C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MARCH 1 , 2022
Adapted from an
online discussion.Dear Carolyn: My
boyfriend is a
relentless nail-
biter. We have
gotten into so
many spats about
it because I think
it’s so unhygienic and
unflattering. He says he wants to
change, but it has been years,
and still he gnaws at his nails
constantly every day.
Any advice?
— Anonymous
Anonymous: For him, or for
you?
He can get the underlying
condition treated (anxiety, ADHD,
OCD, other possible neuro issues),
put foul-tasting stuff on his nails
to treat the symptom, and redirect
the fidget impulses to a habit that
is less icky.
But does he want to? And if
yes, will he follow through these
steps?
You can suggest that he do
these things and, if he refuses,
treat this as a take-him-or-leave-
him-as-is proposition.
Recurring arguments are
refusals to take reality for an
answer.Re: Nail-biting: I picked my
nails for years. I hated it and
knew it was related to anxiety
and stress. I picked when I was
nervous or bored. Surprisingly,
covid-19 was what I needed to
stop. I just don’t anymore. For
boredom, I keep a smooth stone
on my desk and if I start picking
at my nails during a call or
meeting, I rub the stone and it
keeps my hands busy. I have
short stubby fingers so it’s not
like I love my nails now, but I do
love that I don’t pick at them
anymore.
— Former Nail-PickerRe: Nail-biting: I didn’t bite my
nails; I picked them, constantly.
For me, it’s anxiety/OCD. I’ve
tried to quit for years. I’m intherapy (not due to the nails)
and taking meds for said
conditions, but I still pick my
nails. I know they’re unsightly. I
know they’re not pretty. People
cheerfully tell me that all the
time.
I had an ex years and years
ago who was obsessed with my
nails. He constantly harangued
me to grow them out, to have
long nails, to stop picking
them. He finally broke two of
my fingers because “You don’t
care what your fingers look
like, so why should I?” Still
have the weird habit, don’t
have the boyfriend. And yes, he
was arrested and punished.
Believe me: We know it bugs
you, we know you don’t like it.
We’re doing our best.
— I’ve Tried to QuitI’ve Tried to Quit: Oh, wow.
This is devastating.
Good for you for standing up
for yourself, and putting the
humanity in this conversation.
Part of doing our best needs toCan you stop a ‘relentless nail-biter’?
Carolyn
Hax
be granting that others are, too.
Thank you.Re: Nail biting: I stopped
biting my nails when I came to
understand that it was all
about “having” to fix the rough
parts. I just was determined to
make everything even. So I
started filing my nails everyday to prevent the rough,
uneven edges. Amazingly, I
didn’t bite. Eventually I got to
filing once a week. Still, I have
to push myself to get up and
file the MINUTE I realize I
have a rough edge. Just telling
myself to stop biting didn’t
work.
— StoppedWrite to Carolyn Hax at
[email protected]. Get her
column delivered to your inbox each
morning at wapo.st/gethax. Join the discussion live at noon
Fr idays at washingtonpost.com/live-
chats.NICK GALIFIANAKIS/ILLUSTRATION FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTsor in Te xas A&M University’s
department of communication
and t he author of “Demagogue for
President: The Rhetorical Genius
of Donald Trump.”
They make “him feel approach-
able,” Mercieca said, particularly
juxtaposed with Russian Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin, who “has
always portrayed himself as an
authoritarian leader who must be
obeyed and respect.” The videos
contrast with images of Putin that
show him sitting at the end of
long, empty tables — far from
anyone else.
The clips make Zelensky “seem
that much more heroic. That this
average guy, almost, this comedi-
an, someone who would be more
like the court jester ... has turned
out to be this fearless leader. And I
think the world is impressed with
that.”
Indeed, Zelensky has quickly
become a global celebrity, his
name and image popping upwhere you’d least expect it. The
first_dogs_usa Instagram ac-
count, which is dedicated to the
furry friends of the White House,
posted a photo of Zelensky in
workout clothes, sitting on a
squat rack with dogs on either
side of him. “Just when we
thought we know all the good
things about President Volo-
dymyr Zelensky and his impec-
cable character, we stumbled
pawcross this photo of him and
his puppers,” reads the caption.
On Sunday night, Michael
Keaton accepted a Screen Actors
Guild Award and shouted out
Zelensky, “a fellow actor” who is
“fighting the fight.” On Tuesday,
comedian Cameron Esposito
tweeted, “So far I have insuffer-
ably reminded 8 ppl today that
Zelenskyy is a comedian. HE
MAKES ME FEEL PROUD OK.”
On social media, many people
have imagined Zelensky as a su-
perhero, a member of Marvel’sAvengers. Others envisioned a
Lin-Manuel Miranda musical
about him. One viral tweet read,
“BREAKING: every woman in
your life now has at least a small
crush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy
and there’s absolutely nothing
you can do about it.”
