We like our targets big and bright, don't we? Big as barn doors with gigantic bull's eyes on 'em! All the easier for the irony-challenged to "nail it," to cement their laboriously cultivated reputations as sassy media hoots.

[The operative word there being "cement."]

Soviet propaganda was funny, to be sure, if you could divorce it from its historical and moral context. Today the course of events has done the de-contextualizing for us. Back then regular citizens of the failed empire, even party members, never paid much attention to it. The only people who cared about the idiotic mewlings of Soviet ad men were those who had to read them for professional reasons, western security and political experts, Russian language students (of which I was one), for the most part. Attempts to mock them for their obviousness, stupidity, clumsy rhetoric, etc. always had the stale air of rote institutional humor about them. There was and is a Kafkaesque frigidity about such arched-brow asides, associated with the tacit acknowledgement that one was stuck with a corrupt state's obviously false, maniacally mannered bureaucratic self-presentations. Because the truth and reality of the world [Russia] one would have liked to be able to penetrate were inaccessible.

Today there's no such obligatory alienation underlying, and rendering poignantly absurd, the Russian government's attempts to manipulate western opinion. Even a quick glance at the Post supplement indicates that today's "nation branding" is a far sight more sophisticated than Brezhnev era bombast. The most striking thing is a new self-awareness on the part of the advertisers of their role, the mutual "influences" between them and society and the global market, etc.

Yet it must be remarked that various clumsy usages in the piece come not from Russia's ad for itself, but from the blurb called "Nation Branding" appended to the supplement by the Post's professional, American editorial crew: "The Post's reach of both the influential audience in Washington and, through its website, influentials around the world is a ripe target."

You don't have to be a Pravda hack to write sloppy English, and generally speaking, the writing in Russia's supplement is no worse than anything one would expect from this genre, whether the subject of such ad-blab were an "up-and-coming" nation-brand or real estate in the Ozarks. Shafer and Slate are just as capable of "regaling" us with their "inadvertently hilarious" verbal crap as any Russian copy-schmuck : "Obviously, [. . .] who may have gotten a chuckle or a groan out of it before feeding it into their recycling pile." "Feeding it into"? Ha ha ha! LOL!! Who writes this shit. Or, just scroll down to the bottom of the page: "In 2005, both Jack Shafer and Jacob Weisberg described George W. Bush as a propagana president." OK, Let's stick a great big "sic" after that "propagana," -- just so no reader thinks witty Slate writers are capable of spewing illiterate nonsense.

Shafer's so eager to do his hack gotcha thing, guffawing so hard at his freeze-dried "humour," he doesn't bother to look at the thing he feels required to spoof. Indeed, among the shallow attempts to "put a human face" on Putin, extol Russia's "diversity" or challenge readers' cliché assumptions with even more cliché anecdotes, there are some interesting comments. The very article Shafer cites as proof of the Secret Policeman's "unintentional" and altogether sinister irony contains, for instance, the following regarding upcoming elections and the Kremlin's thinking about them: "Too strong to be wary of any competitor, its [Kremlin's] public image will improve if there is a proper contest at the polls. This will make the election look legitimate in the eyes of the nation and the world." That's a perfectly forthright assessment and a clear analysis of the ground rules for the most important upcoming event in Russian political life. You won't find a better depiction in the Post, or indeed, here at Slate.

No, here at Slate what we get are writers with a sense of clammy fun that is so pro forma, so prefab and hackneyed and fill-in-the-blank, so relentlessly dumb, it's blinding. And no, doing silly, I-was-a-wild-and-crazy-guy-onc­e Badenov voices doesn't make you witty. Real wit has a spark of critical insight to it, something Shafer so painfully lacks. A witty insight into the Russian ad supplement would take note of the true creepiness of today's propaganda, how corporate and faux "intimate," pr-whorish and smarmily clever at worming its way under the glossy skin of our media-primed "narrative" affects. But for someone like Jack Shafer to be capable of an insight in that register, he'd have to begin by acknowledging how all media styles, especially dim attemtps at arm's-length yucksterism such as his own, are already spoiled by propagandastic techniques. It would do wonders for him as a writer, maybe, freeing him from this oppressive felt need to convince people of his "talent" as a hi-lare-ee-ous hoot. Just leave Russia out of it.