Slike života i obmana
Images of Life and Delusion

Summary/Abstract: How should one keep his senses in a madhouse? By pretending to be there just temporarily? This is how people have been living over here for more than fifteen years. Every new electoral contest in Serbia only adds to that feeling of temporariness. In a way, temporariness has become a key national trait. All that is constant in some crazy way is the double role of the media. Serbian media, newspapers in particular, are both a stronghold of democracy and its very negation. It’s more than obvious today that those gangsters of the Zemun clan need not have bothered at all to launch the “Identity” daily – financial and political interests have spontaneously permeated the paper’s criminal policy into a number of tabloids. Both manipulation from the outside and bribing of the media have always been in the background. Closing down of newspapers and starting new ones is the natural order of things: in Serbia people are as expendable as newspapers. And there is some strange, inner justice in all that. The whys for closed down newsrooms are by far more imaginative than the whys for starting up new ones. (For instance, explaining why the “Tabloid” had to be closed down, editor Misa Brkic says a printing house turned them down under the pretext of four-month outstanding bills though the true reason is to be tracked down in the fact that the newspaper has run a series of articles about millionaire Miskovic.) Miskovic can for sure prevent many things or start them going. However, Brkic’s explanation sounds rather paradoxical. The intentions of the founder of the “Opposition” daily – close to the Force of Serbia Movement – are rather evident: after January 21, 2007, the paper will grow into something called “Position.” It’s hardly imaginable, but not impossible. The Big Brother’s House is the only place unaffected by elections. Its residents’ list of the information they miss totally bypassed politics. They wanted to learn what was going on in the world of sports or the exchange rate for Euro. How strange! The residents were subjected to an interesting experiment. They were distributed false newspapers. Some news stories were fabricated, some were true. The residents had to name the stories they believed in and vice versa. Personal emotions and assessments are infallible. You’ll always find your wishful thinking in papers. Believing in things impossible you are not interested in is by far easier than believing in something that is quite possible but affects you too much...

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