Towards the Summer Vacation and Mundofalusophobia

Where are those wonderful seagull times of one-on-one battles, when sex was not considered a matter of national survival? The most important seasonal summer question is where you will go to the sea, just as in autumn the most important question is where you have returned from.

Written by Stela Jelinčić

The winter’s most important seasonal question is where you will go for New Year’s, and the spring one is more like a seasonal lament: When will summer finally come? And so, Zagreb lives from seasonal to seasonal question, but it is very important that you do not answer those questions with ‘I don’t know’ because then you are socially and existentially under an exclamation mark and a question mark (!?), so I constantly wander around so that, if I really can’t say exactly where I’m going, I can at least say that I just returned from somewhere. And I just came from Terazije and I can tell you that people really behave in all sorts of ways on those Terazije. They walk, shop, lick ice creams, café it up, get bored, and wander aimlessly from window to window. I would almost say it is similar to Cvjetno in Zagreb.

Čičak’s Point
But just as I return, I am caught by the beginning of the political cucumber season which, lo and behold, has to do with Terazije. Otherwise, it seems that Croats have received yet another, fifth season – the season of political cucumbers – which comes as a pre-season for pickles that starts around June and penetrates deep into summer… There is everything here, from religious and state tricks to gay pride… Even anti-fascism and Bleiburg come somewhat close… How irrationally they crammed so much of that state-building and spirit-building heritage into that poor month of June. In general, I realize that those Terazije are actually a big metaphor, at least as big as certain Kistanje. I realize this thanks to Mr. Ivan Zvonimir Čičak, a widely respected Croatian politician, a remnant from a series of those whose snout I have been watching since I can remember, and who seem to have decided to grow old together, and who, if we are to believe the Croatian newspapers, said: ‘This summer we are expecting 100 thousand tourists from Serbia and we do not need incidents. The problem is that young people from Serbia do not understand the new reality, so they behave as if they are in the middle of Terazije.’

New Chapters
At first, I think – what a state, such are the politicians, and then out of pure mercy, I interpret what rolled off his tongue as summer oral-gymnastic ventriloquism, because why should Kistanje be afraid of some hypothetical tourists? As if you were warning Sarajevans about what awaits them when Aborigines come to their picnic. Finally, it dawns on me that actually, Čičak is not speaking as a politician but as an ordinary man. Because he is not talking about Serbs in general, but about an army of young Serbs and their batons, Serbs contaminated by some dangerous, presumably seductive, Terazije behavior with which they will try to conquer us this time, of course again through aggression, this time even more somehow from within… Can we at least not be members of some fucking ethnic herd over the summer? Where are those wonderful seagull times of one-on-one battles, when sex was not considered a matter of national survival? Why now, when we are waiting for Europe to open some new chapters for us, does Čičak open old ones? He tears the worn-out goats. As if to say, fuck the future that has no foundation in the past. And just as everything is unclean to the purists, so everything is foreign to Croats.

Croatian Phobia
And now who can understand how to enter that Europe, fuck Europe, if Europe does not enter us? Of course, we will temporarily ignore the notorious fact that we were Europe even before Europe, and the fact that there is no living modern Croat who has genetic material straight from the seventh century. So, we are a mixture, presumably European, but such a mixture that we are just right so that every new ladle, not to mention a baton, would totally spoil everything. If some men are our measure for the state, gentlemen, we have run aground on territoriality or as my neighbor would say – the wrong baton and hairs are bothersome.
Kistanje is our last line of defense from Terazije. The Serbs are heading towards Split, through Kistanje, and the Croats fall into paranoia. To the sea, so blue and so ours, batons will rush from the wrong direction to biologically-imperialistically board a hundred thousand chaste Croatian women. Moreover, they approach from behind, not to say from the back, sneaking up, and just when we have spread all four to those coming from the front, not to say from the front, from Schengen. The rich Croats imagine that these tourists will do exactly everything they dream of doing if they were tourist batons. Even worse… And even from the wrong side… So how can that not hit a person with phobia, a special Croatian seasonal phobia – the noble mundofalusophobia or fear of foreign batons from which pure Croats suffer.

Gather Yourself
So that is the situation, and all other excuses like: what do we need tourists without money, those lovers of pâté and without a buoy or tourists supposedly eager for cultural exchange, are just economic alibis that hide banal mundofalusophobia. And it is known that more destructive weapons can be drawn, like: what do we need some completely black-skinned people coming to sunbathe or how they do not feel inappropriate, God forbid, lost atheist tourists or, heaven forbid, vegetarians. So, Croats when they can avoid danger, naturally feel fear, when they are not sure if they can avoid danger, panic sets in, but when they are sure they cannot escape danger, they feel horror… Especially when it comes to milk, a substance more harmful than cultural exchange, they even feel disgust. There you have it, such is the gradation of Croatian paranoia. And all of this is actually just demagoguery, the most impotent of all ideologies – the demagoguery of impotence, so instead of our men asking themselves if there is at least a little blame in them, they fall apart speculating about who it would be least painful for our girls to pair with, if it must be… as if it must be… and also, say, in Kistanje… The Danes, for example, have long understood that they cannot have positive natality without foreigners, and I won’t even mention the Slovenian-Bosnian natality that is called Sulio. Since even the Slovenians have reconciled with the fact that they will not disappear if they realize themselves in others, come on, our men, add up if you are already unable to gather yourselves.