Kategori: Art

When the plane bearing the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, lands at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday afternoon, his American counterpart will be waiting for him. U.S. Presidents usually receive heads of state at the White House, but the esteem with which Donald Trump appears to hold Xi, and the weight of this visit from the leader of the United States’ closest peer competitor—the first of its kind in a decade—are apparently such that Trump decided to greet him on the tarmac. On Thursday, when Xi goes to the White House, the two leaders will hear the U.S. Marine Band play both of their national anthems and watch a military flyover featuring a B-2 stealth bomber and four F-22 Raptors. When the President went to Beijing in May, he did not get an airport pickup from Xi, and when Xi later escorted him to the Great Hall of the People, they were met by a group of children, who chanted “Welcome!” and waved Chinese and American flags. Optics are paramount for Xi, who presides over a sprawling but opaque one-party state apparatus, and comes to the United States leaving behind a mounting set of domestic woes, including sluggish economic growth and stubbornly high youth unemployment. But he will begin his time in Washington as Trump’s honored guest, more fêted than leaders of allied nations who have called on Trump during his turbulent second term.

What will follow—closed-door meetings between Trump and Xi, with their staffers, scheduled amid the hurried summitry; a state dinner crowded with tech C.E.O.s and other A-listers; a tea involving the Presidents and their spouses, all of it likely covered by a reduced press corps following Trump’s ban on three major media outlets—is murkier. Despite the pomp, expectations for tangible results are low, with Trump and Xi’s personal rapport belying a chasm of distrust and tension between Beijing and Washington.

China has played a central role in the past decade of Trumpist politics. Initially, for Trump the campaigner, China was the embodiment of U.S. folly, a country catapulted to superpower status thanks to the naïveté and the cupidity of the American globalist class, which, a generation ago, opened the doors for China’s manufacturing juggernaut to take over the global economy, hollowing out factories and disappearing working-class jobs in the West. For Trump the President, China was, in his first term, a clear strategic rival to be reined in by tough policies, including the first blows of a trade war that lingered through the Biden Administration, which took a similarly tough, if more calibrated, approach to Beijing. But, in Trump’s second term, his tone has changed—in April of last year, China responded to his unprecedented tariffs with expanded export controls that showcased the dominance of its critical-mineral supply chains, which many U.S. companies depend on. Trump backtracked, and has conspicuously softened his stance. He delayed arms sales to Taiwan, the autonomous island democracy whose return to mainland rule Xi says is a “historical inevitability,” and appears to have tolerated China’s insufficient purchases of U.S. agricultural products that Xi had pledged to fulfill.

Of the sixteen novels that John Steinbeck published before his death, in 1968, “East of Eden” was his favorite. “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this,” he said of the multigenerational epic, which follows two families in the author’s agrarian home town of Salinas, California. Published in 1952, the book is narrated by a fictionalized version of Steinbeck, who recounts the travails of the wealthy but miserable Trasks and the hardscrabble but lively Hamiltons, from the late nineteenth century to the First World War.

“East of Eden” is back on the cultural radar because of a buzzy new adaptation, on Netflix, that centers on Cathy Ames (played by Florence Pugh), an iron-willed woman who marries the hapless Adam Trask, gives birth to twins, and abandons them all as soon as she’s physically able, to join—and eventually run—a brothel. (When Adam asks her what he’s to do with two infants, she tells him to throw them down a well.) Suffice it to say, Cathy is the main reason to tune in.

I hope it’s not too blasphemous to declare that I preferred the miniseries to the book, despite finding the adaptation rather uneven. The show’s creator, Zoe Kazan, makes Cathy sympathetic, her villainy a product of the gendered violence of her era—something Steinbeck didn’t bother to do, as he considered her a born sociopath. I also loved Kazan’s elaboration on the character of Lee, Adam’s cerebral servant, who ends up raising Adam’s children while grappling with his inability to truly belong anywhere as a Chinese American in the early-twentieth-century United States.

But the novel is not without its advantages. Its chief edge over the series is its sense of historical sweep, conveyed via the book’s aging narrator, who seeks to impart how things used to be: how miraculous refrigerators initially felt, or how absurdly difficult it was to start the earliest automobiles. (My favorite chapter involves the narrator’s mother, Olive Hamilton, taking her first flight. She “did not believe” in aviation, he says—the Wright brothers had taken their inaugural ride less than two decades prior—but Olive gets on an airplane in spite of her terror, so as not to let her children down.) I didn’t always respond to the narrator’s tone of folksy garrulousness, but his love of his native soil—its seasons, its scents—gives the story a warmth that didn’t quite make the leap from page to screen. And, like all beloved multigenerational tales, the novel is wonderfully immersive—this one particularly so because it weaves in Steinbeck’s own family history.