Though praise of the president
feels ubiquitous online, some
have criticized the over-the-top
comparisons as tone-deaf or inap-
propriate. Others have noted that
the people of Ukraine, who are
under attack, probably aren’t
scrolling through Twitter and
watching videos of their president
on “Dancing With the Stars.”
But also, in Zelensky’s home
country, “now everybody per-
ceives him as a leader,” Roman
said. “His previous career as a
comedian, it’s not forgotten. But
Ukrainians are not perceiving
him anymore like a comedian.
He’s a serious guy who’s defend-
ing the country.”of performance,” Woolley said.
“It’s a game of knowing what to
say and when and how, and Zel-
ensky seems to be hitting the nail
on the head here.”
Woolley also pointed out that
Zelensky “almost speaks in
quotes,” recalling politicians such
as Barack Obama and Winston
Churchill, “dropping these turns
of phrase that are highly memora-
ble.” When the United States of-
fered to evacuate him from
Ukraine, for example, Zelensky
reportedly retorted, in Ukrainian,
“I need ammunition, not a ride.”
“It frankly speaks to what the
Ukrainian people want and need
to hear,” Woolley said.
Before taking office, Zelensky
was a household name in Ukraine
for decades. Nataliya Roman, a
former television reporter in
Ukraine who’s now a journalism
professor at the University of
North Florida, said Zelensky rose
to prominence in part by doing
sketches on comedy-competition
shows in the late 1990 s and the
2000 s. In 2005, his success on
that front earned him his own
sketch series, “Evening Quarter,”
which Roman described as an
immensely popular “social and
political satire” show, beloved for
its bravery at a time “when free-
dom of speech was an issue in
Ukraine.”
Over the next few years, his
career blossomed: In addition to
winning “Dancing With the Stars”
and voicing Paddington, Zelensky
also starred in movies, such as
“Rzhevskiy protiv Napoleona”
(“Corporal vs. Napoleon”), in
which he portrays a womanizing
Napoleon Bonaparte during his
invasion of — yes — Russia.
But perhaps his most influen-
tial role came in 2015, when he
began starring in the TV series
“Servant of the People” as a high
school history teacher who gets
elected president after a video of
him eloquently criticizing the po-
litical status quo goes viral.
Michael Marion Naydan, a
professor of Ukrainian Studies
at Penn State, wrote in an email
to The Washington Post that
Zelensky’s portrayal of an every-
man becoming a great leader set
him apart from both “the stiff
and stodgy Ukrainian politi-
cians in power and those even-
tually running against him in
ZELENSKY FROM C1 the presidential election.”
Naydan compared Zelensky’s
performance to that of Kevin
Kline in the 1993 movie “Dave,”
which follows an ordinary guy
who, in an unlikely twist of fate,
ascends to the American presi-
dency. Of course, what happened
next in Ukraine would be akin to
the American populace loving
“Dave” enough to actually elect a
President Kline.
When Zelensky announced his
candidacy for the presidency in
2019, Roman says, some were
skeptical — the country’s intellec-
tual elites, in particular. But one
popular line of thought, accord-
ing to Roman, boiled down to:
“We have tried this with tradition-
al politicians. It did not work out.
Let’s see what this guy can do.”
And while Roman recalled that
Zelensky’s official policy positions
during his campaign were
“vague,” she said the content of
“Servant of the People” convinced
many Ukrainians that Zelensky
was sensitive to the issues real
Ukrainians faced. As Roman
wrote in a 2021 paper published
in the European Journal of Com-
munication, the final episodes of
“Servant of the People” were re-
leased just days before the first
round of Ukrainian presidential
elections in 2019. “This overlap-
ping of his fictional televised pres-
idency with his ongoing presiden-
tial campaign,” she wrote, “may
have resulted in some voters hav-
ing difficulty separating his televi-
sion character’s characteristics
with the actor’s real characteris-
tics.”
Since the invasion, many
Americans have compared Zel-
ensky to Jon Stewart, the comedi-
an best known for hosting Com-
edy Central’s satirical “news”
program “The Daily Show.” But
where Stewart’s comedy on the
series tended to be political, Zel-
ensky’s sometimes veered into
much goofier territory — more
like Jimmy Fallon. One clip, for
example, finds him and four
other gentlemen standing be-
hind a piano, their pants around
their ankles. They proceed to
pretend to play the Jewish folk
song “Hava Nagila” with ... well,
let’s just say without using their
hands.
Rather than diminish his lead-
ership, the viral clips of his former
life only serve to humanize him,
said Jennifer Mercieca, a profes-
His most
crucial role
the people of Ukraine. “This is
not a developing third-world na-
tion,” she said. “This is Europe.”
