Charlton Heston’s Moses parts the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments” (1956).

COVID and America's 'pharaoh'

April 15, 2020

“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.

Suffering, death and Resurrection

April 6, 2020

It is perhaps fitting that we should approach the apex of the coronavirus in the New York metropolitan area during Holy Week, which once again overlaps with Passover.

This year there was no need for Lenten sacrifices. Instead sacrifice has been forced upon us. The coronavirus has been our Lenten journey and now our Calvary. This, too, is our Passover story — which also has a plague episode — our Exodus.

Then 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.

The economics of illness

March 25, 2020

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.

The New York Stock Exchange. The largest stock exchange in the world is being tested, along with world markets, as the coronavirus, and the initially tardy response to it, turn a medical crisis into an existential one.

New York in the time of corona

March 9, 2020

Not long after 9/11, I went to Manhattan to do a story on the Chrysler Building. There was a burning smell in the air and something else — the smell of fear, hurt, dread. But New Yorkers being New Yorkers, they did then what they always have done: They went about their business.

There was something of that in the air when I visited last Friday. Now as then, the city seemed quieter, less bustling. There was the same sense of uncertainty among waiters and clerks. And yet people remain grimly determined to carry on. Perhaps more than anywhere else, in New York you are what you do.

An illustration of the coronavirus, created for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Courtesy CDC.

Bugged: Trump, the coronavirus and the politics of narrative

March 1, 2020

In the fall of 2009, I was caring for my beloved Aunt Mary, who raised me and who was dying of the effects of her dementia, exacerbated by disastrous hip revision surgery at a local hospital. Around that time, the medical establishment had released new guidelines for breast cancer screening, stating that women who were young and healthy did not have to have a mammogram every year. The reaction was swift and merciless, with women’s groups denouncing the shift as jeopardizing women’s health.

I remember talking then to a nurse who was upset at the public outcry. Didn’t people understand this was a good thing? she wondered. I told her something I’ve often thought about: To win public opinion, you have to get out in front of a story. He who controls the narrative has the power.

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.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, seen from the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. at dusk, represents the neoclassical style that the Trump Administration wants federal buildings in the capital to adhere to. Photograph by Joe Ravi.

The Trumpian return to classicism

February 10, 2020

Far be it from me to agree with President Donald J. Trump on anything, but as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Trump’s decision to MABGA — Make American Buildings Great Again — finds him decreeing in a new executive order that federal buildings in Washington, D.C. should be classical in style, rather than Modern.

The liberal media, Modernists and the art world are not taking this well — understandably. Everyone gets nervous when the federal government starts telling folks what to do, especially conservatives. And Modernism isn’t less a standard of beauty than classicism, Marion Smith, chairwoman of the National Civic Art Society, which is leading the anti-Modernist charge, notwithstanding. As the great composer-pianist Duke Ellington — who wrote jazz standards and classical works alike — observed, there are only two types of music, good and bad. So it is with all the arts.

But the Trump order is in keeping with a growing backlash against Modernism n art and design.