mr. Assad ofered at least a theoretical path for change," the article today said, "even if the speech lacked specifics and delivered somewhat vague deadlines." Oh sure, a "theoretical path" offered by thugs who know the minute they're out of power their next stop is The Hague. A musician would never go for that. For musicians, lack of specifics and "somewhat vague deadlines" means they aren't getting paid, period.
I once drove from L.A. to Yuma, Arizona - a more miserable 6-hour stretch you can't imagine - to play at an Army base, and this was back at a time when you really couldn't expect to see many women at Army bases either. So it's all sand and sweaty guys. Anyway, we drove out there, booked a motel for a two-night stay, and showed up at the canteen, mess-hall, whatever it was, only to find the agent had double-booked the gig, and there was another band already there. Oh gosh, sorry 'bout that, was pretty much his response on the phone. So we drive back, and my then-girlfriend, who was the bandleader, and I go to see the agent to at least get something we can give to the sidemen - I believe our draconian demand was $50 each for the two other guys, which might cover, oh, gas and snacks. So we find this guy on the deck of his condo, holding court kind of like Jabba-the-Hut, but for the fact that he's sitting in a particularly unattractive state of dehabillé (again, think Jabba-the-Hut) at a card table with one or two phones, with a woman who turns out to be his daughter in an adjacent folding chair acting as his aide-de-camp/chief-of-staff/secretary-of-defense. We explain our predicament, and the miniscule measure that we think might make it right, and his daughter chimes in and says "but then he would be out a hundred dollars" and guesses we can understand the sacrifice we're asking, right? But finally we wheedled the hundred bucks out of the guy, and as we were leaving, following angelino conventional wisdom which says you don't burn your bridges with anyone - the reasoning being that there is no point in alienating people you think are slimebags, because there would then be very few people left in L.A. with whom to do business - we said well look, no hard feelings on our end, hope we can work together sometime… To which he gave a dismissive wave and said, "Forget it. You two are too much trouble."
And believe me, musicians have the same experiences the world over. It's one of the reasons why a musician from anywhere on earth can walk into a music venue anywhere on earth, and the guys on the stand instantly recognize one of their own. So imagine being a professional musician in Syria; you're dealing with all that, AND a ruthless dictatorial regime that would just as soon kill you as look at you, let alone rip you off. You wanna talk bullshit? Bashar al-Assad just went on TV to try to placate his pissed-off citizens, who were having none of it. He left about three layers of bullshit between him and anything actually happening. "Oh yeah, we wanna have this dialogue, see, sometime in the future, with every element of the opposition dumb enough to show their faces…"
