Pair of Kings

The April visit of the British king and queen provided plenty of foursome photo-ops across the White House, but also plenty with just the suits: on one side, the gracious, affable figurehead; on the other, the democratically elected felon seeking to extort himself into kingly status. This unlikely pair of kings would seem to play right into Donald Trump’s favorite metaphor of statecraft: having or not having the cards.

With at least one card of conscience up his sleeve, King Charles attempted some stealth diplomacy while addressing a joint session of Congress. He reminded the legislators why their constitution has been a 250-year-long beacon for democracy, only to draw blank stares from half of them. While most of us can (or maybe can’t) imagine what Charles made of Trump and the MAGA spectacle, the king travels with his own spectacle of phantom grandeur—access that can still be counted out in bullion but weighs almost nothing. (Plus, there’s Andrew.) In the end, everything about this pair of old kings—the powerless aristocrat and the power-mad buffoon—rings hollow. And that, for better or worse, leads us to Shakespeare.

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Street Hassle

The election of New York City’s first Muslim mayor generated a lot of inane racism across social media, but I remember one Twitter comment for its near-perfect channeling of parochial ignorance: “We don’t want a Shawarma King running the city.” On Election Day last November, I left P.S. 187 thinking: “Long Live the Shawarma King.”

I wonder if that Twitter chud is aware that our mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, has just earned his first royal title in an arena far more important than falafels: filling the city’s potholes. Doing this at a rate of 1,000 per day has made Mamdani the new Pothole King. Last week, he himself shoveled tar pellets over the city’s 100,000th pothole, on Staten Island’s Olympia Boulevard. We haven’t seen this kind of pothole action in a decade.

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Songs of a Lost World

Anglo-American society never quite embraced Samuel Johnson’s idea that “nothing odd will do long.” His reference point was Tristram Shandy (1766), Laurence Sterne’s odd autobiographical novel filled with so many asides and digressions that it eventually cops to its own pointlessness. Though right about the trend-setting potential of Tristram Shandy, Dr. Johnson was completely wrong about oddity within culture.

Amid the conformity of British capitalism and especially that of the American version, oddity endures but is constantly displaced by new oddities vying for consumer attention. We are often too busy or too incurious about the previously odd to track its subsequent fate. History being full of curios and oddities is what makes it seem clunky, non-seamless, and non-optimized to devotees of presentism. The internet dutifully organizes the previously avant-garde within a mainstream buffet, enabling consumers to pick and choose the “alt” to suit current tastes and esthetics (tattoos, piercings, Doc Martens) without the bother of historical context.

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The Hard Way

Donald Trump’s signature extortion line of 2025 was delivered right out of the gate last January. Ironically, he said it to the last person in the world he would dare extort: Vladimir Putin. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way,” he told the Russian President in regard to the war with Ukraine. Although Trump’s FCC lackey Brendan Carr used the phrase months later in attempting to pressure the FCC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Trump owns the letter and the spirit of this gangland “proposition.” He said it again on January 9, this time in regard to annexing Greenland, as he regaled the oil executives he called to the White House with scenarios of Venezuelan plunder.

In the mob world, “We can do this easy way or the hard way” is usually delivered to someone in a very bad place. In extreme situations, victims are aware that if they don’t submit they will be tortured to death (the hard way) whereas if they do they will merely be fatally shot (the easy way). With the White House rackets, many have paid to take the easy way: Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia; YouTube, Disney, Meta, ABC, and most notably CBS. Pepper that with a bunch of white-shoe law firms and voilà! . . . a one-pan dictatorship for a crowd. During the Year of Submission, it seemed that this is what you did when your number was called: capitulate to the criminal threatening to remove your organization’s congressionally approved federal funding and/or tax exempt status.

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We Are the Robots

America’s destruction of its own government and economy continues to shock the world outside of bribe-paying oligarchs. Not just Canada and Mexico but our allies across Europe and Asia look on with horror as Donald Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol thugs beat up and kidnap people on American streets and murder Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean. While a federal shutdown dragged on for almost two months, the MAGA-aligned Supreme Court gave a thumbs-up to Trump denying children SNAP benefits and Trump’s clown cabinet made the TV news rounds saying that inflation was a hoax and that prices were actually coming down.

Official government websites now function like backed-up sewers, filled with Trump Administration propaganda and lies about political enemies, the state of economy, and the safety of cities and communities. The Homeland Security site, in particular, engages in performative immaturity that would get you fired from any company in America. Its vulgar “messaging” mirrors whatever foreign-bot-generated AI content Trump shares on Truth Social. All of this contributes to the global impression that the word of the United States cannot be trusted.

