By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Dignity, after all, does not depend on social status and wealth.
It is possible to be a dignified butler, as everyone who watched Anthony Hopkins in “Remains of the Day”, based on Ishiguro’s novel, knows. Butler, in fact, has an obligation to serve with dignity – because no real gentleman wants other human beings, not even those who bring him tea, to flutter around his legs like an English setter. The master always despises the humble the most and trusts him the least.
In Savile Row, a London Street where they make the best men’s suits in the world, tailors and customers talk at a level of dignity and mutual respect that is unthinkable for our Parliament. The layers of humor, etiquette and, finally, the tradition that can be read from the sentences that these tailors utter go beyond anything that can be produced by local multi-partyism.
Let’s say… When the tailor finds during the measurement that the customer, since he was last visited him, has significantly gained weight, he addresses the customer with the words: “Well, the gentleman has decided to let the world know that he is doing great in life”. Finally: if you immediately realize that it is irony, it is not irony. If you realize for the rest of your life that it was an irony back then – it wasn’t British irony.
And it is possible, on the other hand, to be the prime minister of one country, and even a country of arrogant, proud people, and to be deprived of even a notion of what dignity is. What does everyone who saw Dritan’s visit to Belgrade, filmed after Beckovic’s poem “Serbian youth will carry him in their arms to Kalemegdan”, know?
When Dritan, only ostensibly as a tailor in Savile Row, kneels before Vucic, polishes his shoes and twists his trouser legs, and says about the man who ordered the abuse of our MPs that he solved the problem of abuse of our MPs, while allowing him to humiliate him in the middle of his humiliating let-I-kiss-the-hand-that-feeds-me sentence to correct him, that is: slimy, disgusting, yuck, invertebrate, bastardly, creepy, garbage-like, servile, inferior, masochistic, I throw up…
In short, Dritan was almost as servile in front of Vucic as Ivica Dacic was in front of Erdogan, to whom he sang in Turkish.
What else did we understand from Dritan’s visit to Belgrade, from Dritan’s triumphant announcements that he was accompanied by 25 cars (is there a nicer scene for the leader of the green party than 25 limousines that consume 20 liters per hundred kilometers and emit all that wonderful CO2 into the atmosphere?) and his “let’s go to paintball, put on a new army jacket, there will be girls” visit Ukraine?
Brothers and sisters, James Bond fans. Daniel Craig is gone, but don’t worry: Dritan is the new James Bond. Did you see how the Ray-Ban glasses suit him? Did you see how he spreads when walking at Ukraine and Belgrade airports? Did you see him ride the speedboat? Whatever James Bond does, Dritan does. I don’t know, bro, but he somehow reminds me of Tom Cruise.
This brings us, and I don’t even know how, to the issue of the so-called Fundamental Agreement.
Dritan’s audacity in Montenegro and towards the people in Montenegro is inversely proportional to his servility shown in Belgrade. And masters sometimes like to humiliate servants who are especially enthusiastic in showing servility… To paraphrase Ljubo Filipovic: that is how Vucic threatened the Albanians with war just at the moment when he was kneeling in front of him and nodding his head – an Albanian. This, after all, any honest sadist would do.
Dritan, therefore… That man had words of justification for the Greater Serbia post-election party in front of the temple in Podgorica; that man who a day later called the gathered citizens of Montenegro on the square in Podgorica a crowd that was crying: that man dropped Joanikije into the Cetinje Monastery by helicopter; that man fired rubber bullets and tons of tear gas at the citizens of Montenegro who opposed it. What should his Minister of Police Filip Adzic do now with cheap jokes. Good Luck With That, Buddy.
Will he sign the so-called Fundamental Agreement? Whatever happens, there is no happy ending. The fact that we have come to this is bad enough.
Here are the options.
- He will sign it and that’s it; everyone protested, but we move on
- The government will sign it and fall
- It won’t be signed
The fact that all three options are possible clearly shows how non-transparent the work of this government is. This is not a government, this is a masked unit for special tasks.
Everything about this government is bad, hell bad.
But I wanted to tell you something else.
The world, I say, is full of artisans, gardeners, painters and factory workers who are born gentlemen. The world, I say, is full of supposed gentlemen who are ontological bastards. Let’s not realize, for God’s sake, that our “lordship” is of this other kind.
A bit of backbone and dignity has never killed anyone.
