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Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Susanna and the Elders” (circa 1610), oil on canvas, Schönborn Collection, Pommersfelden, Germany. Gentileschi was raped by her artist father Orazio’s assistant, Agostino Tassi, who had been engaged to give her art leassons, then tortured to make sure she was telling the truth. She played out her survival in paintings in which biblical heroines triumphed over male assault. Whenever I think of men trying to control women, I think of works like this one.

Pro life and its culture of death

May 7, 2022

Just in time for Mother’s Day, the United States Supreme Court has a gift that is “sure” to warm the hearts of moms and would-be moms everywhere — a leaked draft decision that would appear to repeal Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion legal in America. Chief Justice John Roberts — whose position as a swing vote on the court appears to have been nullified by the arrival of conservative Amy “the Handmaiden” Coney Barrett and whose legacy is in jeopardy — was shocked, shocked I tell you, that someone leaked the draft and has vowed an investigation. But the leak is hardly the point, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Jacques Louis David’s “Leonidas at Thermopylae “(1814), oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. Adolf Hitler compared the Germans at Stalingrad to the Spartans fighting the Persians at Thermopylae. Of course, the Nazis were more like the invading Persians. But Hitler’s point was that it would be in a clash of civilizations, a fight to the death.

Narcissists at the gate: The fateful siege of Stalingrad and Ukraine

April 24, 2022

I’ve been watching PBS’ “Rise of the Nazis,” which focuses on the Eastern front of World War II’s European Theater, and I’m just astounded at the parallels between that conflict and the one in Ukraine. Then as now, you have the irresistible force of a dictator — well, two in fact — determined to maintain chaos to stay in power and the immovable object of a people determined to go all in to save their homeland. The names have changed, but the issues behind the Nazi siege of Russia and the Russian siege of Ukraine remain depressingly familiar, particularly as brought home in the recent episode on Stalingrad, the turning point of World War II in Europe.

Covid, Ukraine and the meaning of suffering

April 10, 2022

“Hippo King” — a recent episode of PBS’ “Nature,” a show I find difficult to watch but am nonetheless drawn to — tells the story of a hippopotamus from birth through violent maturity to his becoming the primary bull in his pod and eventual death at age 35. In a key moment, the young hippo, on his own for the first time, is eyed by a pride of lionesses. But they turn their attention to a swift gazelle that flashes before them until they attack and devour it as our hippo protagonist watches and moves on, perhaps relieved that it was not his day.

I find myself thinking of that hippo of late as Passover approaches and Holy Week begins in a saason that has always symbolized death and rebirth. Why do we suffer? Well, I think we know why we suffer — OPS (other people’s selfishness) for one thing and then there are those calamities the flesh is heir to that we generally have no control over, like many illnesses.

John Collier’s “Lady Godiva” (1898), oil on canvas. Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. Hair has long been a symbol of female sexuality in patriarchal society. So it was shocking but not altogether surprising that a callous joke at the Academy Awards about the loss of it should trigger a violent response.

The Oscars' hair-raising moment

March 29, 2022

The adage about the Academy Awards is that nobody remembers who won last year. Will Smith has ensured, of course, that no one will ever forget that he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Venus and Serena Williams’ father in “King Richard” — even as his awards-ceremony performance eclipsed it.

As everyone knows by now, Smith got out of his seat, marched up to presenter Chris Rock — who moments earlier had made a snarky joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s shaved head, a response to her autoimmune alopecia — and slapped him. Smith then added insult to injury with an emotional apology/about-face in his acceptance speech a few minutes later. (Smith has since apologized to Rock as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reviews the incident.)

Nothing about Smith’s behavior is in any way excusable. But I also think Rock is equally culpable in a moment that rolled out every cliché pf America — stupid, classless and violent.

Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald J. Trump at the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan in 2019. The two share a self-aggrandizement and a disproportionate sense of grievance and rage at rejection. But time is another country. And Trump’s fanboy worship of the world’s strongmen — remember his “love affair” with Kim Jong-un? — has come back to haunt him at home as Putin’s war ravages Ukraine. *Photograph by Shealah Craighead/The White House.*

Putin and narcissism -- a cultural perspective

March 20, 2022

With the ground war raging in Ukraine having been played to a standstill — thank God, although the shelling continues — many have attempted to analyze its sole instigator, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have considered the so-called encroachment of NATO, a defensive organization that would probably not exist without Russian aggression; the supposed failure of American presidents to read the 800-pound gorilla in the room; the obliviousness of a Europe that reportedly saw Russia as nothing but a giant gas station with onion domes; the alleged corruption of the former Soviet satellites that Putin would seek to crush to corral — Chechnya, Crimea, Ukraine.

But as with any analysis of his former BFF, President Donald J. Trump, the political with Putin must begin with the personal. As with Trump, Putin is a narcissist. The difference is that while Trump is an ultimately ineffective narcissist — too intellectually lazy and disorganized to be Machiavellian — Putin is the worst kind of narcissist, a wily malignant nihilist.

The Ukraine invasion and a new kind of culture war

March 6, 2022

In Bernard Taper’s biography of Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, he describes a moment of deprivation during the Russian Revolution that haunts me still: A horse drops dead in the street, and the starving populace rushes out to carve it up.

Historically, the Russian people have careened from one kind of oppression to another, from the czars to the Soviets, whose empire Vladimir Putin is now seeking to reconstitute with his brutal siege of Ukraine.

The official portrait of President Volodymyr Zelensky — the defiant, courageous face of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. *Courtesy* *the Ukrainian government.*

Narcissus at the gates of Kyiv: Putin and the siege of Ukraine

February 27, 2022

“He is ‘pretty smart,’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a Florida fundraiser, assessing the impending invasion like a real estate deal. ‘He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,’ he said, ‘taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.’”

That was former President Donald J. Trump —a former president of the United States of America —in a New York Times article praising Russian President Vladimir Putin in the run-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which the former KGB agent instigated to. assuage his ego and bolster his notion of former Soviet glory.