A Chinese copy of Shame

(May 26, 2016, Vreme No. 1325)

If I remember correctly, it was the crappy early nineties - followed by the crappy mid-nineties and the crappy late nineties - and our phone somehow broke, you know, the ancient one with the dial, all rounded, the color of white coffee, so the father is from somewhere, I guess from some flea market - and at that time it was basically any place where you could spread a blanket on the sidewalk or spread your assortment on the hood a rotten three-hundred-year-old - all happy brought home a catch in the form of a new phone: "Look at it, Panasonic, and it's almost for nothing!"

I looked suspiciously at that unpromising device with the beautiful inscription: PANASOANIC. "Dude, this is as much Panasonic as I am Eddie Vedder: we have the same facial features, just arranged drastically differently!" They put in some Chinese copy for you mangupi..." Father was shocked, although I pointed to the superfluous third "a" with my finger, he barely noticed the difference, it was just as if he was blind to it, not because he lacked literacy, but Kanda was illiterate for the signs of new times and new standards, those according to which it is normal for nothing to be what it claims to be, but only something that resembles it. And that too makeup, my dear brother, it's a very debatable matter... Most often it just looks like it, but there's actually no connection.

The fact that even then, and in later times, to this day, was only a Chinese copy of what it was claimed to be, it's not that we haven't Googled somewhere the fundamental inauthenticity of things, beings and phenomena in our world. Even the designation "Chinese copy" is not reliable and means nothing but a generic name of all unreliability, since in reality it may be produced in the bestrags of Inner Mongolia, and perhaps in Kurshumliya. Or in an illegal factory in the suburbs of Naples, why not.

However, I don't have a problem with "fake" phones, t-shirts or sneakers: I don't really care about fakes. Much more toxic is the violence perpetrated on us by those whose motive is not (necessarily and primarily) commercial in nature, and who use force and vile fraud to force Chinese copies of important and valuable things (which do not necessarily have to be items) that are valuable in our lives, a sign of the better that we were, are or can be.

Why all this introduction? Well, here I am, circling like a cat around Kragujevac and raining hot porridge because of the great discomfort that I will have to inform you that the publishing company Prosveta from Belgrade, in its famous edition Veliki romani, has just published three early works of Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović in one volume.

Wait, Pančić, why such an idiotically rude joke?! No, it's not a joke, it's the truth, alive and literal. With a few necessary caveats: first, ova Education is not ona Prosveta, once the most respected and important publisher of a large country, but its grotesque Chinese copy, which, admittedly, lives at the same address, and is run by some sad people who are, at best, the weakest Chinese copies of its famous editors. The Veliki romani edition is not the one whose editions were found in the places of honor in your libraries and with which you grew up to be literate and sensitive beings, but it is some kind of bizarre Panasoanic that, within the limits of possibility, copied the original design, but it lacks the corresponding quality content. therefore the essence, and hence it is possible that inside, among the covers, instead of Thomas Mann, Darrell, Rabelais, Ruždi, Apdajko or Andrić, Habjanović Đurović is hidden Ljiljana, that Holy Aunt of contemporary Serbian... literature, so to speak. Now, there is good news: Ljiljana H. Đ. is real, authentic, unspoiled; after all, it is impossible to make a Chinese copy of it, just as the Panasoainian who brought the calamari into the house was not further forged into some, what do I know, Panasoainiac, or something like that. Although, who knows…

It would be banal and too "straightforward" to believe that Ljiljana H. Đ. with this solemn ordination, she was rewarded for her support of the leading regime party, in the capacity of "prominent public figure". No, that would be disgusting, but it would contain some internal logic, however twisted, and this is something much worse because it is completely spontaneous and "untethered": the point is simply that we are back in Panasoanic times in full glory, in the disillusioned tyranny of the Panasoanic characters, men without qualities, but with indomitable ambitions and self-love unbounded by knowledge, taste and feeling of real human decency (whose is an indispensable part and having a reasonable amount of awareness of one's place in the world). It is therefore logical that they again have the same aspirations, strengthened by the passage of time and the corresponding progress in submission: if we have a Chinese copy of a Protestant worker as prime minister, if we are ruled by Chinese copies of graduates and PhD students, if the government destroys real television by making their Chinese copies, if it destroys a real city to build a Chinese copy of an Arabic copy of a provincial American copy of Nothing, why wouldn't it be the same in the so-called cultural superstructure? Who will forbid them??!

And what is the necessary ingredient that makes all this possible? A complete absence of shame. These people are not ashamed of anything. And whenever you think of them, remember that this is the only thing that is really important to know about them, because everything else flows from it: where others have an authentic sense of shame, they have only a scratch-built Chinese copy, which falls apart at the first it's raining