In fiction, spoiler alerts exist to protect the reader experience, premised on the idea that knowing a story’s outcome will reduce momentum and suspense. In historical writing, it’s just the opposite. Works of history gain energy from the fact that readers know where the narrative is going, especially when it’s going nowhere good. Books on the origins of wars tend to rely on a tragic arc, with the reader aware of the shoals ahead while the books’ subjects blithely reassure one another that the coast looks clear, that diplomacy will win the day, that any conflict will be short and easy.

Within this literature, no decade is more doom-laden than the nineteen-thirties, when misguided hope and willful blindness led the world’s democracies to grossly underestimate the threat of Fascism. In the standard story, the United States, Britain, and France stood by, wringing their hands and straining for appeasement while the Japanese stampeded through Asia and Nazi Storm Troopers ran roughshod over Europe. The result was the greatest cataclysm in modern history: seventy million dead, the genocide of European Jews, the bombing of once magnificent cities. The reader, aware of this outcome, is left with the literary equivalent of shouting at the screen: Don’t do it! Act now! Watch out—they’re coming for you!

The historian William I. Hitchcock’s excellent new book, “A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II” (Simon & Schuster), leans into this sense of foreboding. In the course of nearly six hundred pages, Hitchcock describes how Fascism spread across the globe, beginning with Mussolini’s rise in the battered, destabilized Italy of the nineteen-twenties and ending in 1941, when Hitler occupied most of Continental Europe. A Pulitzer finalist and a professor at the University of Virginia, Hitchcock has written several books about the Second World War, each with an emphasis on the European theatre. This time, he wants to explain why U.S. policymakers, especially F.D.R., failed to act or even to fully comprehend what was happening until it was almost too late.

No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”

Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.

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Zacharia brought to her work a gossamer résumé in the field of communications: a brief stint as a commentator at Newsmax and less than two months as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”

When Barbara Trapido was in her late twenties, a friend told her that she was lazy: she told such good stories, but she never wrote them down. Trapido did not think that she was lazy. Each morning, she took a bus from Durham, in northeast England, where she lived with her husband, Stanley, a lecturer at the university there, to Sunderland, an industrial town on the coast, where she taught drama and literature at a continuing-education college. Trapido loved her students. They were in their late teens, earnest and tasting freedom for the first time. She wrote her own abridged versions of difficult texts, to help them pass their exams. Trapido didn’t think she was lazy at all. Besides, the friend who’d said that she was—Margo Russell—was an overachiever. Like the Trapidos, Russell and her husband were political exiles from South Africa, where they had opposed the apartheid regime. The Russells were sociologists. They had young children and had blown up power lines belonging to the state.

But it was true that Trapido didn’t have ambitions to speak of. She never had. As a child, she had been small and wheezy, held close by her mother, Anneliese, who was herself an exile. Trapido was hopeless at sports and other worldly pursuits. Her sister, Fran, who was a year older, was much better at all that. In school, Trapido loved fiction and poetry, but she noticed that, where all the bright boys in her classes had plans—for future careers or to study abroad—there was no plan for her. She just assumed, if she even did that, that she would meet a man and get married and learn to cook and sew and have children and live in a bungalow like the one her parents had in Durban.

Russell was insistent. The Guardian was holding a short-story competition, and Trapido had to enter it. When she tried to come up with a story, she heard, very distinctly, the voices of a large family, talking loud, fast, and over one another. She closed her eyes and entered a soundscape. “I didn’t actually see them clearly,” Trapido told me recently. “What I saw was kind of shapes and the way people moved, the way people come to you in dreams.” More than anything, the experience reminded Trapido of her early childhood, when she would spend hours hiding in bamboo clumps in Durban, talking to people in her head. “I thought, Hey, this is playing. This is what I used to do—and I got really addicted to it.”

Her imaginary family—the Goldmans—became her constant companions. They accompanied her to the movies and to the seaside. She wrote down what they said: reams of argument and love. There were five—no, six—children. The mother, Jane, was beautiful and strong, but displaced from her own well-bred family. The two eldest sons, Roger and Jonathan, were captivating in different ways. Trapido wondered what would happen to the middle daughter, Rosie, who wasn’t as clever as her older brothers.

