Dominic Green

Dominic Green

Thursday

Dominic Green

Can we believe Ilhan Omar’s autobiography?

Political autobiographies are written to conceal, not to reveal. They come in two eminently pulpable forms. One is the twilight apologia of the retired or defeated politician, the other the resumé-polishing pitch of the rising star. Which category Ilhan Omar’s autobiography falls into depends on whether you, like her, think she’s a cruelly traduced beacon of hope in a land of benighted bigotry; or whether, as one investigative journalist concluded, she has committed the ‘worst spree of felonies by a congressperson in history’.‘I’m not here to undo or rewrite history,’ Omar tells us. But the truth slips away from her like a greased pig.

ilhan omar

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Trump picks a Swedish model

Donald Trump is moving toward a Swedish model. His vitality sustained by regular doses of hydroxychloroquine, President Prophylaxis is pushing hard for re-entry. His goal? Normality or, this being the Trump presidency, the next best thing. And that, as Trump so succinctly put it, means ‘a lot of death’.Our future is Swedish. Not naked saunas and reindeer stew, but the Swedish model: herd immunity against COVID-19. The Swedes went their own way when, as in Ingmar Bergman’s chucklefest The Seventh Seal, the plague swept up from the south. Being hardy northerners, they pursued their own corona-strategy and continued to live as normally as possible.

swedish model

Thursday

Dominic Green

Welcome to COVID College

Welcome, freshpersons and already indebted students, to the fall semester at COVID College. The college experience is an essential part of American life. For it is here that our young adults learn the American values of democratic socialism, gender exploration, racial guilt and defaulting on the first of, we hope, many unpayable debts.As our adjunct instructors will fail to teach you, before the slaveholder’s charter had ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, there was white supremacist philosopher John Locke’s ‘Life, liberty and property’. Owning a property is so American that even the homeless of Los Angeles aspire to have their own tents. So it’s right that your college education is your first mortgage.

covid college

Tuesday

Dominic Green

COVID-19: the bluffer’s guide

COVID-19 may have prevented us from going to bars and talking nonsense, but there’s nothing to stop us drinking at home and talking nonsense on Zoom. Problem is, COVID information is multiplying faster than a virus on a vagrant’s tongue. Here’s 11 tips for bluffing your way through the greatest challenge in our lifetimes: sounding like you know what’s going on and what to do next. 1) ‘I think I had it in December’‘What do they know of COVID who only COVID know?’ Rudyard Kipling might have asked if he’d licked a pole on the New York subway and spent a few days in bed. Remember that bug you had last December, January or February and thought was food poisoning or a head cold?

covid

Thursday

Dominic Green

The symbolism of Orion, the hunter of the heavens

From our UK edition

What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our pre-literate past is a history without a clear story: excavated stones and waste pits, fragments of myth and philological association. The early literate past is little clearer. The later Bronze Age of the Myceneans, the Minoans and Moses is a speculative assembly. Later, the surfaces of the Athens of Plato and Pericles are solid in marble and rational in thought, but the myths remain strange and violent memories, subject to an alien, evasive logic we cannot quite follow. ‘These Greeks,’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal mused as he climbed up to the Acropolis in 1908, ‘where are they?

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Lockdown is over. Someone tell the government

The coronavirus shutdown is over by public demand. There are crowds of sunbathers in the parks of New York City and mobs on the steps of the statehouses. Pedestrian and road traffic are rising and businesses are defying orders by informally reopening. The people are speaking — the people who used to work on a hand-to-mouth economy, the people who cannot afford to stay indoors indefinitely, the people who cannot be bothered to stay in when the sun comes out.These people are not all the people. They are not the doctors, who counsel caution. They are not the state governors, who are terrified of votes being washed away by a post-reopening second wave of casualties. They are not state employees, who can trust that their jobs will be waiting for them.

lockdown

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Bill de Blasio isn’t an anti-Semite but…

