No Leaders Attended the G7 Summit

The meeting last week in the U.K. is just a reminder of what happens whenever we allow actors to take the place of leaders.

When I was a child, I made the mistake, as many children do, of thinking that the actors I saw in movies were in some way responsible for their lines. As the playwright Moss Hart heard from a lady sitting behind him: “Actors say the cleverest things!”

But it didn’t take me long to notice that while an actor can make good material great, he cannot make bad material good. If you give him stupid and implausible things to say, he will look stupid and implausible. He may or may not be aware of how he looks; that’s not his job: His job is to act the way someone tells him to act, and to say what someone tells him to say.

And that brings us to the picture of the G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall. Nobody who watches the film of these people arriving, coming down the boardwalk carefully spaced, hygienically elbow-bumping in lieu of shaking hands, and finally taking up positions for their photo op—nobody would believe these people are world leaders. Because they aren’t. They aren’t running the western world. They are run by the people who really are running the western world—people whose names we don’t know. The people on the beach in Cornwall are there simply in recognition of the working man’s need to see an elected head of state. They are actors.

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