Potemkin Nation

"Those who failed history are doomed to repeat it."
-Hollywood Dick

Last night I was watching Catherine the Great on HBO starring Helen Mirren -- who is also pretty great. I became interested in the character of Potemkin, who becomes Catherine's "favorite" and ends up (spoiler alert) having a lot of political influence. Potemkin is one of those historical figures whom I've often heard about but really never knew who he was. So I went online.

Turns out that one of the main things Potemkin is known for was convincing Catherine to annex the Crimean peninsula, making it part of Russia. If this sounds oddly familiar, it's because just about everything happening in American politics right now stems from a more recent annexation of Crimea by Vladimir Putin. See, after the Russian revolution in 1917, Crimea changed hands a few times until -- following the collapse of the Soviet Union -- it became part of Ukraine. Then five years ago, Putin invaded Crimea and made it part of Russia again. The US & the EU imposed sanctions on Russia, members of the Trump campaign made over 100 contacts with Russian officials, and hilarity ensued.
But back to Potemkin. In order to convince Catherine that annexing Crimea was a good idea and that everyone there was happy and prosperous, Potemkin arranged a series of staged installations during a visit she made to tour the area. He had fake villages erected, kind of like movie sets, painted in festive colors and populated with smiling residents -- for Catherine to observe along her route. Once she had passed by, the fake villages would be disassembled, packed up and moved to another location to be re-purposed for another leg of the tour. These ersatz hamlets came to be known as Potemkin villages, and the term Potemkin village has, in turn, come to represent a kind of facade or put-on used to disguise an undesirable situation or create the appearance of something valuable.
In the book The Art of The Deal, Donald Trump boasts about a stunt he pulled off while trying to impress some executives from Holiday Inn, whom he wanted to con into investing with him in a new casino. In order to make the executives believe that he was already engaged in active construction on a particular lot along the Atlantic City boardwalk, Trump ordered his construction managers to rent some heavy equipment and basically just move the dirt around -- digging holes and filling them up again. "What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn’t important," Trump said, "so long as they did a lot of it." Classic Potemkin move.
Now, there are those historians who say the stories of the Potemkin villages are apocryphal -- and by now we should all know better than to believe anything that Donald Trump says -- but one or two things are certain: 1) watching TV can be educational as well as entertaining and, 2) we are living in a Potemkin Nation where the bullshit never ends.