Last week, as global elites met in Davos to celebrate hard power, the dance world marked the 122nd birthday, on January 22, of George Balanchine, whose life was the result of the greatest failure and collapse of hard power.
That failure was caused by Joseph Stalin, who destroyed the Russia of Balanchine’s birth, and Hitler, who wrecked Europe so thoroughly that a life like Balanchine’s could only be lived in the United States—as an exile, an emigré, an immigrant. The coincidences, both on the calendar and with the current state of the world, matter. As is always the case with Trump, his wickedness distracted everyone from the way more important thing.
Balanchine was brought to America relatively early: in 1933, under the auspices of Lincoln Kirstein, who would become one of the “monuments men” who rescued lost masterworks in the ruins of World War II. His greatest find, however, was Balanchine, a genius rivaling Bach or Mozart. One hundred and twenty-two years ago, Balanchine was born in St. Petersburg into the collapsing Russian Empire; his career—from a dancer at the prerevolutionary Imperial Ballet to a prodigy avant-garde choreographer working with Diaghilev and Stravinsky at the Ballets Russes in Paris and Monte-Carlo; to the inventing and perfecting, at the New York City Ballet, of the modern classical style that still animates and liberates dance to this day.
In world culture, there are no small gestures. Movement is a root language of all things civilized—before humans could speak, we moved. Balanchine was the person who would bring movement into the twenty-first century, out of the ruins of the twentieth and the old world. His mastery began at a fundamental level, with an assertion of humanity: For centuries, dancers had held their fingers straight out, as if they were statues.
Balanchine spread those fingers, tenderly, joyously, humanly—“God gave us four fingers and a thumb,” he said, “I want to see them all.” From this humble place, he revolutionized movement.
Once, dancers controlled legs and arms only on the way up. For Balanchine, the entire arc was controlled—lightning-fast, creating a new way of being that encompassed everything from Harlem jazz to supersonic flight.
“He was tuning their bodies to the speed and transmission of the car, the train, the plane,” wrote Jennifer Homans in her biography, Mr. B, “shearing the traditional symmetries and alignments of classicism and the Vitruvian Man into the curved, spherical and off-balance space of Einstein and an imagined fourth dimension—which he talked about constantly.”
As art, this was transcendent. As politics? Ravishing. The Soviets were humiliated first by losing this genius, then by the two world-shaking defections that followed: Nureyev’s 1961 “leap to freedom” and then, in 1974, Baryshnikov, who found his way to New York City Ballet, where he awed the world by seeming to launch into the air from a pure zero position—no coil, no tell.
What’s in a gesture? Everything. For America, the language of movement was the language of soft power, from art to science to sports. It was the original language of abundance, of prosperity.
Consider: In 1953, Jackson Pollock danced over his canvases and manifested abstract expressionism, shifting the center of the art world from Paris to New York. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, a human body freed from gravity. But this was mere prelude to 1984, when America’s best-known athlete, Michael Jordan, shed gravity and birthed his famous Jumpman silhouette, which across the next 40 years would be a soaring trinity of limbs defying physics—through dance.
Because Michael Jordan took ballet classes, and basketball’s signature image was in truth just ballet’s great showstopper, the flying grand jeté, perfected first in other courts: that of Louis XIV, himself a great dancer, and then of the Romanovs, before the Bolsheviks slaughtered them and closed their ballet academy, casting a young George Balanchine into the streets, where he survived hunting rats that would later take form on the stage of The Nutcracker in Manhattan.
The Jumpman’s appeal was no accident but a refined image of imperial power that served America as the ultimate defector, movement and spirit pure. Jordan’s “Dream Team” conquered the world, the first step in welcoming the world to the National Basketball Association—which is now packed with emigrés. This was at one time what a great power could achieve.
No longer. There is now a new pose, identifiable through the mocking laughter that trails it. It is the wrecked inverse of Jordan’s transcendent dance-flight, and yet—at least pharmacologically—just as avant garde. It is a quintessential and concise expression of what America has become ... the “fentanyl fold.”
One hundred times more powerful than morphine, the addictive synthetic opioid fentanyl so overwhelms its greatest victims that their leg muscles lock rigid—“providing,” but more inflicting, structural stability even as the individual wafts in delirium. In a humiliating limbo, they can’t wake up, but unlike the drunk or the heroin addict are denied the dignity of collapsing to rise again.
Last week, during Davos, the fentanyl fold went viral, performed on TikTok not by a Baryshnikov or a Nureyev but by two comically gifted Greenlanders bent on resisting the threats of American conquest with satire.