Bumbling Bill de Blasio is all thumbs, and not just on Twitter. Slow to respond when Orthodox Jews suffered an unprecedented wave of violence on his streets, the mayor of New York City quickly ejaculated a blanket warning of mass arrests to ‘the Jewish community’ after several hundred members of a Hasidic sect attended a funeral — a funeral, de Blasio now admits, that his office and the NYPD’s commissioned knew of in advance. https://twitter.com/nycmayor/status/1255309615883063297?s=21 COVID-19 is full of nasty surprises. But who would have put ‘mayor of New York City rounds up the Jews’ on their pandemic bingo card? The mayor now threatens to ‘summons or even arrest’ Jews if they gather in ‘large groups’.

bill de blasio

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Netanyahu’s wages of winning

In a time when the weakness of democratic governance is everywhere on display, Israel dwells alone and displays the dangers of strength. After an unprecedented three elections in less than a year, and coalition negotiations that placed a pandemic second to horse-trading, Benjamin Netanyahu remains in the saddle. This time he is supported by Benny Gantz, whose Blue & White coalition was formed for the sole purpose of unseating him.Like Doron Kabilio in Fauda, Netanyahu survives by short-term maneuvers and deceptions. Crosses are doubled and friends are lost, but the star survives for yet another season. Stability is supposed to be the elixir of good government in multi-party systems with proportional representation.

netanyahu

Monday

Dominic Green

The Meghan & Harry Show will end in tears

Just as we were getting used to the headlines about hospitalization and mortality rates, the really bad news arrives. Meghan and Harry are back. After scuttling to California before they were isolated in the hell of a luxury rental in Vancouver, the unemployed ex-royals are loose on the streets of Los Angeles. Disguised as two Postmates workers, they’re delivering bags of food to already vulnerable members of the public and making sure to be filmed doing it. Think Candid Camera, without the candor.Like everything this spontaneously warm and down-to-earth couple does, this stunt combines a cold whiff of careful planning with their signature aroma, a complex blend of farce, vanity and self-destruction.

meghan harry

Thursday

Dominic Green

Trump walks the recovery tightrope

President Trump’s decision to set the United States back on the path to work will be decried as mere politics, but it is the right decision. It is the task of politicians to consider the general welfare. This consideration sets the current emergency against the coming one, the need to reduce deaths from COVID-19 against the need to forestall the human cost of an economy in open-ended limbo. The data on COVID-19 remains insufficient and will probably remain so. The economic prognosis is, however, clearer, and we have the data too.The IMF is warning that a prolonged shutdown will lead to a Thirties’-style Depression.

recovery

Thursday

Dominic Green

Will coronavirus kill the eurozone?

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

eurozone

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Plagues at Passover

The dust has been expunged and disowned, the bread bin stands forlorn and empty, there is half a ton of matzah in the pantry, yet the Passover of 5780 is different from any other. We are to conduct a festival of liberation under lockdown. The seder, an expansive time for family and friends when the unexpected guest is prized and a cup set out for Elijah, has contracted into the pressure-cooker of the nuclear family or, hardest of all, a solitary vigil, its isolation as likely to be worsened as — excuse the language — leavened by a Zoom session.On Passover, a rabble becomes a people.

passover

Monday

Dominic Green

Who is Dominic Raab?

On Monday evening, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, diagnosed 11 days’ earlier with COVID-19 and taken to hospital for ‘tests’ on Sunday afternoon after showing ‘persistent’ symptoms, was moved into an Intensive Care Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. A brief statement from 10, Downing Street described Johnson’s ‘worsened’ condition and confirmed that Johnson, who had continued working in isolation throughout his illness, had asked foreign secretary Dominic Raab to ‘deputize for him where necessary’.Forty-six-year-old Raab is also the first secretary of state, the most senior member of Johnson’s cabinet.

dominic raab
trump corona
Dominic Green

What happens if Trump gets the coronavirus?

