The Ramadan Affair has reopened the historical split over laïcité within the French left, but the dispute has found new grounds—about whether national identity is something fixed or evolving, about what place Muslims and immigrants have in the country’s future. These cleavages, which divide not only the French left but society in general, are something Emmanuel Macron had hoped to elude. But today, in the wake of the Ramadan Affair, Macron finds himself caught up in the return of this controversy over Islam and French identity. This time, it is neither the far right of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, nor those of the Gaullist right who emulate Sarkozy, who are winning, but an ex-Socialist who still claims to be on the left (he quit the party after the election). Valls may lack a political home for now, but he has signaled that he means to make identity—Islam vs. France—his main theme. If President Macron fails to pull the country out of its socio-economic doldrums, he will have to face a dangerously sharpened identity politics.
Books
Big Rocket Man
Donald Trump has threatened “Little Rocket Man” with “fire and fury like the world has never seen”—not even seen, presumably, at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We possess, after all, many more and much better (that is, much worse) explosives than were used by President Truman in 1945, when he incinerated those cities without Congress or the American people knowing we even had them. The fact that President Trump (“old lunatic”) has a legally absolute power to destroy Kim Jong-un (“short and fat”) over dueling insults is so scary that Senator Edward Markey and Representative Ted Lieu are trying to restrict that absolute power, so that only Congress would have the authority to declare nuclear war. This seems not only reasonable but constitutionally necessary. The Constitution in fact denies the president the power to declare war and reserves it solely to Congress. More than that, the framers clearly opposed the massing of power in the executive—lest it become the monarchy they had opposed with a revolution.
Not So Innig
To the Editors: Tim Page in his review of Harvey Sachs’s biography of Toscanini speaks of the preference of some of us for a particular style of interpretation of classical German composers, imbued with what the Germans call Innigkeit, or “inwardness,” as he translates the word. He surely means Innerlichkeit, the real German counterpart to “inwardness.” Innigkeit has nuances of warmth and intimacy.
Spy Novelists
To the Editors: A small correction to “Back from the Cold” by Christian Caryl. John Bingham was not Sir John Bingham, but John Bingham 7th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook, Mayo, whose ancestors included the winner of a VC at the Battle of Jutland.
Acting Natural
The camera, just by its presence, altered human behavior. The motion picture camera changed the nature of acting. Among other things, it created that apparent oxymoron, the non-actor, the subject of an unusually rich and stimulating series now at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Programmed by Dennis Lim and Thomas Beard, “The Non-Actor” is predicated on the idea that all camera-based movies are documents and that filmed acting is perhaps synonymous with behavior. In this sense, the first movie actors—the workers filmed leaving the Lumière factory or the family that the Lumière brothers documented in Feeding the Baby in the mid-1890s—were the also the first non-actors.
Kick Against the Pricks
At first it was a lot of enormous media potentates crashing to earth, followed by a bunch of lesser despots and lords, many employed in the media industries too, and it soon expanded to include half the men in Hollywood and ancillary trades like politics. The accompanying din was the clamor of pundits (those who hadn’t yet been felled themselves) attempting to explain what had happened—then reexplain, then explain some more—because the picture kept changing: soon the not-so-powerful were under fire too (freelance writers and experimental novelists were among those anonymously charged in an online list), and it was becoming unclear whether it was “toxic masculinity” or masculine panic we were talking about.
Walden on the Rocks
In October 1849, 140 Irish immigrants perished when the St. John, the ship upon which they had sailed to “the New World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did,” crashed on the shores of Cape Cod during a huge storm. We would probably not even remember their fate were it not that their demise was registered, and then narrated, by none other than Henry David Thoreau. This year, which marks the bicentennial of his birth, has focused, rightly, on a life dedicated to nature in its multiple and luminous forms, and his ground-breaking call to civil disobedience. And yet, it is worth also turning our attention to that lesser known experience of his on Cape Cod, the calamity he witnessed such a long time ago and that nevertheless feels so sadly contemporary, so vividly relevant.
Truth in Advertising
By the final scene, a great quantity of blood will have been splashed across the screen, yet despite the impressive amount of mayhem and gore on view, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an unusually literary film. Martin McDonagh, who began his career as a playwright, is intensely concerned with language. In fact, Three Billboards is partly about the power of language—specifically, the outrage and havoc caused by the few words that Mildred chooses to display. Just before Mildred’s first conversation with Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones) begins, we may notice that Red is reading a book by Flannery O’Connor. It’s by no means a casual or accidental choice. One feels O’Connor’s spirit hovering over the film, and not only because, like her fiction, it is set in the rural South and leavens a deep seriousness with broad and often grotesque humor.
How to Stop Trump Blowing It Up
Trump gave his UN speech on North Korea on September 19, which means that the War Powers Act’s sixty-day period for unilateral presidential action ran out on November 18. Under the act’s explicit provisions, the president can engage in no further provocations, such as military incursions into North Korean airspace, without gaining a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force from Congress. The act’s ban on unilateral presidential action is not absolute; it expressly authorizes the president to respond unilaterally to “an attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” If North Korea assaults American bases in Korea, or fires missiles at Guam, Trump is indeed authorized to respond with “fire and fury.” But in the meantime, he must restrain himself—and the statute provides his congressional critics with special procedures to insist that he keep his forces under control.
China’s Art of Containment
“Theater of the World” is an account of two important decades in that tortuous journey and it revisits the era of China’s global emergence from an academic and inclusive curatorial perspective. Crucially valuable is the effort made to redress an imbalance in the general international understanding of contemporary Chinese art, one which has previously over-emphasized what the art critic Jed Perl has called “radical chic with blood on its hands.” Regardless, the curators of “Theater,” partly under the influence of Wang Hui, an establishment “new Marxist” favored by left-leaning Western academics, follow the trend of earlier exhibitions to celebrate too readily vacuous critiques of capitalism, to unearth supposed acts of resistance in artistic gestures, and to extol experimental forays as rebellions in miniature.
Sig Nordal 