Who the hell are you people? What is your generation? what is your song Slogan? What does your badge say? Who do you trust? What are you shouting for? What are you against, what are you for? What are you changing? What are your books? What are you looking forward to? Who are your future classics? What is the reason for your existence? Why are you in this world? Do you accept the fate of a generation produced in a three-minute arrhythmic encounter between an unfortunate sperm and a crying egg? Who and what are you repaying with this kind of fate? Why are you in debt when you didn't make them? Did Che kill Fidel in your generation? Do you want to be a cursed, insignificant, scrap of history for a generation? Do you look like us?
Is the sight of Kim Kardashian's cellulite your ultimate horizon? Your text-developed hyperthumbs, your Big Brother, Pachomies and Adulterers, the media's natural ideal-type idols with the same number of duck lips and identical udders, bought from a monotonous Ikea shelf; Is that all you can generationally do? What are you allowed? These post-war people, before you, saw the Beatles, Kennedy, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, the 69th, Woodstock, the flower children, the black brothers, Brando, pose XNUMX, Salinger, our Golden Palm, the Nobel laureate Andrić, the moon landing, the Transistor Olympics on Jahorina, , Bill Gates, color TV, Marilyn Monroe, Commodore computers, Dylan, the end of the USSR, Zoran Radmilović, the sea, Marathon players, Sean Connery, Zvezda as the world champion, death of Tito, remote control, the end of apartheid, our gold in basketball, Džajić, Concorde, Picasso, the first part of The Godfather, ce-de, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Arsen Dedić, the opening of the Chinese Wall , Bulgaria in the European Union, the covered Church of Saint Sava, the civil war and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Do you see the difference? Why do you agree to it? Why, indescribably slack, did you agree to be the dumb silicon generation after the previous, silicon generation?
Comforting. For now. It is not your fault that you are like this. Nobody's genetics are that bad. You have been stuffed. You are exhibits. Guinea pigs. First, communism and long-term transition destroy generational and individual integrity. Without integrity there is no personality. Without personality, there is no civic courage and responsibility. Without civic courage and responsibility, there is no democracy. Finally, lack of integrity and lack of literacy give this kind of Serbian journalism. Serbian journalism is then enthusiastically involved in the training of Serbian public opinion, contributing to an atmosphere in which anything is possible. People, due to a radical loss of consciousness, even of personal interest, mostly agree that Serbia occasionally locks the gates from the inside. They agree to give their children to others to spend them as if they were not their relatives. They agree to take Serbia away as if it were already dead.
They agree or remain silent when, with the help of major social distortions and fractures, forced social promotion of the ignorant, unquestioning and obedient is carried out every ten years. What is unclear?
Tabloid politics inevitably gives birth to tabloid economics, then tabloid art, then tabloid journalism, and, finally, tabloid life with ten hours of daily stupefying television programming. Whatever it is, if there was no RTS in Serbia, all daughters would be like Stoja and all sons would be protected witnesses. It's not a coincidence. It is someone's political project to reduce everything in Serbia to eternal unproductive conflicts and the primordial war between our Šojić and their Sultan Sulejman. Kismet, I guess.
You can only save yourself individually. By talent or by fighting, it doesn't matter. Be better than others. Better than us. Take advantage of this chaos. Penetrate the essence of social conducting, obscenity, the abolition of all spontaneity or randomness. They keep quiet about it. Paradoxically, it has never been easier to make a career in the media. Separate yourself from the crowd with literacy and integrity. All provided you are not grumpy. And that you are literate. And not to touch the essence of the system. It's not easy. You have chosen the last slave-owning profession in the world. You always depend on some editor who heals all the complexes of his, also miserable, life on you. Of course, there are others in this business. Some are dead. Killed because they were different. Others cling obstinately to their vanity; due to selfishness, a sick desire to stand out, to be noticed, memorable, influential - the unrest threatens the peace, physical security and financial stability of their families.
In order to understand how the things you're going to write about work, it's best to at least see them clearly. In the Balkans, any wealth is, for the most part, the result of resourcefulness, mischief, corruption, Alzheimer's disease ("I don't remember where I get my money from") or state mercy. In the center of the inverted social pyramid, which is held on its head by the losers of the transition and the late middle class, money functions. The big one. To the right of money are the parties and the state. In that part, almost every group, during the mandate, did more for itself than for Serbia. To the left of money are school, church and media. The right maintains the existing order and fear. Leftists produce inertia, social consensus and the illusion of moving towards the better. Which just isn't. Corruption, under which the mafia lurks, connects - like poison ivy - all the floors of the pyramid. This scheme applies to all times, all societies and all systems. It's just a matter of the density of the poison ivy and the system's ability to defend itself by undercutting, very occasionally, those ornamental plants. Well, now you know why everyone is doing exactly the way we are. Now you know that your parents are not to blame. At worst, they are only accomplices. Or at least the witnesses. Or, I suspect, victims.
Do not snobbishly dismiss the importance of printed tabloids or teletabloids for Serbia's mental health. They collect garbage around Serbia and put it on the screen or wrap it in paper. Unlike many, I wish every rich man had his own tabloid. Namely, tabloid editors are honest people. They only attack people who are "paid", "typed" and ordered by the boss. Only then, in the all-out media war of the powerful, where each opponent is snitching on the public and the police, will we find out everything about everyone. Give us more tabloids, if you think good of Serbia. Therefore, there is truth in them. Piece by piece, put together the Lego blocks of revelation yourself.
And now the cliché: journalists are not artists, even less historians. What could a future analyst of our time find out about today's Serbia and us by studying local newspapers? What would you conclude about our culture, economy, literacy? Will they believe that we are a sect, a tribe that worked for itself, until we got it right? We are chats, scribes of the present. That is why, with rare exceptions, we live in our time and disappear with it. Irreversible, because that's how it should be. Let everyone present raise their hand who has heard - not read, heard - about Veselka Tenžera. Nobody? Good. He was the best journalist of his time, in the seventies, in the great Yugoslavia. If I ask you who has read Tirket, a dozen of you will answer. Does it make sense to ask you about Vinaver? None? I don't dare to say - is there anyone who is present and has read one of my texts? I'm sure there isn't, because we would recognize each other by our mutually inadequate appearance, behavior and design. That's why, for three decades, I was reduced to an exhibition sample of a very bad example. That's why I'm here today. Don't be like this. I have to admit, the final blow was dealt to me recently. Namely, my request to become a member of Facebook was irrevocably rejected.
Colleagues, I may have accelerated your maturation with this conversation. Maybe I scared you. But I didn't lie to you. I didn't give in. Honestly, I'd like you to refute me generationally on every claim. I know some of you will. Talent is an indomitable force of nature. Despite editors, ivy, inverted pyramid and transition. Either you will succeed, or you won't. Don't be a conspicuous generation, because you are standing on a mountain of unread books.
Thank you, thank you Neddy, for inviting me to speak at the school where I am still a student today.
(text prepared, then improvised and partially read to students
second year of FPN)
The author is a journalist
