As with everything concerning President Donald J. Trump — including the boos that greeted him for Game Three of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan Monday night — much has been written about his on and off Freedom 250 concert series. It included an array of performers from country music’s Martina McBride to funk and soul’s The Commodores — until it didn’t.
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Charles Le Brun’s “Entry of Alexander Into Babylon” (1665, oil on canvas). Musée du Louvre. Also called “The Triumph of Alexander,” this was one of a series of works Le Brun created for King Louis XIV of France, the idea being that Louis was the new Alexander and Le Brun his Apelles, Alexander’s court painter. Many men have fashioned themselves thus — the Caesars, Napoleon, even President Donald J. Trump. But there was only one Alexander.
Donald Trump's Alexandrian dreams
Some 23 years ago, at the start of the Iraq War, I was senior cultural writer for Gannett Inc., writing a story about the nature of leadership and interviewing, among others, New York City developer Donald J. Trump, who had agreed to answer some questions by email. At the time, Trump owned the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which featured the $10,000-a-night Alexander the Great suite.
Alexandrian that I am, I was intrigued and began by asking him why Alexander? “Because he was the best, and it’s the best,” Trump wrote back.
I was reminded of that the evening of Friday, May 1, as I watched Ashley Parker, a staff writer with The Atlantic, discuss “The Yolo Presidency,” an article she co-authored, on PBS’ “Washington Week with The Atlantic,’’ about how President Trump aspires to be a great man affecting history in the spirit of Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon and, especially in19th-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s interpretation of the “Great Man Theory.”
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Vittore Carpaccio’s “St. Augustine in His Study” (1502, tempera on canvas). The Doctor of the Church’s “just war theory” has been hotly discussed in last week’s face-off between President Donald J. Trump and Pope Leo XIV.
Trump versus Pope Leo — tales from the standoff
The world has been shocked, but I would venture hardly surprised, by the contretemps between the blustery American president and the steadfast American-born pope over Iran that absorbed much of last week. President Donald J. Trump, incensed over Pope Leo XIV’s antiwar stance, accused him of being weak on crime, terrible at foreign policy and ungrateful for his in effect making him pope. (Apparently, even Trump subscribes to the belief that an American pope serving as a counterweight to an American president was what the College of Cardinals had in mind when they elected Cardinal Robert Prevost pope.) For his part, Leo doubled down on his message of peace, grounded in the Gospels.
But this isn’t the whole story or the only one….
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Nikolai Ge’s “What is Truth?” (1890) crystallizes the biblical encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus, between military might and spiritual transcendence.
Netanyahu, Chalamet and the limits of ‘truth’
Sometimes you can say the right thing – the “true” thing – and still be wrong.
So we have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the limits of Jesus Christ and actor Timothée Chalamet on the limits of ballet and opera. Both offered a realistic assessment of the world as it is. But both failed to see the world beyond its limitations.
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“The Bier of Iskandar” illustrates a scene from the “Great Mongol Shahnameh” (the Persian “Book of Kings”), which recasts the life of Iskandar, or Alexander the Great, as a Persian ruler rather than a Greco-Macedonian one (circa 1330, ink, gold and watercolors). Courtesy Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The rearview mirror — Iran versus the United States
Lost in the fog of war or any geopolitical crisis is its cultural-historical aspect. This is especially true of the Iran War, which reveals a clash of cultures that in some ways are surprisingly similar.
It was President George W. Bush who said that Americans are not good at looking in the rearview mirror. And so lost on the United States is the irony of a country that fought a revolution against an empire that never understand it only to become an empire that never understood the countries it kept invading.
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On Feb. 6, the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group was deployed to the U.S.Fifth Fleet area of operations to support maritime security and stability in the Middle East. Photograph by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford/
Will the U.S.’ latest attempt at regime change be Venezuela or Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…
I was going to write about the U.S.A. men’s hockey team’s and Kash Patel’s less than golden locker room moment – which to me was more about professionalism than politics – but then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, and all bets were off.
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From left, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” still my favorite of the many adaptations, never more so than in this scene of the wild, rough-hewn characters on their beloved Yorkshire moors. I keep a framed copy of this movie still in my library.
'Frost from fire' -- perversity and identity in 'Wuthering Heights'
As a collector of “Wuthering Heights” interpretations —Emily Brontë’s novel being the inspiration for my revenge family drama “Seamless Sky” — I was intrigued then disappointed by the announcement of a new film adaptation. I haven’t seen it, but what I have seen of it makes me think Margot Robbie is all wrong for the part of Cathy, not the least of which being that she’s a blonde.
The fair Ralph Fiennes and the French Juliette Binoche would’ve seemed all wrong for the 1992 film “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” But they have such talent and chemistry that they are among my favorite Cathys and Healthcliffs, never more so than in their scenes on the Yorkshire moors where their perverse, almost Luciferian defiance of everything and everyone but themselves and the natural world sows the seeds for their haunting, destructive story arc.
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