Marshal Potemkin, Meet Your Fans

By Otto Friedrich

Marshal Grigory Potemkin, one of the more artful lovers of Catherine the Great, accomplished many things during his long domination of Russia, but he is best remembered for an illusion. To impress Catherine with the prosperity that he had brought to her subjects, he is said to have built handsome fake villages all along the route of her tour through southern Russia in 1787. Historians doubt this tale, which they blame on malicious court gossip, yet there is something about the idea of "Potemkin villages" that lingers in the memory as a symbol of political craft.

Let us therefore salute Anthony B. Gliedman, New York City commissioner of housing preservation and development, who is carrying on a program worthy of Potemkin at his most imaginative. Confronted with the dilapidation and general ruin of the buildings he is assigned to preserve and develop, Gliedman has found an ingenious solution. He pastes vinyl decals over the broken windows of the city's abandoned slum tenements to convey an illusion of cheery life inside. Some of the decals look like curtains, some like Venetian blinds; some even contain illusory flowerpots, where illusory geraniums blossom in an illusory sunshine.

Not only has Gliedman so far spent $100,000 to gussy up 330 vacant houses in various poor neighborhoods, at $6 per decal, he is now spending an additional $70,000 of federal funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to extend his good works through the most devastated areas of the South Bronx. This pleases the inhabitants and reduces vandalism, he says; it is also supposed to make a favorable impression on potential investors who might be driving past on the way to the suburbs.

"We don't want anybody to think we're doing this instead of rebuilding," the commissioner told the New York Times. "But that will take years and require hundreds of millions of dollars. And while we're waiting, we want people to know that we still care. We want people to feel good about their neighborhood. Morale is very real. Perception is reality."

Perception is reality. Could Plato himself have said it better in his speculations about the imaginary cave where prisoners see life as a series of shadows flickering on the walls? Wasn't that what Shakespeare meant when he had Prospero conclude his pageant by declaring that "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" would all dissolve, for "we are such stuff as dreams are made on"? Trompe l'oeil (trickery of the eye) is the artistic term for it, and Italy is full of palaces with flat ceilings painted to look vaulted and plaster made to resemble marble. Even Renaissance landlords liked to economize.

Perception is reality. It is the motto of pickpockets, but also the police. Los Angeles authorities discovered a few years ago that an empty police car parked alongside a speedway would serve just as well as a manned cruiser to slow down traffic. In fact, at least one Beverly Hills denizen has taken to keeping a fake patrol car in the driveway to deter thieves. Mere burglar alarms are obsolete today; the up-to-date suburban paranoiac installs timers in his house to turn lights off and on while he is away.

Perception is reality. It has long been an axiom for soldiers. "All warfare is based on deception," said Sun Tzu, the great 4th century B.C. Chinese strategist whose prize pupil turned out to be Mao Tse-tung. The Greeks understood that principle when they set sail from Troy, leaving behind only a large wooden horse. Macduff knew it when he disguised his soldiers with branches from Birnam Wood as they marched against Macbeth. In World War II, the Allies created a phantom First U.S. Army Group, outfitted with rubber tanks and canvas landing barges (courtesy of the Shepperton movie studios). Its swirl of fake radio messages about an impending invasion at Calais helped keep the entire German 15th Army pinned down 200 miles east of the actual invasion site on Omaha Beach.

At the demilitarized zone that divides Korea, Ronald Reagan looked frowningly northward last week toward the showpiece village that the North Koreans have built there--complete with false fronts on the buildings and jolly villagers trucked in and out every day. Reagan was scornful of the Communist props. "It looks just like a Hollywood back lot, and it isn't any more important," he said.

Reagan is too hard on his California colleagues who, after all, built the movie sets that convinced people of the reality of George Gipp and Drake McHugh. And as Commissioner Gliedman's views demonstrate, the triumph of stagecraft lies in the change from perception affecting reality to perception being reality. The only question now is why the Potemkin plan should be limited to slum housing when it could just as well be applied to all kinds of problems that bedevil officialdom.

Hunger, for example. If $6 will buy a decal of a flowerpot to make a gutted tenement look cheerily affluent, it could just as well buy a decal of a large filet mignon, surrounded by heaps of buttered carrots and peas and mashed potatoes. If that seems too indulgent, perhaps simply a decal of a steaming pot of stew. That should enable quite a few families to imagine themselves well fed.

Unemployment? Why not a decal of happy workers toiling at an assembly line or a cheerful payroll clerk handing out imaginary paychecks?

There is no reason, for that matter, why the Potemkin program should be limited to domestic affairs. Instead of struggling with Congress to pay billions for MX missiles, the Administration could install decals of the missiles already on their launching pads. In Europe, similarly, the Administration could still the uproar over the new Pershing and cruise missiles by deploying decals instead. None of that is likely to deter the Soviets, but perhaps it would deprive assorted paint throwers and other protesters of an issue.

Once the Government has solved all these problems, a cynic might ask whether there was any purpose in having a Government at all. A decal of President Reagan reading a speech into a battery of microphones would serve just as well as a TV image of the real President reading a speech. Similar decals of Congress passing legislation or bureaucrats issuing regulations would create a reassuring illusion of Government not only hard at work but showing that it cares.

As Jefferson wrote--or should have written--in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these perceptions to be self-evident . . ."

-- By Otto Friedrich This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.