Word: potemkin
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...almost indiscriminately democratic in the range of his friends and interests. He glows with intimidating self-assurance. The true snob sometimes has an air of pugnacious, overbearing self-satisfaction, but it is usually mere front. The snob is frequently a grand porch with no mansion attached, a Potemkin affair. The essence of snobbery is not real self-assurance but its opposite, a deep apprehension that the jungles of vulgarity are too close, that they will creep up and reclaim the soul and drag it back down into its native squalor, back to the Velveeta and the doubleknits. So the breed...