In the 1985 Woody Allen film Purple Rose of Cairo, a fictional character comes off the movie screen and falls in love with a New Jersey movie-goer. He knows nothing about the real world and tries to use pieces of paper to pay a restaurant bill — because it always worked in the movie world, on the screen.
Leaders in the United States and Russia are trying to do a similar thing when confronted with the global CoVID19 pandemic. That’s because they are not true national leaders but, each in his own way, a creature of television.
The first American president to appear on TV was Franklin Roosevelt. He showed up on the tiny black-and-white screen in 1939, at the opening of the New York World’s Fair. But it took another two decades for television to become the principal means of communication between the president and the nation. John Kennedy and his family were pioneers in this respect. Being remarkably telegenic, they pointed the way to the future.
Other nations were slower to get television broadcasts and even in Western Europe TV sets were a luxury after the war until the late 1960s. The Soviet Union was even further behind. Brezhnev’s long, excruciatingly boring speeches were broadcast live to Soviet communal apartments, but he could hardly be called a scintillating television personality. Yet, Gorbachev, who became Soviet leader in 1985, was a much livelier presence on Soviet TV screens.
Be that as it may, in democratic countries you have to look good on television — in color and in detailed close-ups — and project an appealing personality to the camera in order to be elected. Oratory, an important skill in the 19th and early 20th century, became dispensable. Abraham Lincoln, who wrote beautiful speeches but looked sickly and uncouth, probably wouldn’t have stood a chance in modern politics.
But as large, colorful, digital television sets entered every home on the planet, a strange thing happened: “reality” moved onto the television screen in the form of reality TV while television, in turn, started to be confused with reality, especially in politics.
Ronald Reagan, the first Hollywood actor to enter big-time politics, played a number of appealing good guys on the silver screen in his time, But his acting heyday was in the 1950s and during the dozen years after he had his last entertainment job he served two terms as governor of California. He relied on his acting skills, not his acting career, to get to the White House, and his background in the entertainment industry was probably more of a liability than an asset for a politician.
Ukraine has the honor of being perhaps the only country to elect as president a man who previously played an accidental president on TV and who had no experience outside television — effectively forcing life to imitate a silly sitcom. In the year since his election, Zelensky has not yet become a real president, and many of his detractors believe that he hasn’t even figured out the difference.
Trump didn’t play a fictional president, but he was plenty visible on reality TV, playing a tough, highly competent businessman who ruled the roost of sycophants and took competent, decisive action. It is a common view among political scientists that if it weren’t for The Apprentice, Trump would never have become U.S. president. Being incapable of learning, Trump runs the presidency as if it were a television show — offering appearances and no substance, lying nonstop and pretending to be a tough leader while being concerned only with the way he appears to his fans and with making money out of the presidency — which was what The Apprentice was really about.
Putin may have been a real president in his early years. He solidified his power after the anarchic 1990s and implemented a set of reforms which stabilized the Russian economy. But since at least 2012 he has been what Russians call v astrale — in the outer space. His cult among ordinary Russians is stoked by state-controlled television and in all that time he has done absolutely no meaningful work. He plays hockey — dreadfully — and his feats against docile NHL stars are shown on television — apparently, to in a pathetic attempt to demonstrate his extraordinary prowess to the populace. He also appears in highly staged TV shows — the annual national hotline, the press conferences, the meetings with fishermen, the dives for antique amphores, etc.
Zelensky is trying to learn on the job, but he is facing a dire situation. Ukraine is impoverished by two decades of post-Soviet mismanagement and outright stealing by powerful oligarchs. It is under direct military attack from Russia and subject to constant subversion by Russian secret services and their agents inside the country.
Trump and Putin, on the other hand, had all the leeway they wanted to continue to live in the fairy-tale television ether. Their countrymen, while periodically expressing their outrage, could carry on with their business.
Except now they are confronting a real-life challenge. A global pandemic is ravaging their countries. Characteristically, early on, the two fake presidents responded to the crisis in the same way. They figured that if they close their eyes to it, deny its reality and control the media, it will just go away — the way the Woody Allen character expected movie reality to work in the real world.
Trump and the trumpist media started by pooh-poohing the danger and declaring that the number of cases is tiny to begin with and, in any case, they will go down to zero imminently. The whole thing is still being denounced by some of Trump’s more rabid followers as a Democrat plot to take down their beloved TV president. The Republican establishment keeps blaming China for Trump’s criminal delay in responding to the crisis.
Only now, when the number of infections has exceeded 277,000 and the number of fatalities has passed the 7,400 mark as of April 4, is Trump becoming concerned. But even at this point he thinks that he could still slide by as if it is yet another episode of his reality show.
Trump’s slow and inadequate response will surely cause death to many Americans. Putin’s crimes against his own people are even deeper, darker and nastier. He spoke to the nation last week, but he still has not yet descended to earth. Russia is poorly prepared to face the pandemic, both because its health care system has been neglected for so long and because its social services have been infected by kleptocracy long before the country was attacked by CoVID19.
As in the old Allen film, a confrontation between TV presidents with the real world is likely to end in tears — but, it seems, more for their nations than for themselves.