It is a video lasting barely 10 seconds, to the soundtrack of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” that anti-anthem of Vietnam reborn for these dark times on social media, here playing against a blanketing blizzard. In the video, figures hang hunched over, jackknifed in that drug-borne pose now so familiar in American towns and cities—the rictus of crisis. The savage caption on the screen reads, “Bringing American culture to Greenland.”
Their video was a massive hit, obtaining 15.8 million views as of this writing. It is a deserving reward for its creator, Inunnguaq Christian Poulsen, who rebuked a nuclear power and made Greenland the unlikely center of comedy by using the fentanyl fold to indict a country given over to oligarchs, that pleasant euphemism for warlords. Scathingly concise, Poulsen’s work damns all the agents of American anguish.
There is still and always will be transcendent American culture. But I’ve never seen anything like this. For years, they called us fat—but bellies are made of pleasure, and the world still loved McDonald’s. For years, Europeans spoke of Ugly Americans: brash, impatient, loud. But it was that admiring complaint you have about your favorite son, your big brother. They also longed to visit us here in our great cities, as yet unoccupied by ICE goons and gauleiters.
By identifying the new signature American pose with the opioid crisis, which has killed nearly 600,000 over just the last five years, the video damned our society the way only movement, as root language, can. It’s a portrait of soft power gone to mush, and of a crisis that singularly shows how the full spectrum of society has contributed to a declining America with her hamster judiciary, her zombie Congress, and her senile warlord in chief.
This is the United States under Trump: folded, trapped in limbo for three more years of—exactly what the Greenlanders showed us so bravely, against his menace—being propped up by habit, momentum, denial, instinct: a society whose legs stand only sturdily enough to deny the legibility and respite of true collapse.
Trump is the worst of the boomer presidents. The best (Obama) has confused Hollywood schmoozing for humanitarian work—though it’s better to be a starfucker than a grifting sex offender or a callow war criminal. It’s no surprise that the fentanyl fold is our new national posture in the global imagination: We’ve been trapped in the Me Generation’s psychotic prolapse for 33 anguished years. Thank God, for their witness and testimony, energy and wit—for Greenlandic comics.
A broken health care system and predatory pharmaceutical companies have gotten rich on this. I write from Europe, where I moved after a kidney stone found me in a professionally administered fentanyl fold during a brutal ordeal where, waiting for a surgeon, I almost lost a kidney. The final bill was $8,000 with insurance. My kidney stone, somehow, cost more than a diamond. All this in a hospital with its own Dunkin Donuts franchise, a statue of a benefactor’s fortunate son, who died sailing, aged 12. A plaque reads: “He liked sailing and Winston Churchill.” This was 2022, lockdowns still in effect.
A nurse attended me on a walk after I came to. Her skin was rich espresso, mine fentanyl grey. A six-foot robot whirred at us with mechanical blasé, all white plastic, a flat-screen face, and on it a prosperous, tanned doctor in his golfer’s den, “working from home,” while this woman suffered … me.
“The future’s gonna be strange,” I said.
She said, “Strange is already here.”
The strange future is here in ICE’s murder of the nurse Alex Pretti. In the brave mass movement of Minnesota, backs braced against jackboots and cold. And in the heavy hands pushing down on the tiny shoulders of the 5-year-old innocent—the child as bait, now with his father in a Texas gulag, not the first in that place and not the last. We need grace where we can find it: The dead cannot be silenced or defunded. They can still speak, sing, dance for us, move through us.
Here’s something Europe honors and that the martyred poet Renee Nicole Good knew as Trump could never: It is a nation’s poets, not its condo developers, who speak for its soul. This is good news for my homeland, because Walt Whitman, maybe our greatest poet, was a nurse in the last Civil War. And as poet-nurse (who better to speak for our new martyrs?), he wrote:
The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)
As one nurse was slain in Minnesota, others are on strike. I hope the kind woman who treated me like a human despite my wretchedness gets all she wants. I hope it comes from the bonuses of a hundred fleece-vested health care CEOs until said CEOs are no longer marked for crowd-pleasing slaying.
I hope it’s true, what people say: that Trump was almost collapsing at Davos, literally folding over. His bruised hands clutching the podium like a geriatric’s walker as he confused Iceland and Greenland, then invented the nation of Abr-Bajan. I hope these are the signs of his incipient collapse, the twinkling advent of a quick, compassionate exit from our captive fentanyl fold days. Like Whitman said: In mercy come quickly!
How might it arrive? A crash. A revelation. I hope as gently, even benevolently, as a casino failure.
After? We may rest, at last. Then to reclaim our feet, put our hearts to something higher. Open our hands so that others may take them, in trust, in contract, in faith. Life renewed, as in Balanchine’s fingers—that choreographer, alone, uttering a grateful reply to God from Job, after all plagues: “You gave us four fingers and a thumb, I want to see them all.”
