Sausages at the fair cannot make fasting meaningless

There are many lies spread about themselves by the so-called polite and cultured world. These lies have different levels and themes, but their essence is the same - to show that the "decent world", be it middle or upper class, differs from ordinary "paors", that class differences are not invented, inherited and undeserved, but that they are a qualitative determination and that everyone has as much as they deserve.

This type of behavior also exists at the national level, so we often hear that the merits for today's order, according to which some nations have far more than others, do not lie in imperialism and colonialism, not in the theft of natural resources and exploitation by the imperial powers (be they Britain, Spain, Turkey or some fourth) exercised over smaller nations simply because some nations are "better, more refined and smarter than others". This type of thinking has its echo in the autochauvinism that occurs among the self-proclaimed elites of small nations who combine both false elitisms - the reason why the people they were born into is in a bad state is precisely in all those "uncouth", "paors", "peasants", "savages", because of which they do not have democracy, human rights, cultural life. Just as for racists, the "other" is an enemy of a person of another race, nation, or immigrant, so for the quasi-elite, the "other" is some imaginary common man who likes bad music, drinks terrible alcohol, is rude and stops "progress".

The truth is that kitsch is loved by everyone and that the idea of ​​cultural purity is equally racist and false as the idea of ​​racial, national and any other purity. It should not surprise anyone if, in some fifty or a hundred years, today's "elites", embodied in the technocrats of the White House and the European Commission, will be denounced for their elitist hatred in the same way as the ideologues of all previous hatreds. As far as kitsch is concerned, everyone has a kitsch that they like, no matter how polished, refined, better than ordinary it seems to them. For someone it's a superhero movie with popcorn and the biggest glass of coke, for someone it's fast food, for someone it's a reality show, and for someone it's cheap prose. Someone's kitsch may be passed off as art today, but the court of history will place it in its rightful place. The one who pretends to be above all kitsch, all pathos, everything superficial, should examine himself well and see how much he is lying to himself, and how much to the environment and to what extent he is a human being, and to what extent he is an empty shell filled with phrases and learned quotes.

December time is the time of kitsch Christmas fairs, a practice of large European cities that has become popular in our regions as well. Everything around the fair is kitsch - houses made of fake wood, fake deer, red Coca-Cola Santa Claus, Christmas trees made of plastic, sausages made of papak. The commercialization of Christmas is at the same intensity at these fairs as in shopping centers. But lamenting about this commercialization is no less false than that of quasi-elitism, because the fact that buying gifts and decorating Christmas trees has little to do with the essence of Christmas does not prevent anyone from celebrating it in temples, fasting and exercising in spirit and body, and avoiding folk joy that, let's be honest, did not come with coke but existed throughout the history of civilization. Just as listening to folk songs will not erase jazz music from the face of the earth, neither can sausages at the fair make fasting meaningless.

It is interesting how Christmas fairs, with the possible exception of Vienna, really don't belong anywhere, and they look exactly the same. It's somewhat tragicomic to see the same houses in front of the tower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin or among the canals of Venice, but the city where they look the least like they belong is Prague. The Gothic architecture of the city, adorned with pointed towers, dark colors and the Charles Bridge, seems inappropriate to the idea of ​​Christmas in general, let alone a fair. As you cross that main footbridge, you may be admiring the architecture, perhaps taking photos of the Vltava River, but somewhere in your brain, especially if it's night, you're wary of the bridge's statues becoming alive and unleashing their wrath on the diverse tourist population. It is the same thing with the old astronomical clock, which is decorated with figures that denote vanity, greed, death and lust, human sins that, at the ticking of the clock, turn their heads and show that they do not want to leave the world of men and that time cannot do anything to them. When we add to that the legend of the Golem, a being who is a rabbi Judah Lev ben Bezalel resurrected from clay to stop anti-Semitic pogroms (the city's Jewish cemetery will teach you not only about suffering, but how many shades of gray there are), we see otherworldly dangers lurking around every corner of this city. The legend of the Golem is so strong that at the end of the nineteenth century, during the renovation of the old synagogue, they checked whether there were any remains of him in the attic. Now how to fit in the Christmas fair and the cheerful music that spreads from it through the city of Gothic and darkness? It would be said that there is no place less appropriate for the variants of the song "Zvončići". Of course, Prague can also be experienced as a tourist, by walking through museums and tasting beer, but that would miss out on a lot.

Only if we enter the body of a Jew who buried the family he lost because of the senseless hatred of his fellow citizens, only if we are that anti-Semite who fears that the rabbi has awakened the Golem and that punishment is coming, only if we are a sinful man whom the apostles remind us of at the astronomical clock at noon how he lost his way and only if we are the proverbial superstitious Europeans in the face of all possible phantasmagoric beings can we say that we have visited that beautiful capital. This is the only way we can experience Prague as the city it is, a living place of historical horror and beauty. And we will get through that fear more easily with boiled wine, which they call svarak and which is served at those fairs. It is the fuel that, in any winter month, will encourage your heart to take in all that the city has to offer and encourage you to imagine even more, to imagine that you are walking not on modern safe streets, but on a snow-covered road of the seventeenth century, full of darkness and insecurities from all sides, with anxiety in the heart and eyes wide open. Then the arrival at the destination is even nicer and happier.

These weeks, European cities are not destined to celebrate and plans for receptions in the squares have been put on hold. While the yellow vests in Paris make new and new demands on the embodiment of the false elite from the beginning of the text Emmanuel Macron, the idea of ​​protest is spreading to Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and maybe even reaching Prague. There are protests both in Belgrade and in Podgorica, and at every protest we see elitism - some people in Paris are bothered by right-wingers, others by leftists. In Belgrade, some will not Mirjana Karanović, second Boško Obradović. In Podgorica, the protest is of the lowest intensity, but those who do not support it do not care about the principle, because the principle is irrelevant if someone they do not sympathize with has suffered from injustice. Perhaps, the Christmas fairs that have already been erected everywhere will serve a new purpose, be a place that will warm a potential protester, enable him to find courage in his heart and come to an understanding of the "other" with his head, realizing that some new reality has appeared, that some processes are taking place far greater than any individual, that a new reality awaits us that no one can predict, that resemble verses Bob Dylan from the timeless song “The Times They Are A-Changin'”. The Yellow Jackets have already won two games, and maybe the new year will be really new, and not just a calendar change that no one is looking forward to. Maybe the Golem of protest is coming for the embattled elite?