On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth convened hundreds of the U.S. military’s junior officers and enlisted service members in a cavernous auditorium on a military base in Virginia to hear what he called the first of a new annual tradition—a “State of the Force” report to the troops from their self-styled “Secretary of War.” The key moment came when Hegseth, strutting across an American flag-swathed stage in one of his trademark too-tight TV-man’s suits, announced victory over the enemies whose defeat has been the signature focus of his tenure. “We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department,” he declared. “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

Listening to the address, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a live-action rerun of one of Hegseth’s old Fox News shows, complete with the vilification of bad guys you didn’t even really know were a problem. (Since when was the U.S. military ever the home of wimps and radicals?) But if the antagonists were a bit opaque, the message came through clearly: the only war that this secretary wants to prosecute is the one at home—against the forces of political correctness, against the military’s own generals, some ten per cent of whom Hegseth has already fired, with plans to dismiss ten per cent more, and, above all, against the “fake news,” which he accused of “treason” for accurately reporting the challenges imposed on U.S. forces by an actual war in the Middle East that went all but unmentioned in his nearly hourlong speech.

Hegseth’s main nod to the ongoing conflict with Iran, in fact, came when he asserted that the war, which the Trump Administration is currently asking Congress to provide tens of billions of emergency funding for, was both over and a roaring success “that every red-blooded American is proud of.”

His speech, it should also be noted, came on a day when the Pentagon announced that it had closed the last major U.S. military base in Iraq, thus ending the twenty-three-year, $1.7-trillion American presence there that began with George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion in 2003—the last time a Republican President embarked on an unpopular war of choice in the region. This also was not mentioned. It wasn’t just the Middle East that Hegseth omitted, though. The entire rest of the world was also left out. As in, no China, no Russia, no Europe or Africa. In Donald Trump’s Pentagon, there are no geopolitics; only the divisive domestic politics of us versus them.

On a whirlwind trip to New York this week, Mahmoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, looked exhausted. His country has been at war with the United States and Israel for seven months. Dark, puffy bags sagged under his eyes. His tone—at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, on the sidelines of negotiations with U.S. envoys, in meetings with other world leaders, and at briefings for nuclear specialists, think-tank experts, and members of the media—alternated between bitter, biting, and bewildered.

The scenes were often surreal. Since February 28th, when the war began, Pezeshkian has frequently run his government from an underground location, to avoid the fate of his former boss, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of other politicians and military officers, all killed in air strikes. This week, however, the U.S. Secret Service and the New York Police Department provided Pezeshkian protection in coördination with his own security detail of Revolutionary Guards, an Iranian military branch that has repeatedly been targeted during the war. It was the first time that the President of a country at war with the United States has been allowed to pay a visit.

In New York, Iran made a new bid to end the conflict during indirect talks with U.S. envoys. The proposal, which would expedite a resolution in a mere seven days—peace on steroids—called for the U.S. to lift economic sanctions and end its blockade of Iranian ships, and for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz to all international shipping, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Thursday. It “would be much better” if the process were completed before the U.S. midterm elections in November, he continued. But Tehran is “in no hurry.”

The proposal also outlined an end to hostilities between the U.S and Iran, a ceasefire in Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, the release of an estimated twelve billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets, and the resumption of negotiations on the future of Iran’s controversial nuclear program. These reflected the main points in the so-called memorandum of understanding negotiated in Islamabad in June and signed, from afar, by Presidents Trump and Pezeshkian. That deal broke down in July, when Iran struck three ships that were passing through an “unauthorized” route in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. responded with fresh rounds of punishing air strikes.

The new proposal was relayed to the U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during three hours of indirect talks, mediated by Qatar. Witkoff described the meetings as “encouraging, constructive and successful.” Trump called them “very good.”

Earlier in the day, however, Trump had mused, during a speech on the U.N. floor, about whether he should “annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again.” Trump said that he was willing to drive Iran “into Hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations” if it does not agree to end the war on his more ambitious terms, which include sweeping steps to dismantle any remaining aspects of a nuclear program that could be used to make a weapon. On Friday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had indeed rejected Iran’s proposal, and that he expects to resume bombing the country after the midterms, though an unnamed U.S. official said that Washington and Tehran continue to negotiate.