It's not often that the first among us rips the shirts off his chest, so to speak, to bare his very soul. To the domestic public, he is a tireless fighter, a lightning rod for the people, but he confided in a British Reuters journalist, in the way we sometimes only open up to a stranger – that he would like to, when his presidential term ends, give up politics for a while.
More than half of Serbia wishes him the same! Our president (who would no longer be president) could indulge in his passions, reading and chess. Only, if more than half of Serbia is asked, he could do that every day until evening in Zabela.
But human life is cursed, a deep canyon between desires and reality. Srećko Šojić only wanted to be the captain of a white ship, but he had to be a corrupt egg-laying machine. And Vučić will apparently have to postpone his retirement and become prime minister! Of course, he wouldn't, but the party is persuading him because they would do without Vučić somehow, but they believe that Serbia would collapse immediately without Vučić. Let him live happily at Nemanjina 11, and let him read and work out chess openings at night, when he is tormented by workaholic insomnia.
And the first among us, what will he do, carries his cross, he liked it that way in this world, and he is already giving himself over to the campaign. He eats a sandwich in Novi Sad, for example, and when our president indulges in the food of ordinary people – like that burek with Orban or a mezetluka at some host – then three rings of security are needed. The president also receives some kind of church order, and he gets everywhere, especially on television.
The thing is simple, the thing is this: our government has all the naked force on its side and in the next elections they will ruthlessly steal so that they don't find out what the evenings are like in Zabela. But then again, it is calculated, some people still have to really round up the SNS and the Trabant, and those who can round them up are almost exclusively pensioners and people with eight-year-old children. All the research shows this.
(Sometimes, when I mention it, a pensioner, a loyal reader of the column, gets angry with me, but there's no need - if he can see beyond the propaganda that most of his peers believe, then all the better and more commendable for that particular pensioner!)
It seems like a plusquamperfect when Vučić wrote an intellectual authorial text in this newspaper about a new era in which he finally realized that the Berlin Wall had fallen. He did not please the “elite” and that bothered him for a while, and now he is at war with the “elite” and has embraced his fate of addressing the elderly and less educated, just as Šojić accepted being a corrupt egg-laying woman, not the captain of a white ship. His audience is people often left on a crust of bread, having a fun time at SNS rallies and vague promises of a better life.
In this, if you'll excuse me, communication with the lowest social stratum, our president has a whole propaganda line that is worth considering, and which, for the purposes of this column, we could call "beating with a club."
So the other day our president went to have the Chinese show him a robot, and the robot shook hands with the president, addressed him respectfully, and then danced and performed acrobatics. The president liked it so much that he ordered a robot factory to be opened immediately, and then those robots to be given guns and recruited into the army (from which flesh-and-blood people flee without a care) so that the enemy would tremble before the Serbian robot army.
Impulsive decisions ("Let's pave the road here! We're buying Rafales! I want a robot army!") and the dystopian idea of replacing people with robots are the hallmarks of a wannabe dictator, but let's focus here on beating the shit out of Vučić's audience.
Of course, she has no idea about these robots, or whether such futurism is even possible in recent times, but that's exactly the charm - ignorance of high-tech topics shrouds her in a veil of mystery and inscrutability. We don't know much about these humanoid robots, but it's something absolutely new and must be very good! It doesn't exist anywhere else in the world yet, but it will exist here!
The president has indulged in high-tech visions before, remember the crossbreeding of fish and tomatoes, then the admiration for the Chinese blackboard that the staff drives around Belgrade to the television studios that the president visits, the chip factory and other wonders, the greatest of which is perhaps the flying taxi!
There is, of course, no reason for ordinary people to be enthusiastic about a flying taxi, which at best can serve as a bacchanalia for the decadent rich, who will now express their privilege through a literal height advantage in three-dimensional space. And the only benefit for the people will be that the progressive nouveau riche, if they fly, have less chance of running over a child at a crosswalk.
(Today)
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