Mayor

A bitter feeling remains after the events in Zabjelo, which showed many of the "true" faces of local actors, from the street to so-called high politics, although sometimes it is not easy to see the difference between the two.

Hatred of any otherness, in my imagination always conjures up the image of a community chained in a heavy metal coffin of alleged tradition and supposedly proven values. General happiness and joy. Maybe in that coffin everything is clear to someone, everything is in its place, but it is always a cruel illusion. No community (people, ethnic group) is able and cannot survive being locked in such a tin coffin. Then communities disappear, petrified, turned into the dust of national pride and the endless mud of banal agreement. That is the monolith that all dictators dream of. Another name for the disappearance of a community.

Because every community lives in change and through change. Everything else - including the bright tradition - is only a kind of self-deception. Every society is led forward - by spiritual dynamics, the courage to test boundaries, an imagination that always surpasses the existing and prescribed, a clash of opinions that is not a game, but, as with Helen, a conversation in the square...

Amidst such joyless images, sometimes completely different voices arrive from unexpected quarters.

Such is, of course, victory. Zohrana Mamdania in the New York mayoral election. In the midst of Trump hysteria, an immigrant and socialist is taking over the leadership of America's largest city.

In the political sphere, too much euphoria can quickly turn into a trap (or a debacle), but this is, by all accounts, one of those game-changing events.

There is some crazy symmetry in the simultaneity of these two events: New York has a mayor who is Muslim and an immigrant, while pogroms and hunts for “Turks” and other immigrants are taking place in the capital of Montenegro. Scary, isn't it?

This is not the first time that the local talent to rise up against the spirit of the world, or the spirit of the times, has been so clearly seen (zeitgeist). That dangerous gift for discord. I like to remember, and in this place I reminded of that detail, which the local public somehow likes to forget. The year is 1989, when the Berlin Wall, an epochal dividing line, will be torn down, and at the same time - in Nikšić, a full square chanted "We want the Russians"! By the way, anyone who remembers that time will know what I'm talking about - back then, neither in the capital city of Moscow, nor in the rest of Europe, could you find twenty thousand people cheering - We want Russians, but in Montenegro - it is. It was a struggle, which is not unimportant, where Djukanovic i Mandic were together, with the same emotion and political stance.

Always the same - a terrifying agreement with every darkness, with all possible ghosts, and a tragic disagreement with the world...

And finally, I have to allow myself this. Namely, a completely Montenegrin intonation is now required here: Do you know whose son he is? This thought was not brought to me by any personal combinatorics, but by a raw sense of the passage of time. A hell of a lot of time.

Namely, somewhere in the late nineties and early 2000s, an Indian filmmaker Mira Nair she often "guested" in the culture section of Vijesti. From one Kan, Mrs. Branka Bogavac reported how the Indian director charmed the hosts, and we published at least five articles about the young director and her films and political views.

And today I read that her son is the mayor of New York. What a leap of time.

The world in which such events are possible is exciting, dynamic, politically modern... All that the events in Zabelje have recognized as meanings that need to be defended against. By expelling foreigners from the state.

Don't you feel the shame pulsing from the bowels of the tin coffin they want to lock you into?

And finally - one detail that will distinguish the other Podgorica: deepest respect and support Natasa Vukicevic and her (solitary, therefore even more valuable) performance from Independence Square.