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Brazil

With the government shut down, with ICE terrorizing American cities, with the National Guard used as strong-arm intimidation cutouts, and with Donald Trump’s Department of Justice indicting his political enemies, America’s proposed $20 billion bailout of Argentina initially flew under the radar.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spun the move as a lifeline to Javier Milei, Argentina’s embattled president and Trump’s authoritarian pal. But the bailout would also help major U.S. hedge funds that made risky bets on the Argentine economy. During Milei’s October 14 visit to the White House, Trump clarified that Argentina would receive the $20 billion only if the ruling party of the chainsaw-wielding Milei won in the country’s elections on October 26. The next day, Bessent sweetened the deal by making it a potential $40 million bailout.

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The Press Corpse

I was struck a couple weeks ago by a fairly banal headline amid the Trump administration’s daily authoritarian grease fires: “The Best Red Carpet Looks at the Venice Film Festival.” With the fracturing of democracy, I’d forgotten that mainstream entertainment media and luxury brands are still doing their thing according to a seasonal calendar. The annual parade of Venice gowns whets the appetite for Fashion Weeks in New York, Paris, London, and Milan.

Fashion Week ought to be a reminder that despite world wars and natural disasters, the cycles of institutional culture and the media that promote them always manage to carry on. Haute couture is the small-batch distraction from social ills just like professional sports is (or is supposed to be) the Big Gulp distraction. But the first thing I saw in the New York Times about the city’s 2025 Fashion Week was an article on Andrew Cuomo and other current and former local politicians walking the runway as part of Style Across the Aisle, a supposedly bipartisan charity event launched by a former journalist who “last year wore an ‘I Heart Cuomo’ T-shirt in the Hamptons.”

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The Law of Subtraction

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything,” wrote the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” I assume he meant the letting go of worldly attachments, hence the Christian centrality of alms-giving and rituals of fasting and material abnegation. But humans—loss-averse by nature—and Americans in particular have found subtraction a difficult act.

Before there was athleisure and people still “dressed up” to go out, a sartorial rule held that before leaving the house you should look in the mirror and subtract one thing. But in today’s baroque culture of eternal abundance, even one thing seems too much. Americans’ preferred solution to any problem that involves themselves is to add. During COVID lockdown, our first impulse was to hoard and then to binge-buy superfluous gadgets. Despite the ignorance of anti-vaxxers, reasonable people aggressively wanted to be vaccinated (addition) rather than socially distanced (subtraction).

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Look What You Made Me Do

A couple of years ago, I saw a tweet about an entitled white novelist who’d just published a memoir about being entitled. So I read Jonathan Dee’s New York Times review of Quiet Street: On American Privilege, by the novelist Nick McDonell, an exemplar of the “blue-blooded, white upper class” who “reaped enormous benefits from having grown up in hyper-privileged circumstances.” According to Dee, McDonell “sees . . . [his privilege] more clearly now, and he feels bad about it. And so, having unconsciously monetized these unearned advantages all his life . . . he now monetizes his consciousness of them, courtesy of corporate publishing, at a rate of roughly $1,495.73 per page.”

Dee’s is a competent and composed takedown of McDonell’s grossly ironic social transgression. Yet when I looked up Dee’s bio, I learned that he, too, is a successful novelist who graduated from Yale and went straight to work for George Plimpton at The Paris Review. To a probably lesser degree, he himself is one of the entitled . . . which, according to the worldview of the New York Times, is the only way it could be. Why, you couldn’t rightly have some working-class striver review McDonell’s book now, could you? That would be socialist class warfare. No, it could only be someone “internal” to the club.

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Ancestors

On a bright, breezy Saturday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its redesigned and reconceived Michael C. Rockefeller wing with holdings from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. At one time or another, I had breezed past the wing’s 1,726 objects before the 2021 renovation began. When friends wanted to check out the architectural bling related to the Oceania rooms—specifically, a reconstructed Ceremonial House Ceiling by Kwoma artists of Papua New Guinea—I went along.

In 1982, the Met had acquired pre-Columbian and African art and artifacts collected by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the politician and oil dynasty scion. Nelson’s son Michael, a young ethnologist, had purchased various artwork from the Pacific islands and Australia before dying in a boat accident in New Guinea in 1961. With the Rockefeller acquisition, the Met built a 40,000-square-foot addition to house it. This renovation changes the floor plan to better integrate the wing with the larger museum, providing a bridge from Greek and Roman galleries that begins with Africa.

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