In order to clarify a side event from a few days ago, it might not be a bad idea to think about a few questions:
What does cabbage have to do with water polo?
What do cabbage and water polo have to do with relations between Serbia and Croatia?
Finally: what do the presidents of Croatia and Serbia, Milanović and Vučić, have to do with cabbage, water polo, the brain and life?
Well, let's try to untangle these complex connections established by the statements and mutual exaggerations of two complete idiots and their rather idiotic - but, fuck, neighboring and relative - countries.
Milanović started Python's polemic by saying somewhere, approximately, that the politics of Serbia is neither "Eastern" nor "Western", neither a fish nor a girl nor anything else consequential and from one piece, but rather that it is more of one - cabbage patch.
Milanović likes to express himself, ahem, colorfully, which sometimes turns out to be witty and insightful, but more often, especially in recent years, it is strained and arrogant. This time, Milanović didn't say anything that wasn't true - if we leave aside the fact that he used a vocabulary and style more suitable for a disheveled columnist than the president of the country.
Vučić, of course, could not feel this, much less react in the manner of a politician and statesman, because he is none of those things according to his habitus. Instead, with a touching praise of his own non-cabbage policy, he offered to send Milanović some futo cabbage, so that the poor Croat can finally see what real cabbage is, because nobody - let alone Croatia - has cabbage like the Serbs have. Milanović replied to that by praising the Varaždin and Ogulin cabbages, which are not even knee-deep in futoshki there. After all, we know what happens when Croatia and Serbia face each other: Croatia becomes world champion. Like here now in water polo. That's what the proud Milanović said, from which I concluded that the Croatian Vaerpolists won some gold; I don't really understand if they also beat up their Serbian colleagues on the way to gold, and I don't really care, so I won't google it. Let's say they are. Or they didn't. Who cares? Both Croatia and Serbia were several times world champions in fucking water polo, a sport that is taken seriously in 4-5 countries in the world. And before them, the SFR Yugoslavia was also the world champion, so that didn't help it in the same year that it didn't bloody disintegrate (disintegrate?) into its constituent parts.
As far as cabbage is concerned, I can tell you that the best one is any that can be used to make a good podvarak, be it in Stari fiaker in Mesnička above Ilica, or in Plava Frajla on SPENS, approx. 8 km as the crow flies from the nearest Futos cabbage fields. Fortunately, this cabbage polemic was not conducted twenty years ago, because then Vučić would hardly have resisted retorting that Croats have no right to own Ogulin cabbage, since Ogulin is still in the famous radical borders of "Greater Serbia" Karlobag- Ogulin-Karlovac-Virovitica. And Vučić is a big part of his so-called spent his political career on dead watch at the so-called watchtowers. Nothing, I'm just saying…
Okay, we had a good time, but why all this and why does this matter? Eh, why... It would be easiest for me to answer - because it shows what kind of cabbage heads the two key countries of the Slavic Balkans are leading. That's certainly not incorrect, but it's scratching the surface or lamenting the grotesque consequences, instead of researching - and then maybe dismantling it, right? - of the real causes of permanent untidiness, chaotic and embarrassing cheapness and inferiority of relations within the "Stokava duo" (or trio, because unfortunate Bosnia is also part of that story, except that not only do we not know where the best cabbage grows, but you also don't know who would was exactly authorized to say so) with a complex and difficult recent heritage, inextricably linked by a "fatal" linguistic commonality and hence, and from some other of "Freudian" reasons, condemned to a constant barren comparison of nothing.
It was often written, when our wars finally ended, that Serbia and Croatia should emulate Germany and France, which have been the closest European allies for over half a century, although they have an incomparably more difficult and bloodier history of mutual satire. That, however, somehow never happened. In a certain sense, the wall near Batrovac is higher and more impenetrable today than twenty years ago, but the fundamental reason for this is not the provincial Serbo-Croatian interrooms, but the fact that one of those countries has advanced to the European Union and Schengen, and the other is stuck in a cabbage patch. But that cabbage is not Futsal, but some bland and inedible misery and misery of a plant, as if it was grown somewhere halfway from Chernobyl to Siberia. We won't get enough of it, but maybe it will at least shine for us in the dark, which is getting denser anyway.
