Ben Smith at Politico picks up on a Russia Today ad campaign in which images of Obama and Ahmadinejad are superimposed on billboards next to the question, “Who poses the greater nuclear threat?” According to RT, US airports declined to display the original version of the ad, but did accept a version in which the subject’s eyes and mouths are blacked out.
Redacted
Smith, of course, keys on the fact that RT is an arm of Russia’s state-owned media. (It’s channel 236 on Time Warner Cable in my area.)
But that tends to be indicative in more ways than one. Looking at the older ads RT has lined up for inspection at the link above, one has the sense of a Soviet-era zeitgeist unrecovered from. The images are clunky and unsubtle, the kind of political snark American 14-year-olds would outdo from their home computers, in both sophistication and humor. As would French, Japanese, Brazilian, and no doubt Russian 14-year-olds, for that matter. Subversive political art just doesn’t work as an expression of state policy. To come across as subversive, it has to be really, you know, subversive. It helps if it’s a little funny too, or if it at least slips in a sly, mentally interesting irony.
Now, it is funny that President Obama, whose American critics would say he has never met a Russian demand he didn’t want to give in to, comes in for this over-the-top, back-of-the-hand ankle-biting. (I promise those will be the last locutions evocative of yoga class.) I don’t think that’s the humor the RT ad had in mind.
I suppose we could also attribute a high-concept postulate to the RT auteurs, that Obama is more dangerous than Ahmadinejad because he’s fey and unpredictable, as opposed to embodying Ahmadinejad’s other characteristic of shrill aggression. The sort of “Well, with Nixon we at least knew where we stood” kind of thing. Then Jimmy Carter burst forth from that turgid time, and America was all over the map like an old geezer with Alzheimer’s, handed the keys to the Ferrari.
But neither of those qualifies as a mentally interesting irony. Your call, reader, as to the precise nature of the intended implications in the RT ad. It comes off to me as subversive imagery by committee. And then RT couldn’t even get American airports to display it in its original form. Come on, guys. Get yourselves some leverage on US soil – buy it if you have to – and sue in federal court. That’s what artist Michael Lebron did when the Washington, D.C. Metro declined to display his anti-Reagan oeuvre entitled “Are You Tired of the Jelly Bean Republic?” As the New York Times recounts – with obvious relish – a federal appeals court consisting of Ken Starr, Antonin Scalia, and Robert Bork ruled in 1984 that the Metro could not refuse to display Lebron’s poster.
It’s reassuring, in a way, that RT doesn’t bring the attempted subversion off any more effectively than the Grey Lady or CNN would. RIA Novosti as a whole (the holding company for the state-owned media) seems to be an experiment in combining the functions of MSNBC, USA Today, The National Enquirer, and The Onion. I would award it high marks in the Enquirer line, myself.
But there’s a starting point you have to have stored in your tribal consciousness to really move forward in this realm, and I’m not sure the deep thinkers at RT know what it is. The NYT writer crowing over the Lebron case would apparently have to be reminded of it. You see, when Michael Lebron sued the Washington Metro to display his anti-Reagan poster, and Starr, Scalia, and Bork ruled in his favor, what mattered in all this was the following:
1. Although the criticism was directed at him, Reagan had no involvement whatsoever in the court’s decision; and
2. He didn’t care.
That, dear Russian friends, is freedom of speech.
Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.
Comments 18
Great Russian leadership, always protecting great Russian peoples, no need for subtle western humor; troublemakers only need bullet in face during hours of darkness.
January 25th, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Americans are so naive. The Russians and the Chinese clearly recognize us as a great threat which must be undermined at every opportunity, and which must ultimately be defeated.
So they busy themselves in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America making friends and making deals, while we spend billions defending Europe and rebuilding Haiti. We send our very best to to get their faces and limbs blown away, fighting wars the locals are unwilling to fight. And the Russians and Chinese laugh at our clumsy stupidity. We sit around complaining that all politicians are equally corrupt while a tight band of revolutionaries gut us from the inside out.
We havn’t got a clue.
January 25th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
“No good deed goes unpunished’ from the Russian perspective, too much bowing and scraping does not befit the American Eagle’ image.
