When facing the kind of elections in Montenegro, I always remember one that is a bit caustic or at least unusual, but that's why it's no less accurate. Borges definitions of theater. Theater is a social game, says the great poet, in which one group of people on stage pretends to be someone else, and the other group, those around the stage, pretend to believe them.
Isn't it similar in Montenegrin election campaigns? We have politicians as a group of people who pretend to be honest, hard-working and exemplary, and citizens who pretend to believe them... And that's how this trickery game goes on. From election to election.
A campaign is underway, which naturally favors activist discourse and somewhat changes the rhetoric of politicians. This kind of concentrated public invocation of the "party" truth has a long-term effect on language - which in such epochs becomes more a means of falsification than truthful speech. But the frequency of campaigns often forces politicians to go a step further, to touch the rhetorical boundaries - both sense and good taste.
"If I lost my mind," says the DPS president Djukanovic, "I would rather vote for DF than URU."
To me, I must say, this is not so illogical, although it might seem strange to someone that the president, even after "coming out of his mind", chooses a "pro-Serbian/Russian" party over a "pro-European" party. Don't hurry... In the end, Đukanović together with that team, then under some other names, demolished SFRY and created a "Common State/Serbia for all who want it". And he led those who want to then. It is not for nothing that it is said that first love is not forgotten.
Does the DPS leader want to tell us that back then, in the early nineties, he was "out of his mind", because at that time he believed that only "out of his mind" could make him vote for the liberals, for example. Whose program he will completely take over when he "climbed to the mind".
Such oratorical exhibitions certainly do not contribute to the rationalization of the Montenegrin political scene. And if the citizens begin to feel en masse that they too have been "massaged", don't worry. It's just an election campaign.
In order to hide that "descent from the mind" from the nineties, actions to launder the Leader's biography must be organized constantly.
We had one such action with a pre-election memorial plaque in the former Morinj camp. Well, even when the reason is indisputable, Montenegrins manage to do something stupid. What were they waiting for until now? Why wasn't that plaque put up much earlier?
This is how we got a memorial text whose meaning was not in the necessary culture of memory. Here we actually had a kind of invocation of oblivion. For all that the former Montenegro and its government did. Headed by a president who is afraid that he will "go out of his mind". It doesn't have to anymore, that was enough then.
Campaigns turn into a big quagmire here. And a disgusting orgy of demagoguery.
Mayor for the third time among the citizens of Podgorica. And the fastest court in all of Mexico... But, everything is simple, until we get to the "rebuke" of those who hinder him from doing good deeds. Mother Teresa Podgorička. The mayor's rebuke with a flash story about a desperate mother on the verge of suicide waiting for him is the most demagogic and sleazy thing this public scene has seen in a long time. (If there is, the lady should sue him for such abuse.) How he imagines his job. Some kind of courts slander, and hinder him from doing charity. Such details reveal how sick this country is, how much this society is under the pressure of mediocrity and their down-to-earth demagoguery.
Dear reader, you are holding the thousandth issue of Art in your hand.
This is not small, at least not in the Montenegrin culture of easy giving up and quick tiring. From the beginning, Art was and is a public forum, but also a space for the type of text that you rarely find in today's media.
Two decades are behind us, which changed the face of Montenegro in a dramatic way. And Art was, among other things, a chronicle of all those processes.
Bonus video:
