Presidents 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.

Are China's virus labs Trump's WMD?

May 5, 2020

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.

Otto Warmbier and the limits of male power

June 21, 2017

Some years ago, I saw an exhibit at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass. in which a male artist included an image of the Y chromosome. It’s much smaller than the X chromosome. And it’s been shrinking.

I couldn’t help but think of this on the death of Otto Warmbier, the young American imprisoned and apparently tortured for allegedly taking a propaganda poster off the wall of a North Korean hotel. Returned to his homeland in a coma, he died six days later on June 19.

Lost, however, in the geopolitical story – the barbarism of North Korea, the failure of the Chinese to contain it and the challenge this poses for America – is both the larger and deeper cultural and psychological story. It is a narrative that says simply no one does stupid like a stupid man. ...

The Lochte caper enters the backlash-against-the-backlash phase

August 26, 2016

I had planned to write a post about the big, fat September Vogue and editrix Anna Wintour’s latest anointed tennis star, Alexander Zverev, who at 19 is the youngest player to crack the top 30 since Novak Djokovic a decade ago. (The magazine article’s headline blares “Alexander the Great” above a picture of a shirtless, Alexandrian figure indeed.)

But I’m afraid such pleasures pale with the news that Brazilian Police have recommended that Ryan Lochte be charged with falsely reporting a crime for saying he’d been robbed at a gas station during the Rio Games. ...