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Detail of Charles Le Brun’s “Battle of Arbela (Gaugamela)” (1689), oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre. It shows Alexander the Great leading the charge against Darius III in the battle that would cement his conquest of the Persian Empire.

'Meeting' the moment

May 19, 2020

In 334 B.C., Alexander the Great took an army of 35,000 – roughly the size of the New York City Police Department -- against a Persian army of a quarter of a million in a bold quest to conquer the Persian Empire. Three years later, on the eve of the decisive battle at Gaugamela in what is now northern Iraq, he told his troops that they had no need for long, inspirational speeches. Their bravery and deeds made them more than prepared. But he wanted them to know that they had something the enemy did not. They had him. He would have their backs by leading from the front. They would endure together. And together, they would be victorious.

Why care about Alexander and the Greeks? For that matter, why care about history? Because they tell us something essential about leadership — that to be a leader you have to communicate a clear goal, demonstrate what’s in it for others and lead from the front. Whatever you may think — or not — about Alexander, he led from the front. He was a leader. And leadership is a quality that is in short supply these days.

Shining city on a hill: Leo von Klenze reimagines the Acropolis created under the leadership of the Athenian statesman Pericles in “The Acropolis at Athens” (1846), oil on canvas. Neue Pinakothek.

Is this the end of 'American exceptionalism'?

April 26, 2020

The Athenian statesman, general and orator Pericles is generally regarded as presiding over the Golden Age of Greece, when Athens was the first among equals of the Greek city-states — ruling the seas in a series of wars; bestowing democracy on freemen; encouraging the arts and literature; and building a series of public works projects that are still with us today in the remnants of the buildings of the Acropolis that include the Parthenon, temple of the city’s patroness, Athena, goddess of wisdom and war in a just cause.But after some 30 years it was all over in 629 B.C. when a plague — perhaps typhus — ripped through Athens, killing Pericles and several members of his family. It was the beginning of the end for Athens, too, which became involved in a long struggle with archrival Sparta.

People often ask me about my fascination with history and in particular the Greeks and Alexander the Great, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror who would come along 300 years later and avenge all the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Persians, their foreign rivals, including the burning of that Acropolis. Let’s be frank here, shall we? People find my fascination with history and the Greeks at best quaint and at worst out of touch. They don’t just ask me about it, they ridicule me about it.

Who’s laughing now?…

Yo-Yo Ma is offering “Songs of Comfort,” like Johan Sebastian Bach’s Sarabande. Facebook/Yo-Yo Ma.

Of COVID and character

March 21, 2020

Well, where to begin? Should we begin at the beginning — with the overpopulation, poverty, lack of education, filth and communist secrecy that produces diseases like COVID-19 in China? I’m no fan of President Donald J. Trump, but I have no problem with him calling this the Chinese disease, particularly as Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks nothing of kicking American journalists out of China in a further attempt to mask the severity of the virus there and his own negligence in his delayed response and sharing of information. (If Xi is helping the world now with masks and respirators, as Christiane Amanpour of Amanpour & Co. keeps going on about, really, it’s the least he can do, given that his country created the crisis. Praising the Chinese for “helping” is like thanking an arsonist who burned your house down for offering you a place to live. I mean, honestly.

Chinese one-child policy propaganda from 1982. Photograph by Robert Schedwy.

Sex and the determinedly single girl

February 19, 2020

I have to laugh at the Chinese government pressuring unmarried women to get hitched. A little background: In 1979, the government instituted a one-child policy to curb the population. Because Chinese tradition dictates that the oldest son cares for the parents in old age — and we wouldn’t want to mess with tradition, now would we? — couples opted to abort girl babies or put them up for overseas adoption. And now the policy, which ended in 2015, has bitten the government in its considerable butt. The gender selection chicken has come home to roost as the fewer females of marriageable age have the pick of the crop.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, seen from the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. at dusk, represents the neoclassical style that the Trump Administration wants federal buildings in the capital to adhere to. Photograph by Joe Ravi.

The Trumpian return to classicism

February 10, 2020

Far be it from me to agree with President Donald J. Trump on anything, but as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Trump’s decision to MABGA — Make American Buildings Great Again — finds him decreeing in a new executive order that federal buildings in Washington, D.C. should be classical in style, rather than Modern.

The liberal media, Modernists and the art world are not taking this well — understandably. Everyone gets nervous when the federal government starts telling folks what to do, especially conservatives. And Modernism isn’t less a standard of beauty than classicism, Marion Smith, chairwoman of the National Civic Art Society, which is leading the anti-Modernist charge, notwithstanding. As the great composer-pianist Duke Ellington — who wrote jazz standards and classical works alike — observed, there are only two types of music, good and bad. So it is with all the arts.

But the Trump order is in keeping with a growing backlash against Modernism n art and design.

Between Iraq and a hard place

January 7, 2020

So President Donald J. Trump, a man who’s always tilting at “cancer-causing” windmills, finally has something to rail against for real. From the beginning, he’s been against Iran and all Muslims and anything he imagined President Barack Obama espoused, whether he actually did (like the Iran nuclear deal) or not (the Muslim Brotherhood).

Fresco of dancing Peucetian women from the Tomb of the Dancers in the Corso Cotugno necropolis of Ruvo di Puglia, end of the 5th or mid-4th century B.C. The ancient Greeks believed that charisma was the grace of the gods. But charisma has little gra… — Fresco of dancing Peucetian women from the Tomb of the Dancers in the Corso Cotugno necropolis of Ruvo di Puglia, end of the 5th or mid-4th century B.C. The ancient Greeks believed that charisma was the grace of the gods. But charisma has little grace in the modern age.

Boris, The Donald and charisma in the age of reality TV

December 23, 2019

Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party won big in the United Kingdom’s recent election, establishing a clear path — or more precisely, a clearer path — to Brexit Jan. 31. Amid all the questions of winners (the Tories) and losers (the Labour Party, its unpalatable former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and quite possibly the British worker, London as world financial capital, immigrants, globalism, Scotland, the Irish backstop), was the notion that the Conservatives succeeded because of Johnson’s Trumpian charisma, which he damped down for the occasion by corralling his usual hijinks.