Ukraine president volodymyr Zelensky

The Ukrainian president's actions in the face of the Russian invasion turned him into a hero online. But the Marvelization of political figures is ...

“What we see in studying memes and politics is that while memification helps a political message or cause spread to many people, it often comes at the expense of a flattening of that story,” says Sulafa Zidani, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor specializing in digital culture studies. It feels cruel to put the idea of Zelensky on a pedestal when the flesh-and-blood man is begging for help on the ground. When certain segments of the liberal crowd in the United States treated the Robert Mueller investigation as a hero-studded spectacle, buying T-shirts with the former special counsel’s face on them and calling former FBI director James Comey “daddy,” it didn’t negatively impact the Trump administration. Believing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an atrocity and that Zelensky is behaving courageously does not mean that it’s wise to apply the googly-eyed logic of fandom to his actions. Zelensky is the number-one target of the country with the most nukes in the world, and he’s not backing down—if there was ever a time to idolize a political figure, it might be this moment. The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait.