Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump during Trump’s November 2017 trip to China. Some see America’s ratcheting up of tensions with the Chinese as Trump’s Saddam Hussein moment. Photograph by Shealah Craighead/White House.

Are China's virus labs Trump's WMD?

May 5, 2020

Perhaps the only thing hotter than the subject of the coronavirus at present is the discussion of China’s accountability as the country of its origin. President Donald J. Trump has been pressing the Chinese for greater transparency, arguing that if the country had not been so secretive, the virus might’ve been stopped in its tracks.

Trump himself has a lot of explaining to do about his own early praise of the Chinese response to the virus and his own lax reaction. But we mustn’t allow criticism of Trump’s behavior to obfuscate the Chinese role in the catastrophe, anymore than we can let Chinese culpability obscure the lack of Alexandrian leadership — leadership from the front — on the part of Trump and other world figures like Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, whose macho approach to the virus has decimated the indigenous people of the rainforest. If failure is always an orphan, as the proverb suggests, it certainly has many negligent step-parents.

Shining city on a hill: Leo von Klenze reimagines the Acropolis created under the leadership of the Athenian statesman Pericles in “The Acropolis at Athens” (1846), oil on canvas. Neue Pinakothek.

Is this the end of 'American exceptionalism'?

April 26, 2020

The Athenian statesman, general and orator Pericles is generally regarded as presiding over the Golden Age of Greece, when Athens was the first among equals of the Greek city-states — ruling the seas in a series of wars; bestowing democracy on freemen; encouraging the arts and literature; and building a series of public works projects that are still with us today in the remnants of the buildings of the Acropolis that include the Parthenon, temple of the city’s patroness, Athena, goddess of wisdom and war in a just cause.But after some 30 years it was all over in 629 B.C. when a plague — perhaps typhus — ripped through Athens, killing Pericles and several members of his family. It was the beginning of the end for Athens, too, which became involved in a long struggle with archrival Sparta.

People often ask me about my fascination with history and in particular the Greeks and Alexander the Great, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror who would come along 300 years later and avenge all the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Persians, their foreign rivals, including the burning of that Acropolis. Let’s be frank here, shall we? People find my fascination with history and the Greeks at best quaint and at worst out of touch. They don’t just ask me about it, they ridicule me about it.

Who’s laughing now?…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren stumping for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire in 2016. Photograph by Tim Pierce.

A country for old (white) men

March 8, 2020

Remember that film “No Country for Old Men”? Well, this isn’t that.

Just when you thought Bernie Sanders was the second coming of, well, Bernie Sanders, “Uncle Joe” — as one of my sisters calls former Vice President Joe Biden — came roaring back. Now no matter who gets the Democratic presidential nomination, the presidential contest will be between two old white guys and, if it’s between Sanders and President Donald J. Trump, two grumpy old men with an enormous sense of grievance and my-way-or-the-highway entitlement. (They’re like the relatives you have to tolerate on holidays and then pray they don’t say anything politically incorrect.)

Chinese one-child policy propaganda from 1982. Photograph by Robert Schedwy.

Sex and the determinedly single girl

February 19, 2020

I have to laugh at the Chinese government pressuring unmarried women to get hitched. A little background: In 1979, the government instituted a one-child policy to curb the population. Because Chinese tradition dictates that the oldest son cares for the parents in old age — and we wouldn’t want to mess with tradition, now would we? — couples opted to abort girl babies or put them up for overseas adoption. And now the policy, which ended in 2015, has bitten the government in its considerable butt. The gender selection chicken has come home to roost as the fewer females of marriageable age have the pick of the crop.

John R. Bolton (fourth from right) joins Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (second from right) in negotiating with the Russians, Nov. 3, 2001. Photograph by R.D. Ward/Department of Defense

The impeachment plot thickens

January 26, 2020

Why impeach President Donald J. Trump only to have the Senate acquit him? What’s the point?

You can’t help but be nagged by this question as the trial churns on, despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s politically savvy and Representative Adam Schiff’s sharp prosecutorial skills. But just when you’re about to despair, a light or two. There are the tapes by Lev Parnas, the Rudolph Giuliani goon who was in on muscling Ukraine for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter, who worked for a Ukrainian energy company while his father was in office.

And now there is the leaked unpublished manuscript of former National Security Adviser and perpetual loose canon John R. Bolton, which establishes a link, once again, between the withholding of $391 million in American aid to Ukraine and the quest for damning information on the Bidens, thus undercutting Trump’s argument that there was no quid pro quo….

The ruins of the Gates of All Nations in Persepolis, Iran. As the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, Persepolis was burned to the ground by the conquering Alexander the Great accidentally or as an act of revenge for the destruction of the Acr… — The ruins of the Gates of All Nations in Persepolis, Iran. As the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, Persepolis was burned to the ground by the conquering Alexander the Great accidentally or as an act of revenge for the destruction of the Acropolis in Athens and/or the mutilation of Greek captives. Now President Donald J. Trump is threatening Iranian cultural sites like this one, which is illegal under international law.

Between Iraq and a hard place

January 7, 2020

So President Donald J. Trump, a man who’s always tilting at “cancer-causing” windmills, finally has something to rail against for real. From the beginning, he’s been against Iran and all Muslims and anything he imagined President Barack Obama espoused, whether he actually did (like the Iran nuclear deal) or not (the Muslim Brotherhood).

Fresco of dancing Peucetian women from the Tomb of the Dancers in the Corso Cotugno necropolis of Ruvo di Puglia, end of the 5th or mid-4th century B.C. The ancient Greeks believed that charisma was the grace of the gods. But charisma has little gra… — Fresco of dancing Peucetian women from the Tomb of the Dancers in the Corso Cotugno necropolis of Ruvo di Puglia, end of the 5th or mid-4th century B.C. The ancient Greeks believed that charisma was the grace of the gods. But charisma has little grace in the modern age.

Boris, The Donald and charisma in the age of reality TV

December 23, 2019

Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party won big in the United Kingdom’s recent election, establishing a clear path — or more precisely, a clearer path — to Brexit Jan. 31. Amid all the questions of winners (the Tories) and losers (the Labour Party, its unpalatable former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and quite possibly the British worker, London as world financial capital, immigrants, globalism, Scotland, the Irish backstop), was the notion that the Conservatives succeeded because of Johnson’s Trumpian charisma, which he damped down for the occasion by corralling his usual hijinks.