We are barely a week into the second Trump administration and the outrage is spilling forth. It's almost too much to grasp, really. Norm violations are busting out all over. And I'm just talking about Lauren Sanchez's inaugural outfit.
But speaking of norms, Tal Fortgang has a review of Olivier Roy's The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms.
"When we no longer share widespread cultural understandings, especially normative judgments ('rape is wrong') and guidance ('sexual encounters should proceed within relationships to guard against exploitation'), nothing can be left to chance or the unsaid. Nothing is implicit, which is why universities make students undergo training about how to have one-night stands, and those trainings include the instruction, echoed in 'affirmative consent' laws, to receive an unambiguous 'yes' before each stage of the encounter. Our interactions, sexual or platonic, become rote and mechanized. As Roy points out, romance actually begins to imitate pornography by sticking to a script and treating each element of sex as a distinct act within the performance.
"I have put the analytical cart ahead of the horse here, of course. What happened to culture? More accurately, what happened to our culture, the one that provided the structure for managing expectations and interactions? Which culture is Roy, a Frenchman serving as a professor in Italy whose work is informed deeply by American current events, referring to?
"Roy's theory goes something like this: In the age of the internet, and the global-liberal marketplace of goods, ideas, and cultural touchstones it ushered in, local cultures are subsumed into a global culture with its own lingo, assumptions, and norms. That culture may be dominated by American exports—more precisely the contributions of American tastemakers—but we are not hegemons. Young people who grow up on the Web inherit an admixture of cultural inputs with no authority capable or qualified to tell them how to make sense of it all. Culture—implicit understandings of what is and what ought to be, shared by members of a community—has globalized, commingled, and diluted to the point of disappearance. All culture, in the traditional sense, is gone.
"One mundane way this manifests is in the difficulty of discerning tone and intention from contemporary communications. Enter emoji, the surefire way to take all guesswork out of interpersonal interactions. Roy describes how European bureaucrats attempt to deal with the problem of language decoupled from culture: 'Emotion is allowed, of course, but it must be immediately understood by addressees, wherever they may come from, so it is "sourced" from a list that, while remaining open, is pre-prepared.' Joking is 'banned,' therefore, and 'emotions have to be expressed explicitly using an emoji with a pre-defined meaning.' The parallels to sex—and the ominously dehumanized world both manifestations of a post-culture world portend—are clear."
From the Empire of Norms to the Roman Empire, Joseph Epstein is back with a review of Josiah Osgood's Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome.
"In his Lawless Republic Josiah Osgood, a professor of classics at Georgetown University, recounts several of Cicero’s trials, including his first and last, and does so with quiet authority and impressive lucidity. His chief sources are Cicero’s printing of his own courtroom speeches and other writings. Cicero has been fortunate among ancient Romans in having a vast amount of his writing—no fewer than 29 books in the Loeb Classical Library—survive. Much of what we know about the late Roman Republic we know from Cicero. From these writings it also emerges that Cicero was the first pure type of the intellectual.
"Perhaps the most interesting of the trials in which Cicero participated is the one occasion on which he served as prosecutor. This was the case against the magistrate Gaius Verres, who openly plundered the Sicilians he was sent to govern. A thief with a strong aesthetic sense, Verres was a man who couldn’t bear anyone else to possess any objects of beauty. Wherever possible he stripped the homes of the wealthy and the temples of their statues and paintings. Had you a decent set of silverware, you would have been mistaken to have invited him for dinner for he was certain to return to take it from you. Cicero won, and Verres was sent into exile. In this case Cicero had defeated Verres’ defender Quintus Hortensius, and thereby established himself as the leading advocate in Rome. Verres, pleasing to report, was later proscribed by Mark Antony and divested of all his beloved stolen possessions."
"During his year as consul, Cicero’s life radically changed. The first change was his encounter with Lucius Sergius Catiline. A man of patrician ancestry, Catiline twice lost election to the consulship, and much resented having done so. He resented it enough to call together a group to help him stage a military coup. One of the first projects of this group of conspirators was to kill Cicero, who had defeated Catiline for consul in 64 B.C. Osgood’s account of what has become known as the Catiline Conspiracy makes vivid an immensely complex plot of intrigue. In the end five of the conspirators were put to death without trial. 'In the prison was an underground chamber, dark and foul-smelling, reached only by an opening in its stone ceiling,' Osgood writes. 'One by one, the conspirators were lowered into the chamber and strangled by a noose by the public executioners.' Cicero would soon after be excoriated for having ordered these men put to death without trial, while others, among them the strong traditionalist Cato the younger, applauded Cicero’s quickness to take action and save the city. Catiline later died in battle against senatorial armies, his head, in the custom of the day, detached and sent to Rome."
