Nobody can deny that the videosphere has completely devoured the graphosphere. The one-dimensional surreal world has hijacked the three-dimensional real world. The CNN and ABC networks in America, the French TF1 and TF2, have totally displaced books and journals. The swift, levitating image has come ahead of the solidly grounded written word. No longer is the presidential office the center of command, as TV has become the epicenter of political power. Riots and military coups that once aimed at capturing the prince’s palace now aim at capturing the TV tower. The video-oriented Western hemisphere in general, and Hollywood-focused America in particular, has ceased to gauge presidential candidates by their “right-wing” or “left-wing” pedigree or their Republican or Democratic affiliation. Rather, it is their choice of hairstyles, or the cut of their clothes, that gets them media attention or proximity to the White House.

Undoubtedly, with the end of history comes the end of the traditional notion of politics. The classical war of ideas, as Regis Debray recently wrote, has been replaced by the war of “good looks.” The last American “realpolitician,” Richard Nixon, at least had the courage to admit that his 1960 presidential campaign had gone sour because, unlike his rival John Kennedy, he was not “likable.” The postmodern ideology of good looks, coupled with the video-political “image,” is rapidly becoming the new destiny of Western man.

In the laboratory of video politics the most important tools are p.r. strategy and “have a nice day” conduct. Of course, if a politician is to retain lasting credibility, he must also learn the politically correct metalanguage, known as “baby talk.” The beauty of baby talk is that it immediately disarms the interlocutor yet never discredits the speaker. It denotes everything, without connoting anything. Short elliptic sentences teeming with Aesopian doublespeak, and smacking of sentimental succor, are the surest and shortest avenue to lasting video-political success. In the videospheric game, America takes the lead, thanks to her Puritan “pathos of distance,” as well as her apolitical candor that allows all sorts of video-political escapades.

Take the United Nations-sponsored American invasion of Somalia, for example. When the American marines landed on the Somali beaches, they came under the rapid fire of . . . TV cameras. The subsequent U.N. mission was largely tailored to the appetites of numerous TV crews, which chased the U.N. soldiers more than the ragtag Somali fighters. In the same vein, the ongoing war in the Balkans is also being teleguided by TV cameras whose graphic images of horror provide good consciousness to distant prime-time viewers. In a new paroxysm of vicarious humanism, TV masses worldwide worry about the displaced and the deprived as long as the anonymous TV elites furnish them with the right dose of lacrimal material. In a grotesque twist of modern politics, the fleeting image of the TV world has dethroned the real political world. Henceforth, the surreal nonevent keeps endlessly creating the real political event with all its tragic consequences on balkanized battlefields everywhere. If we were to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, the TV world with its surreal values has completely devalued all real human values.

The videospheric show appears to be of special interest to the new political class in post communist Eastern Europe. By ignoring the tricks of video politics, Eastern European imitation of Western democracy is often met with big laughs. Certainly, to regurgitate democratic slogans is today in great TV demand, but when this regurgitation turns into flawed mimicry, it then borders on the grotesque. For all Eastern European politicians, the CNN network functions as the superego that creates their democratic image but also unmasks their excommunist rhetoric and their inherent customs of monkey business. Having emerged culturally castrated and aesthetically emasculated from 45 years of communist terror, the Eastern European elites are having enormous problems in capturing the heart and soul of the American videocracy. Small wonder that their quest for the video West often results in a death wish to be more papal than the Pope, i.e., more videomorphic than the new video Vatican in Washington, D.C. Predictably, Eastern European mimicry of Western democracy can only result in a flimsy escapade into the dangerous world of the unknown.

Traditionally, Eastern and Central European elites, unlike the French and Anglo-Americans, lack glamour, glitter, glitz, and glory: the four mandatory elements of political success today. This new political class recruits itself from the pool of provincial “hicks” and ex-party hacks with a meager sense of foreign video-political empathy. Eastern European politicians have enormous difficulties hiding their past communist pedigree. Many speak the basic, broken, heartbreaking English that hurts the Western eustachian TV tube. The only lauded figure in the West European videosphere is the much-admired Czech Vaclav Havel, who embodies the perfectly projected mixture of a latter-day hippie, postmodern Ghandi, and Angel Gabriel announcing to the world the Gospel of permanent peace. As far as his hapless Eastern European neighbors in Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and Croatia are concerned, they display the huge Slavic heart—but also the huge epic mouth. When they roam along the East River corridors, they appear unable to shed their homo sovieticus veneer that they inherited from the communist way of life. All of them strike the observer’s eye as exotic species with an amazing talent for singing liberal slogans without really knowing what those slogans mean. Yet, behind the surface of their democratic dilettantism, few can hide their former communist skin.

One of the problems of Central and East European politicians is their lack of bureaucratic perseverance and technocratic commitment. To argue, to walk, to talk in a way acceptable in Paris or in Madrid is often rejected in modern America. All Americans know perfectly well how important p.r. and sound bites are for professional video success. All Americans know deadly well that in professional life, friends never complain to each other; they always complain about each other to a third person. For the lyrical Eastern European heart and for the epic Eastern European mouth, the American video-political game is often perceived as a sign of cold, Puritan, legalist hypocrisy mixed with a twisted offshoot of modern make-believe democracy. Few can grasp that what counts in politics today is not the political substance but rather the apolitical “fun” style. Alas, in the hi-tech global democracy, as Neil Postman wrote, the classical notion of politics will be made between those who amuse the TV masses to death and those who bore them to death.

