Suzanne Harrington: Real 'strongmen' can dance in high heels
Suzanne Harrington
Google ‘why’ and the question that comes first on the search list is "Why is Russia invading Ukraine?" The rest of the top five whys - why is my eye twitching, why is my poo green, why am I always tired (could these be related?), why is Pluto not a planet – are considerably more answerable. Why, Putin? Is he driven by mad dictator grandiosity? Is this really about inhabiting a space formerly occupied by Catherine the Great?
Google "Is Putin mad’ and the hive mind’s response is a resounding no – from the Spectator and the Wall Street Journal to Dave on Twitter, opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of Putin being perfectly sane. Despotic, duplicitous, but not deranged. Labelling him mad is a cop-out. He knows exactly what he's doing.
Yet as a ‘strongman’ dictator, he embodies a masculinity so distorted it resembles a cartoon villain high on novichok. Which makes you wonder what ‘strongman’ actually means – how is brutality ‘strong’? There is no ‘strongwoman’ equivalent; calling a woman strong tends to be a compliment.
Of the50 dictators currently in the world - 19 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 12 in the Middle East and North Africa, eight in Asia-Pacific, seven in Eurasia, three in the Americas and one in Europe (Lukashenko in Belarus) - every single one of them, from China to Western Sahara, Ethiopia to Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan – is male. Apart from tyranny, testosterone, and human rights abuses, what do they have in common? Clue: not strength.
Not humour either. Dictators take themselves terribly seriously. They tend not to laugh at themselves. Serbian activist Srdja Popovic, leader of a student movement that helped topple Milosevic, recounts in his 2015 book Blueprint for Revolution, how the movement used humour in a dictatorship that controlled all media. How they made laughter trump fear.
Placing a rusty old barrel with a photo of Milosevic’s face on it in a busy shopping street, they invited passers-by to hit the photo with a metal bar. People did. It caused hilarity and a sense of community. Police came but no crime had been committed, so they arrested the barrel. Which made it even funnier.
President Zelensky of Ukraine understands the power of funny. He used to be a comedian. He used to be an actor too, in a 2015 comedy series, Servant of the People, where he played the president of Ukraine. His character, a school teacher, becomes president after a student’s video of him denouncing corruption goes viral. I am not making this up - Channel 4 has just bought it.
Another Zelensky clip from 2003 has gone viral, showing him dancing in shirtless, in high heels, with his comedy troupe Kvartal 95, in the manner of Beyonce doing All The Single Ladies.
Their aim, in contrast with Putin’s joyless homophobia, was to “make the world a kinder and more joyful place with the help of … humour and creativity.” So who’s the real strongman here – the one with the tanks, or the half-naked one in stilettos?