Russia is being very foolish, to mistake Obama’s weak posture, for the
truly disturbing prospect of Mahmoud’s delusional camerilla
January 25th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
The Russians’ problem is that the ad was too long in development and approval through the various bureaucracies. As first proposed, with GW Bush compared to Achwhatever, it would have sailed right onto the walls of U.S. airports, and it would have been splashed all over the major media as well.
January 25th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
The ad makes perfect sense as a sour rationalization of Russia’s dealings with Iran. I doubt any real irony or subversion was intended beyond the “everybody does it” excuse offered by the average dictator or naughty child. But I hope Yvette Lieberman saw it, since his fantasies about Russia seem to rival if not outdo Bush’s not to mention Obama’s. (At least I only drool over their female tennis players.) Iran’s dissidents would doubtless view it with their own special cynicism.
Why anybody in the Kremlin thought it would play in Peoria is another matter; but the Russians have a history of mistaking American chronic malcontents for the Real McCoy and the ad might appeal to the former.
January 25th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Edit function didn’t work for me. Should read “…if not Obama’s.”
January 25th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Seems to work either way, Seth.
I’d nominate this ad for the Hall of Fail if I had a better grasp of what the heck they were thinking in the first place, or the second, for that matter. Sully’s explanation, that it may first have been designed for W, but had to be re-designed for Ø is believable.
January 25th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
@CKM: It’s hard to fathom how Stalin could have regarded Britain or France as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany except maybe that he was a syphilitic paranoid Communist tyrant. All capitalist imperialist Trotskyite kulak wreckers don’t look alike to me but did to a fair number of the secular messianists my parents were acquainted with back in the 1940s. To Jane Hamsher or Michael Moore, Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney are two peas in a pod. Ron Paul checks his crawl space every night for CIA assassins and presumably wears impermeable gloves whenever handling Federal Reserve notes. We had a Defense Secretary once, Forrestal, who was probably certifiable. I can only infer that when ideology or some other compulsion comes first square pegs can always be jammed into round holes.
January 26th, 2010 at 6:32 am
Well Stalin did regard the Social Democrats as the real adversary in Weimar Germany, not the rump regime of Bruenings Catholic Party, and not the Nazis, at least at the outset. Forrestal created most of the national security architecture, including the predecessor agency agency to the NSA, that the left has been yapping about for a generation
January 26th, 2010 at 7:03 am
@narciso: I bet Michael Scheuer could clean my bathroom far better than Jennifer Lopez could or would, but until J-Lo called Sarah a crazy bitch I’d have gladly cleaned hers for free!
January 26th, 2010 at 8:23 am
@Seth Halpern
Well that’s true, the claws really did come out, that time, then again WTH watches George Lopez seriously, I don’t see the relevance to this thread except in the very general thread
January 26th, 2010 at 8:41 am
@narciso: The point is that the world really doesn’t need to have the loons take charge but somehow they find a way.
January 26th, 2010 at 9:48 am
I guess that makes sense, but seriously even if W was the original target, it still doesn’t have any logic. But then again I didn’t think
Michael Moore could ever gain a big an audience as he did with Fahrenheit 451. There’s a reason Heinlein called this period, the crtazy years
January 26th, 2010 at 9:59 am
@ CK MacLeod:
It’s a poser. Sully may be onto something, but I do think the Russians find Obama to be erratic and unpredictable in a way A’jad is not. Who, after all, would call A’jad unpredictable? He’s utterly predictable.
Obama, not so much. I have a sense that the Russians don’t really understand one fundamental thing about him, which is that about 99% of the time he doesn’t remember Russia exists. This isn’t a knock on Russia, really; the same could be said of Mexico and Canada, and indeed of the state of Maryland. Obama is very much oriented on ward-heel politics and cheering crowds. From what I can tell, he wouldn’t know “strategy” if he found it dead in his lunch box.
There is no coherent strategy behind Obama’s decisions about national missile defense or nuclear arms negotiations. I’ve made that point over at NZC several times now. All of Obama’s decisions are situational, and in national defense that’s particularly obvious.
For 60 years — sixty years – the Russians have been able to identify and maneuver against a coherent US policy on strategic defense and global stability. Even Jimmy Carter looked almost Bismarckian compared to Obama. Literally every other atomic-age president has had an identifiable policy, something the Russians could expect his negotiators to keep coming back with again and again.