Likewise, in a segment on the
BBC, David Sakvarelidze, former
deputy prosecutor general of
Ukraine, described his emotion-
al response in seeing “European
people with blue eyes and blond
hair being killed, children being
killed every day” in his country.
Daniel Hannan, a former Con-
servative member of European
Parliament, wrote in London’s
Te legraph newspaper of the
Ukrainian people being at-
tacked: “They seem so like us.
That is what makes it so shock-
ing. War is no longer something
visited upon impoverished and
remote populations. It can hap-
pen to anyone.”
Such coverage resorts to “Ori-
entalist concepts of ‘civilization’
MEDIA FROM C1 that have long been present in
European colonial discourse,”
said Denijal Jegic, a postdoctor-
al researcher in communication
and multimedia journalism at
Lebanese American University
in Beirut, in an interview. “This
implicitly suggests that war is a
natural phenomenon in places
outside of the Euro-American
sphere, and the Middle East in
particular, and that war would
take place because of a lack of
civilization, rather than due to
unjust geopolitical power dis-
tribution or foreign interven-
tion.”
Many conflicts outside of Eu-
rope or the United States are
hardly covered at all, Jegic add-
ed, and when they are, “coverage
tends to focus on how the con-
flict is related to Western govern-
mental interests and how it af-
fects Western audiences.”
But the focus on the humanity
of the Ukrainians affected by the
Russian invasion explicitly high-
lighted the lens through which
European and American corre-
spondents see a war so close to
home.
“The casual racism is shock-
ing,” said Rasha Elass, a
D.C.-based Syrian American
journalist who traveled to Syria
to cover the conflict there for a
variety of publications. The Rus-
sian invasion of Ukraine is jar-
ring, because “this is literally the
closest it has gotten in our life-
time to a world war ... and in that
regard, it is very different from
the U.S. invading Afghanistan or
the regional war in Syria. But it is
not because one area is civilized
and the other is not. It is because
of the geopolitics and what is at
stake.”
Philip Seib, professor emeri-
tus of journalism and public
diplomacy at the University ofSouthern California and author
of “Information at War: Journal-
ism, Disinformation, and Mod-
ern Warfare,” said such dispari-
ties in reporting have historical
roots. “One of the most striking
examples came in the 1990 s,
when tens of thousands of White
people were dying in the Balkans
and hundreds of thousands of
Black people were dying in
Rwanda, and the Balkans got
much more coverage,” Seib said.
“There seems to be a gravitation-
al pull leading to more Western
coverage of people who are ‘like
us,’ to use their term.”
“That’s attributable in part to
the fact that these news organi-
zations’ American constituencies
feel closer to their roots in Eu-
rope,” he added. “If something
comparable was happening in a
Western European country, I
think the coverage would be
much more intense, and thepublic interest would be much
more intense. That’s sort of a
chicken or egg thing. What
comes first: the news coverage or
the interest?”
The trend wasn’t isolated to
English-language media outlets.
Some academics noted that in
certain French media outlets,
Ukrainians fleeing their country
were “refugees,” but Afghans do-
ing the same in August and
September were “migrants.”
On the French channel BFM
TV, another commentator noted
that “we’re not talking about
Syrians fleeing bombs of the
Syrian regime backed by [Rus-
sian President Vladimir] Putin,
we’re talking about Europeans
leaving in cars that look like ours
to save their lives.”
And in another segment, the
channel’s Ulysse Gosset re-
marked that: “We are in the 21st
century, we are in a Europeancity, and we have cruise missile
fire as though we were in Iraq or
Afghanistan, can you imagine!”
Seib thinks these double stan-
dards in international coverage
will become less prominent over
time as n ewsrooms d iversify. “ It’s
slowly, slowly getting better, be-
cause the news business is be-
coming slowly, slowly more di-
verse,” he said.
The theme was remarkable
enough to gain a mention on
“Saturday Night Live” last week-
end. The show opened with the
Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of
New York singing “Prayer for
Ukraine.” But later, Weekend Up-
date co-host Michael Che joked
about the media coverage of the
conflict, saying: “This is a tough
subject to make jokes about. I
mean, in my lifetime I’ve seen
footage of attacks like this on
other countries, but never a
White one.”In depicting Ukraine’s plight, some commentators use o≠ensive comparisons
EFREM LUKATSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Volodymyr Zelensky played Ukraine’s president in a TV series before being elected as the real one in 2019. The viral clips of his former life
have helped humanize him, said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor in Texas A&M University’s department of communication.“Politics, particularlypolitics today, is a gameof performance.”
Samuel Woolley, an assistant
professor in the University of Texas
at Austin’s school of journalism