Central and Eastern European politicians, be they of Germanic or Slavic breed, stutter and mutter. It is certainly not farfetched to say that the tragedy of German diplomacy, during this last century, lies in its mystical character and its excessive sense of Faustian solemnity. Had the Germans been more extroverted in their political appetites, had they been more versed in the strategy of global humanism, Germany would probably have become the reference for modern high politics. In today’s Germany, the tragic and awkward style can pass, but in the Anglo-American world it has no entry at all. German politicians in general, and East European politicians in particular, represent the 19th-century world whose tragic narrative and boundless belief in honor frequently fall on deaf ears in fast-forward mercantile America. One of these days it would be useful for sociologists and linguists to examine the German word Ehre and contrast its meaning to the English word “honor,” which, over centuries, has given birth to different political commitments and caused different geopolitical constellations.

Politically correct “baby talk” means little if it is not accompanied by politically correct “baby walk”—a custom that Europeans brutally lack. Is it an accident that all Central and Eastern European politicians appear awkward on the TV screen in Washington? Is it an accident that the American political class feels much more at ease with Canadians or the English than with their Continental allies? For a long time the Palestinian Yasser Arafat was unable to push his cause across video-political America because of his eternally unshaven face and his head scarf that tagged him as an Ali Baba bent on killing modern democracies. Conversely, his recent alter ego, Ms. Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, brought the TV limelight to her native Palestinians, thanks to her excellent knowledge of English and her femme fatale allures. Owing to her feminist streak, the Palestinians finally got world recognition and the red-carpet welcome in Washington. From now on, young, intelligent, and good-looking women will be an enormous asset in video politics—not just on the back stage but right in the first row. Who can deny that Bill Clinton partly owes his election to Hillary? Even the much-admired Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika got off the Soviet ground thanks to his beautiful wife Raisa, who looks surprisingly like Anna Karenina. Must it be recalled that communism in Eastern Europe partly collapsed because communist hacks had bulldog-like faces and their heavy-set spouses had hairy, unshaven legs?

Small wonder that the video ignorance of smaller peoples worldwide further hampers their uncertain voyage toward shaky world recognition. Indeed, Lithuanians, Estonians, or Croats risk becoming Banana Republics should they not quickly learn the video-political game. For centuries, high politics has never been kind to them: once geography was their destiny; today video politics is their fatality. Thrown into a small and claustrophobic chunk of Europe, surrounded on the average by four nasty neighbors, each taking a nasty turn, they were always forced to make pilgrimages; once upon a time to the Vatican and Versailles, today to Washington, D.C. For centuries they had to practice how to “kiss the hand” in Vienna and in the Vatican in order to obtain a modicum of national sovereignty. Today, in order to survive politically, they have to “kiss a–” in the liberal video world.

Ironically, Central and Eastern Europeans are still miles away from any political correctness. One can say things in postcommunist Eastern Europe that in the West would be immediately slapped by TV opprobrium. Indeed, the politically correct, affirmative-action “baby talk” of Western democracies is only the cool version of the communist “wooden language,” which not long ago permeated Eastern European syntax and style. The communist East faced censorship; the capitalist West imposed self-censorship. Western discourse teems with coated sentences and sophisms, such as “it appears,” “it seems,” or “one might say”—everything means nothing, and therefore nothing means everything. The old American rocker, Frank Zappa, best summarized the make-believe video world of the West with his song “You Are What You Is.”

With the TV image comes good political mannerisms, which Europe badly lacks. Europeans are obsessed with smoking cigarettes. As far as Eastern Europeans are concerned, they are pathologically hooked on cigarettes. In today’s official America, smoking is considered a “violation of someone’s human rights,” something Europeans reject. Americans know very well that in the American political establishment it is perfectly OK to snort cocaine or to smoke a joint; yet European cigarette-smoking leaves a bad political odor and seriously cripples the image of new countries in the making.

The times of the commissar and the Kalashnikov are definitely over. Today, the new TV archetype is the liberal caviar entertainer with a giant smile on his face and good dentures to disarm every adversary. In all likelihood, the new hero of the 21st century will be a mixture of a movie star and a car salesman who preaches an ideology of fun and who practices a dictatorship of well-being. Gone forever is the era of the political fighter and the rugged individual of Jack London’s America. In the era of the TV image, it is no longer important what a politician has in his head, but how his head looks and talks. As the respected tone one tells a dieting friend, “You”, trench sociologist Jean Baudrillard recently wrote, modern polities will be the art of “video-fooling.” He who knows how to sell himself on the IN screen will be the ultimate political winner, regardless of how much of a half-wit he may actually be.

Carl Schmitt wrote a long time ago that polities is the art of distinguishing between friend and foe. But who will divine the foe in the one-dimensional videosphere? In the 21st century, the art of telling the foe will mean properly seeing behind his clothes and makeup. The coming titans that lurk on the horizon will no longer be dressed in brown shirts and black boots. They will make their appearance in Gucci suits and Bally shoes.