The White House has announced that everyone coming into range of President Trump will be tested for COVID-19. Trump, meanwhile, insists that he won’t wear a mask when meeting other leaders — or, as he put it in order of reverse dignity, ‘presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens’.Unfortunately the worst-case scenario — that a 73-year-old might catch a dose and get seriously ill — no longer seems outlandish. On Sunday night, Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized after falling sick 10 days ago. Today he went into critical care. What if someone sneezes and Trump catches a cold?Welcome to the nasty, brutish and short Pence presidency.

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Meghan Markle’s white privilege

What’s ancient, slow-moving and leaves a trail of crap in its wake? No, not Britain’s royal family; the African elephant. The two are easily confused. The royals never forget and are an endangered species that mates in captivity. Elephants are leathery, photogenic and likely to inspire misplaced sentiment. No wonder Meghan Markle’s first venture as Hollywood royalty should be as voiceover artiste for Elephant, a Disney documentary about elephants in Botswana. But this, like Meghan’s in-laws, is as rich, white and privileged as it gets.The plot of Elephant is the usual cheap anthropomorphism. Gaia the indomitable matriarch must lead her herd hundreds of miles across the Kalahari Desert to a lush green paradise.

meghan markle

Saturday

Dominic Green

King Solomon’s lost city will remain lost forever

From our UK edition

Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient or modern, Megiddo is more existential than eschatological. The name denotes a fortress overlooking a strategic crossroads: Megiddo means ‘strength’. This is where the ancient Via Maris (the ‘way of the sea’, or coastal road) between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent cuts inland, through a pass from the Carmel mountains and into the Jezreel Valley. Megiddo remains strategically crucial and retains its potential for last stands. Today, the only airfield in Israel’s north, the erstwhile RAF base of Ramat David, sits somewhere in the valley (it’s not on maps, but its location is on Wikipedia).

Saturday

Dominic Green

Finger pickin’ good

The banjo was present at the creation of jazz but, like the clarinet and the fiddle, it fell from favor, and for similar reasons. The saxophone and the electric guitar were easier to play, more expressive and much, much louder. The banjo was on the way out even as it was on the way in — in the Hot Five recordings of December 1927 that instituted the jazz solo as we know it, Johnny St Cyr played both banjo and guitar — but the banjo had somewhere else to go. The fleet-fingered took their four-and fivestringers to the hills — the Appalachians, for instance. There, the banjo thrived with those other refugees from early jazz, the fiddle and the steel-strung guitar. Metropolitan contempt caught up with it in the Seventies.

banjo

Tuesday

Dominic Green

The coronavirus is springing the Thucydides trap

The first casualty of informational war is truth. The first American casualty of COVID-19 was the myth that the United States can ‘manage’ the rise of China as a world power through mutual interest. That mutual interest was only ever economic. Naturally, most of our politicians, business leaders and commentators explained it as strategic too: as technocracy calls GDP the index of human happiness, so it identifies strategic interests with economic ones. The coronavirus crisis has, however, exposed an essential strategic antagonism between the United States and China.'‘What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta,’ Thucydides wrote in History of the Peloponnesian War.

thucydides

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Trump cannot defeat a virus

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no libertarians in a pandemic. As the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States starts to resemble the exponential outbreaks in countries where the pandemic is more advanced, the American public wants the kind of security that only government can provide. Donald Trump was elected to provide security, whether from the domestic challenge of outsourcing or the foreign challenge of a rising China. In recent days, he has failed in judgment, in leadership and in decision-making. Only after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic did he address the nation and announce the closure of America’s borders.

trump
squad
Dominic Green

The circular failing Squad

The history of socialism being one of high hopes and rude repudiations, everyone could see that Bernie Sanders was about to bounce off the Blue Wall in Michigan’s Democratic primaries. Everyone, that is, except for the Bernie faithful. The high hopes of socialism are, historically speaking, little more than the sentiments of the Gospels applied to political economy. As politics go, socialism begins in articles of faith and ends in them. But faith is impervious to reason, just as voters are impervious to the more stringent forms of socialism and hence have to have it forced upon them for their own collective good.Which means we are stuck with Bernie’s followers after their aging shaman has tottered off the stage.