Fermanagh, Northern Ireland will be hosting the G8 summit this month. The problem is that the austerity-led recession has left closed businesses all over the place.
What is there to do?
The butcher’s business has been replaced by a picture of a butcher’s business. Across the road is a similar tale. A small business premises has been made to look like an office supplies store. It used to be a pharmacy, now relocated on the village main street.
That's right. They are going to errect a fantasy to paper over the destruction of their policies.
Elsewhere in Fermanagh, billboard-sized pictures of the gorgeous scenery have been located to mask the occasional stark and abandoned building site or other eyesore.
All is paid for by so-called dereliction funding. About £300,000 was made available by the Department of the Environment and the Department for Social Development. A second round of funding is expected.
That's real money that could be used to do things like create jobs or improve the community. Instead its being used to create an illusion of prosperity.
The question is:
who is fooling whom? And why? Do our political and economic leaders need to be protected from the consequences of their own ideologies?
A real Potemkin village is embarrassing enough, but an intellectual one is worse -- one like the global austerity movement.
This is exactly what Russian minister Grigory Potemkin did for Empress Catherine II in 1787.
Something on a smaller scale was done in Cleveland in 2010, and by the North Koreans in the 1950's.
In many ways this is very fitting. We have a "jobs recovery" based entirely on people no longer being counted as part of the workforce. So this is just taking the next logical step and pretending that reality doesn't matter.