A politician's body language is more than just body language alone. Or does it only look that way?
During the Beijing Olympic Games President Bush made another of his many blunders when he patted the female captain of the American beach volleyball team on her bare back with his hand.
It was not his idea, he was asked to do it by the team. This is thought to be a good omen. If the president pats the team captain before a game, the team is sure to win the gold medal (which, incidentally, came true). In this instance, the girl mischievously turned her back to the President and thrust out her butt.
The scene provided an embarrassing contrast with the pictures of Russian tanks rolling into Gori, President Saakashvili being held down to the ground by his bodyguards and a very serious Dmitry Medvedev making important decisions at the Kremlin.
"I suggest that from now on we regard Bush as a mascot, not as a president," quipped John Stuart, the anchor of a parody news show. Although the unfortunate slap (perfectly innocent and even moving) has nothing to do with Bush's leadership skills or lack of them, like any presidential gesture it has been invested with extra political meaning to become an ideal illustration of the extent to which the current US Administration is out of touch with reality.
The other day a different set of pictures became a big talking point: they showed Vladimir Putin shooting an Ussuri tiger, or rather tigress, with his rifle. It takes the audience a while to realize that he is not firing live ammunition and that the tigress is only temporarily paralyzed (in fact if they look at the photos over the Internet this realization may never come because the Associated Press image is posted without comment and is titled simply "Putin shoots a tiger"). So bloggers' comments vary between "he is challenging us" to "he wants to frighten us".
They may have a point: less than a week ago the Russian Premier, in an interview with CNN, directly accused the US not just of giving a nod to the storming of Tskhinvali (allegedly to help McCain in his electoral race against Obama), but of direct involvement of the American military in the conflict. And now he is seen in battle fatigues wielding his rifle. As they used to write in times more frequently recalled today, "it is not hard to guess what signal Moscow is sending Washington."
Could it be directed at Tbilisi and not Washington? And could it be a hint rather than a signal? After all, a tiger conjures up the poem of Rustaveli, one of the gems of world literature which nobody has read but everybody knows about. Rustaveli is Georgia. And Georgia is Saakashvili. The fact that the tiger was not killed but merely neutralized is also a hint (one may even draw a parallel with Mikhalkov's film "12" and assume that the tiger has been "sedated" for its own good because it would die in the wild).
Or perhaps the hint was intended not for Georgia but for the Russian press and the message was that the Prime Minister was not its enemy (after all, he was protecting the journalists of Vesti-24 from being attacked by a tiger). Or perhaps it all happened spontaneously and we are trying to read too much into the episode? Anyway, I have been telling all my American acquaintances that they needn't worry. But then, who knows?
Vasily Arkanov
