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Imagine you are Greenland. You are a semiautonomous nation, part of Denmark, doing your Greenland thing with your clusters of colorful houses and glaciers and hot springs when suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a geopolitical controversy courtesy of President Donald J. Trump, who, in the words of one waggish poster on The Hill, is now up to the Louisiana Purchase in the manual on how to be el presidente.
Perhaps the president was thinking of Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, which doubled the United States, or the Alaska purchase of 1867 or President Harry Truman’s overture to buy Greenland for $100 million in gold in 1946 — yeah, I’m sure he was thinking of all of this — when he floated the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark.
I’m of two minds about Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide, which is something I never thought I would say. On the one hand, he was portrayed as pond scum, his alleged victims will now never have to worry about recriminations or retribution and the taxpayers don’t have to support him for the rest of his life in prison — a point my uncle always makes in defense of the death penalty — which is surely where Epstein was headed.
But leave aside the vast right- and left-wing conspiracy theories about the rich and powerful who may have offed him, the federal investigations into whether or not Metropolitan Correctional Center officials turned a blind eye to his suicidal mindset — it appears two correctional officers may have lied about checking on him — and consider instead whether or not we should’ve extended to Epstein the dignity he allegedly denied to his underage victims.
In his review of the Public Theater production of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, The New York Times chief drama critic Ben Brantley describes the title antihero — a brilliant Roman general with no people skills — thusly:
“He’s all unedited impulse, and watching him try to control his peacetime temper evokes the irresistibly awful spectacle of a tantrum-prone tennis star losing it on the court. (Ian McKellen has said that his 1984 performance as Coriolanus at the National Theater was partly inspired by John McEnroe.)”
You wonder what Shakespeare might’ve done with Nick Kyrgios, tennis’ reigning bad boy.