Contrary to what the sign says, the lockdown didn’t kill this man’s business. Rather, fear and denial of the virus ravaged the American economy.
Given the highly individualistic nature of American society, the coronavirus was always going to be a lethal challenge here. But it didn’t have to be as devastating as it is.
Read MoreNovak Djokovic at the moment he became the No. 1-ranked tennis player in the world, in the 2011 Wimbledon semifinals. Still No. 1, he is under fire for organizing a Balkan tour for select players that ignored the coronavirus restrictions in place elsewhere.
There are few emotions more confounding, crushing and ultimately useless than the love affair between a fan and an athlete — confounding because, well, it’s one-sided really. I mean, you really don’t know the athlete, only what you project unto him, which is really a dream of yourself. Crushing, because the emotion is real enough. And useless, because, well, see 1. and 2.
So it pains me to write about Novak Djokovic’s thoughtless, coronavirus-infested, aborted Balkan tennis tour.
Read MoreHattie McDaniel as Mammy, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in a publicity still from “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Neither Clark Gable (Rhett) nor Leslie Howard (Ashley) initially wanted to participate in what they rightly intuited was a women’s picture in which the ladies would take the lead. Even after George Cukor, famous for directing fine actresses, was fired from the movie and replaced by Gable pal Victor Fleming, the female stars continued to receive secret coaching from Cukor.
As the Black Lives Matter movement galvanizes the nation, there are renewed calls to remove the names and statues of prominent Confederate leaders from the Capital (and the Capitol) as well as from Army bases throughout the South. As I have written in these pages— and as one young African-American woman put it recently on TV — this isn’t even primarily a case of black and white, even though the issue is pretty much black and white. The Confederacy lost, and the losers don’t get to dictate either the terms of their surrender or the trophies of their defeat. There are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin.
Still, as President Abraham Lincoln said, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.” The monuments and names of the Confederacy should belong to schools and museums — or at least photographs of them should be. We can’t preserve every one. There they can be curated and studied, so that present and future generations can understand how they came to be erected in the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras as a way to reassert white supremacy.
The issue of works of arts and entertainment is a more complex matter, however.
Read MoreRobert F. Kennedy addressing an Indianapolis crowd on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
Well, so much for those “You Ain’t Black” T-shirts .
President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans — always ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as their handling of the pandemic demonstrates — were all set to capitalize on former Vice President Joe Biden’s gaffe that presumed to tell black people they couldn’t really be black if they voted for Trump, as if there aren’t black Republicans and conservatives. But Biden’s remark, however maladroit, contained the kernel of a question: Might a black Trump supporter actually be voting against his own interests?
Read MoreMarin 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 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.
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