While we're discussing barbarity, Josef Joffe reviews Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Yardena Schwartz.
"Schwartz had felt like 'walking into the pages of history,' which keeps defying well-meaning attempts at conciliation, though Western diplomacy had labored hard since the late 1930s. Back then, the Jews were to get 20 and the Arabs 80 percent of the land, the most generous deal of all times. They tore it up. Shredding the U.N. partition plan of 1947, they launched a five-nation assault, which Israel defeated against all odds. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat at the White House; a bit later, the PLO chief launched a terror a campaign.
"In 2000, Bill Clinton tried again at Camp David, and Arafat unleashed the Second Intifada. In 2008, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, extended the best offer ever put on the table by Israel: two capitals in Jerusalem, almost all of the West Bank, plus territorial compensation within Israel proper. Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas said 'la,' Arabic for 'no.' Even Ariel Sharon’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 had been in vain. The fruit was not coexistence, but a totalitarian Hamas dedicated to the erasure of the Jewish state. After its two-front victory against Hamas and Hezbollah in 2024, 'two states for two nations' has receded into Peter Pan’s Neverland.
"Depending on whose side you are on, you will point the finger at the other or invoke lots of 'yes, but.' Or you might perorate about the ways of the world with its countless wars for aggrandizement. Yet that doesn’t explain why Egypt and Jordan made peace with their neighbor Israel half a lifetime ago—coldish as it is. Logically, there must be something else that keeps feeding Palestinian rejectionism. Ghosts of a Holy War lays out the reasons."
I can think of a few reasons to see the movie Anora and no reason to see the much-heralded Emilia Perez. The Weekend Beacon's movie critic John Podhoretz explains.
"The Oscar race is, it seems, coming down to a contest between what is unquestionably the worst movie of 2024—Emilia Perez—and what might be the best movie of 2024. That would be Anora, an uncategorizable and unclassifiable story of a lost soul, a 23-year-old stripper in Brooklyn who also trades sexual favors for money. She hits the financial and emotional jackpot when the son of a Russian oligarch falls for her.
"So it’s a love story, albeit an entirely transactional one—beautifully and precisely observed and unsentimental by its writer-director, Sean Baker. He neither condescends to his intellectually compromised characters nor excuses them their profound personal and moral failings. But those failings come into play when, all of a sudden, the fairy-tale romance goes off the rails. At this point we’re about 20 minutes in, and bam—Anora takes off like a rocket. With no warning that it’s coming, Baker delivers a second act that proves to be the best screwball comedy made in America since Arthur more than 40 years ago."
"The idea that this extraordinary piece of work is in a contest with Emilia Perez tells you something about the decline of everything. Because Emilia Perez is dreadful—both conceptually and in execution. See, according to writer-director Jacques Audiard, the problem with the psychotic mass-murdering Mexican drug lords who are destroying Western civilization is that they have been brainwashed by toxic masculinity. And what is the perfect cure? Transsexuality. The title character is El Chapo with his male machinery removed—and once El Chapo becomes a she, they become social justice warriors for the poor and oppressed."
"Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn. Hollywood is trying to tell us things again. Emilia Perez got the same number of nominations as All About Eve because it’s about the wonders of sex change operations and how they will solve all the problems of our planet."
From the archives: Among Joe Biden's preemptively pardoned was Dr. Anthony Fauci, who wanted to make clear he committed no crime (but will happily accept the rather self-incriminating pardon). Fauci penned a memoir last year, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service, which Gerard Baker reviewed.
"An honest critic now is obliged to acknowledge that, as Fauci recounts, no one had a clear idea how serious COVID might be in those early days—and an abundance of caution in official and private responses was understandable. The problem that Fauci faces is that, as the pandemic wore on and the draconian public safety measures to tackle it hit harder, he and other officials were promulgating actions based on a science that was never as settled as they claimed.
"Mask-wearing, initially discouraged, later became essential, we were told, for saving lives. The strict imposition of social distancing that closed schools, workplaces, restaurants, and ruined the livelihoods, education, and mental health of so many, wasn't rooted in hard medical evidence but 'sort of just appeared,' as he later told a congressional hearing.
"Mindful of how ruinous some of these measures were, and even as he likes to claim credit for saving lives, Fauci is quick to insist he wasn't the decision-maker. There was a 'gross misperception,' he says, 'that I was in charge of most or even all of the federal government's response.'
"And he tries to further dodge responsibility by belatedly acknowledging the limits of the scientific evidence he had for his advice: 'People associate science with absolutes that are immutable when in fact science is a process that continually uncovers new information. … What we know continues to evolve and uncertainty is common.'
"And where would people get this idea that science was an absolute truth? Perhaps from the man who responded to his critics by saying, 'They're really criticizing science—because I represent science. That's dangerous.'"
I beg your pardon?