Marin Cilic, in action at Wimbledon in 2018, has said he cannot imagine tournaments without fans. He may just have to.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
The old thought experiment is predicated on the notion that sound requires perception, not just airwaves, so no perception, no sound.
That seems to be the thinking behind those bemoaning the prospect of spectator-less spectator sports. What meaning will they have without those who provide the gate, the soundtrack, the inspo, the raison d'être?
Read MoreArtemisia Gentileschi’s “Susannah and the Elders” (1610), oil on canvas. Collection of Schloss Weissenstein. The biblical theme of an assaulted woman and the men who both prey on and condemn her had special resonance for Gentileschi, herself a rape victim who was tortured to ensure she was telling the truth.
Context drives not only perception but the passion with which we hold that perception. Witness Tara Reade, who has accused presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of sexual assault when she was an aide in his Senate office in 1993. In another time, Reade would be one more explosive chapter of the #MeToo movement. But as Eleanor Roosevelt might put it, this is no ordinary time.
Read MoreDetail of Charles Le Brun’s “Battle of Arbela (Gaugamela)” (1689), oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. It shows Alexander the Great leading the charge against Darius III in the battle that would cement his conquest of the Persian Empire.
In 334 B.C., Alexander the Great took an army of 35,000 – roughly the size of the New York City Police Department -- against a Persian army of a quarter of a million in a bold quest to conquer the Persian Empire. Three years later, on the eve of the decisive battle at Gaugamela in what is now northern Iraq, he told his troops that they had no need for long, inspirational speeches. Their bravery and deeds made them more than prepared. But he wanted them to know that they had something the enemy did not. They had him. He would have their backs by leading from the front. They would endure together. And together, they would be victorious.
Why care about Alexander and the Greeks? For that matter, why care about history? Because they tell us something essential about leadership — that to be a leader you have to communicate a clear goal, demonstrate what’s in it for others and lead from the front. Whatever you may think — or not — about Alexander, he led from the front. He was a leader. And leadership is a quality that is in short supply these days.
Read MoreJames Tissot, “The Healing of Ten Lepers” (1886-94), gouache over graphite on gray wove paper. Brooklyn Museum. Once one of the most fearsome of diseases, leprosy is one today for which the world has achieved 95 percent herd immunity.
My perpetual inspirational calendar for May 10 — which was Mother’s Day — contained this quote from Daniel L. Reardon: “In the long run, the pessimist may be right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.”
Right about now we could use a little more of the optimist than the pessimist. Each day brings bad news with no sign of let up, even as states begin to reopen and the stock market holds its own. Indeed, it’s hard to be the optimist on the trip when the pessimist in us is regularly experiencing “the dark night of the soul” at 3 a.m., tossing, turning and hyperventilating — terrified for our ill loved ones and our own mortality; wondering if our jobs are in danger or if we’ll get another and, in any event, how we’ll pay the bills; despairing that the things, places and people we cherish will never be the same.
Read MorePresidents 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.
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.
Read MoreCharlton Heston’s Moses parts the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments” (1956).
“The Ten Commandments” (1956), a hokey Cecil B. DeMille film that used to be shown every year as a Passover-Easter observance, nonetheless contains a smart exchange between Prince Moses (Charlton Heston, all lock-jawed macho posturing) and the Pharaoh Sethi (Cedric Hardwick), whose son Rameses (Yul Brynner, all legs-planted macho posturing) is trying to drive a wedge between the two. Instigated by Rameses, Sethi wonders why Moses is wasting grain on the Hebrew slaves building his city of Goshen. Moses points out that well-fed slaves make many bricks; the poorly fed, few; and the dead, none.
I thought about this exchange as our American Pharaoh — no, not the racehorse but El Presidente Donald J. Trump — contemplates the reopening of America post-COVID-19.
Read MoreThen New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo in 2010. Ten years later, he’s the man of the hour in the coronavirus fight. Photograph by Pat Arnow.
About the only thing keeping pace with the coronavirus in the United States is the argument raging over whether or not we’ve overreacted. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has advanced an idea fostered by Dr. David L. Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s C.D.C.-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and an expert in public health and preventive medicine, that would isolate the physically vulnerable while keeping the rest of the population in circulation, much as we do with the flu.
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