But Obama has made decisions that affect global strategic stability without apparently understanding that that’s what he’s doing. He abandoned the Bush policy on national missile defense without seeming to understand that he was sending a signal to the Russians. The signal? “The US has no policy now on strategic stability.”
He has also spoken in ringing tones of reducing nuclear weapons, which is a goal I support — but he has backed it up with absolutely no concept for strategic stability either in the interim, or at the point of reduced arsenals. He seems to be reverting to MAD, at least for now, but he simply hasn’t said that or anything else. It’s like he just doesn’t understand the effect of what he says, on Russia or, we must recognize, on China.
Amateur-hour with strategic nuclear stability ought to concern us greatly. It clearly concerns the Russians. Another thing I have noted about OSlash’s strategic negotiations profile is that it seems to include no revered names from the last 40 years of arms and security negotiations. Jim Jones and Admiral Mullen went to Moscow, and they are policy generalists. Neither has a background in even the last round of deep strategic thinking, when Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2001 and negotiated the Moscow SORT Treaty.
Anyway, that may be some of what RT had in mind with the silly ad. Americans don’t see all this through the same lens as the Russians; Yanks have a general sense that all that unpleasantness with nukes and Russkies is really behind us, a relic of the Cold War that’s SO last-century. But the Russians have never had that sense, not for even an hour since 1991. There is a pervasive sense in Russia’s policy circles that it’s her nuclear deterrent that has kept the US from encroaching on all that should be hers — that her nuclear arsenal is the main reason we take Russia seriously instead of just trying to kick her around.
We don’t have to see things the way they do, but we do have to understand that this is a real and ever-present factor in dealing with the Russians. It’s valid to say that strategic stability versus the US is Russia’s highest national security priority, in a way that is much more “felt” and recognized for the Russians than it has been for us in the last 20 years. From Moscow, OSlash looks like he’s just jacking that stability around like a toddler banging pots and sticking kitchen utensils in his mouth.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:37 am
@ J.E. Dyer:
I hate to disappoint you, but I think I may agree with everything you say.
Yet, the day after you brought this item to our attention, I’m thinking the ad may have been intended to aim lower and broader – as in “Go to RT to get provocative perspectives you won’t find anywhere else!” Incidentally, your summary on Obama’s non-strategy strategy would justify their thematic offer. Maybe you should see if they’re taking freelance submissions!
January 26th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Seth Halpern wrote:
As for Stalin, I’m not sure the term “moral” ever applies. I tend to think of him as a true sociopath in a way that even Mao and Hitler couldn’t approach. They were equally unhindered by the slightest moral squeamishness about piling up corpses, but I think they believed, in their own twisted ways, that there was a utilitarian justification in the broadest sense for what they were doing – the greatest good for the greatest many (of those who deserved to live) over the very long term on a global scale. Such morality as Stalin possessed or as was embodied in his actions were immanent within the ideological and cultural context in which he operated. So, from his/its perspective, the Nazis, the Social Democrats, and the western liberals were all essentially “other” – up to the moment they became useful, and not a moment longer.
As for the rest of the far left, never forget that they have already determined that democratic capitalism is responsible for all of the ills of the earth, with a body count that adds 10s of millions at least every year, year after year, til utopia come.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:59 am
@JE Dyer
Sadly much of his actions, matches the subject of his dissertation as well as the flavor of this piece:
http://documents.nytimes.com/obama-s-1983-college-magazine-article#p=1
January 26th, 2010 at 11:05 am
@ narciso:
narciso — yep, had seen that NYT piece and the original OSlash article last year. Of course the “nuclear freeze” theme has continued, but even more telling, in my view, is O’s emphasis in the article itself. I find it a hilarious read. There are about two short sentences on the actual political idea of a “nuclear freeze” — i.e., on the theory, justifying why we would need one, etc. The rest of it is all about — you guessed it — the organizing on the Columbia campus. Names, banal quotes from self-important undergrads, celebration of “the struggle,” protest activities that have no hope whatsoever of making a material difference to US policy or any real-world outcomes.
It’s so very Obama. And he hasn’t changed.
January 26th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
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