The point is distraction - to have everybody looking-at and discussing the puppet - rather than noticing (or even asking!) who is people pulling its strings.
Distraction can take many forms. Some are constructed as "strong" puppets - pseudo-competent, attributed with ability. Such a puppet may even be intelligent and hard-working as a person - but is still a puppet.
Other leaders are constructed as incompetent, naïve, ignorant, or drooling idiots. We observe the incapacities and dysfunctions; empathize or mock the human wreckage; agonize about what is to be done.
Others act the role of a crazy - firing-off opinions, assertions, threats, promises. People are confused, encouraged to try to make sense of it all - become enmeshed in discerning the puppet's strategic from his reactive nature - and so forth.
Many kinds of puppet are possible; and the person deployed as puppet may be more or less convincing his role - may even really be what he is depicted as!
This doesn't much matter, because the point is distraction; and the totalitarian media collude in evoking, amplifying, and sustaining this distraction.
Since distraction is primary; it can work equally well to have a beloved and admired heroic puppet; or a hated and demonic puppet - or to alternate between them.
Thus the job is done.
It's a very flexible system!
In some places leadership puppets are constantly being replaced; and that business takes-up a great deal of here-and-now attention and energy.
In others, the puppet replacement is less frequent, and there is a long narrative attached to the process.
In others, the puppet is supposedly permanent - and the debate is about whether rule by a long-term puppet is an unjust and intolerable imposition.
Of course, when there is a puppet, then there are puppet-masters - those who choose the puppet, and pull the strings.
Which means that the real societal power struggle is not between puppets, but between alliances of puppet masters.
For the puppet masters, the advantages of puppet rulers are so great that they collude to maintain the public pretence that the puppet is "in charge"; and that policy U-turns and contradictions are due to changes of the puppet's mind, or corruption of the puppet.
(eg. When a drooling idiot is the puppet leader; then nobody asks - nobody with power, anyway - who chose that leader; and who was ruling when the leader was acknowledged incapable of doing so.)
When we see self-contradiction, and unimplemented policies and the like; what is actually happening is that one masters-alliance has grabbed the strings and imposed control and pursue their agenda - only for another alliance to wrest the strings away, then make the puppet say or do... something else.
All of which public discourse attributes to the nature and motivation of the puppet.
In sum; the puppets are, at most, superficial froth on the surface; while the direction of water flow is the product of puppet-master activity; and tidal changes of direction are a consequence of different groups of puppet masters in covert conflict, different of their parties achieving temporary dominance.
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