AN AMERICAN IN PARIS AND A SYRIAN IN MOSCOW

It was comical to see President-Elect Trump front and center at the reopening of Notre Dame, with Macron and his handshake-wrestling partner Donald sitting next to each other like the best of friends, with Macron's wife, Brigitte, looking very much like a stern chaperone on a school trip. One wonders how those who consider Trump to be Hitler felt about Macron's special guest. If political analogies are to be applied in this context, then what we had here was essentially a 21st-century 'Hitler' and 'Napoleon' enjoying a symbolic revival of Catholicism in one of the greatest cities on Earth.

One also wonders what went through Trump's mind as he heard the improvisational exchange between the Archbishop reciting a Latin invocation—calling upon the Holy Trinity—in a unique "call and response" dialogue with the organist (Olivier Latry), who responded in a sort of Cecil Taylor-like frenzy of notes on the newly restored Grand Orgue. Perhaps he wished he had been incarcerated in FCI Otisville after all.

Village People it most certainly wasn’t.

Meanwhile, just a few days later, Bashar Hafez al-Assad fled Syria to Moscow following the collapse of his government to reunite with his old pal, Vladimir Putin. One wonders what cultural event the Russian President might arrange for Assad as a public display of symbolism. Given it's the Christmas season, perhaps Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker or his opera Eugene Onegin. Better still, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov might just be the more fitting choice—that iconic "war-horse" of Russian opera deeply rooted in political history.

Both Assad (Ex-President of Syria) and Godunov (Ex-Tsar of Russia) faced contested criticisms of their legitimacy during their controversial rise to power, with their reigns engulfed by multiple crises and their governments ultimately unravelled.

And yet, I’m wondering if Assad would be hypothetically getting off the hook watching three hours of Godunov in comparison to what Trump had to endure with that twelve minutes of interminable organ dirge.