A Montenegro Retrospective

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This satire will be most interesting to (and better understood by) those intimately familiar with contemporary Balkans politics. It is my 1 April greeting to certain personalities working for the area’s ‘Chiefs of Station’

A Montenegro Satire

Milo Narcissus Gusle was from a family of villagers named for a drunken forebear who had been ‘challenged’ by a senior professor of some serious university academics from the city of ‘New’ Podgorica; to perform the symphony unique to the colony of ‘New’ Montenegro’s ethnicity.

Milo’s ancestor actually had brought off his performance quite well, while on a wagon tongue hitched to a pair of nervous horses which he managed not to spook, swaying side to side until his instrument’s string broke … his fame for the event however, was the wild look of panic on this villager’s face, because this villager had never driven a team of horses.

The villager’s champion musical performance was purely survival driven which made the event all the more hilarious to the Western educated academics that had sent him onto the wagon at gunpoint. The Montenegrin senior professor’s sense of honor, his name was Obren Saša Urošević II (affectionately referred to as Junior OSU), declared himself honorary godfather to this now famous ‘Broken String Gusle’ musician and demanded the villager should be named this, for his amazing ability to mimic Montenegro’s National String Symphony; and the villager would hereafter have to be known by his new name and answer to it.

Broken String Gusle agreed to the terms required to save his life while still on the wagon-tongue, and was subsequently allowed climb down both; before the horses had bolted and nearing sobriety, because he was about to collapse from pure nervous exhaustion. Consequently, Broken String Gusle’s descendant, Milo Narcissus Gusle, was from a family of villagers that did not drink. They knew better. He went to law school instead.

Nobody in OSU’s academic world knew how to create a ‘Village Life Studies’ program because in fact to postulate a program as such in the modern classroom was oxymoron. Heck, they did not even know that. Village Life Studies, if it was Montenegro’s villagers doing the studies, would consist of daydreams passed off as oral history, such as the time a remote Montenegrin ancestor actually had driven his wagon to go somewhere or do something, the sort of work fantasies from which all Montenegro’s village intelligence had been drawn. Milo Narcissus Gusle did not know how to daydream this sort of work, because he had been ‘urbanized’ from age five and then sent to university at Brussels.

By this time, Milo had mastered the provincial English linguistic trick of stating the just so “Sorry” for introducing a thought so simple as it’d be easier for his ancestors to walk to Tirana than to Sarajevo, because according to a terrestrial globe, the route to Tirana should be all downhill.

Milo was a conscientious sort, and so when his undergraduate major in ‘Village Life Studies’ was decided on, he returned to Montenegro for fieldwork in summers to familiarize himself with his ancestors’ cultural habits. But he did not realize that the answer to bring his university into line with the political correctness of the ‘new’ times had been to establish an ethnic studies program staffed by OSU type mentalities in people who’d been educated out of their subliminal and very old pagan habits, and call it ‘Village Life Studies.’ And so, Milo, like the countless educated but now pseudo-superstitious people of village descent, thought academia was real. He should have remembered the village proverb “Everyone knows the city people are crazy.” But Milo could not know this now applied to himself. So Milo questioned his former people’s elders to get ideas for his papers he would need to write in the discipline of anthropology disguised with the ‘Village Life Studies’ euphemism. And thought he was a villager. Woo-woo.

Milo went on to law school and eventually became Director of ‘Village Life Studies’ at Podgorica University which had been duly impressed with his achievements in the field of ‘OSU Treaty Law’, having nothing to do with actual law in reality, but which combined with the idea he could mimic village dialect, seemed to make him qualified to run the academic program.

Here at university he met the philosopher Gani Bobi and they had discussed Bobi’s irritation at failing to grasp why it had been noted as early as the 1980s the Balkans’ Orthodox villagers seemed to have no problem describing many phenomena of the OSU theoretical geopolitics, which the Western academics had difficulty coping with. Milo had no idea why either, but it seemed there must be something to it and so an annual dialogue was opened, and Milo became a politicized god. To at least three or four people.

Milo, now relocated and living in a townhouse in the better part of Podgorica, had continued with his anthropological interest in studying his former people and was particularly interested in their view of government before this had been subverted. His anthropological studies got him up and running on three legs in Montenegrin ways, like the proverbial Golden Jackal that had chewed off one leg to escape a trap, and that was about it.

Milo had by this time taken over the dialogue and thought he had some things figured out: Like how the old time villager oratory had worked. Not. What he attempted to replicate in fact became a lunatic caricature of what had been his ancestral wisdom. It was not meant to be evil and in fact it was not evil. It was merely stupid. But Milo could not know that.

By this time, these dialogues, with Gani Bobi now dead, had become sponsored by the OSU organization worshiped by Milo for the fact the OSU acronym represented precisely his ancestral godfather’s initials.

You would never know to which community of Milo’s ancestry he was loyal to, whether the chauvinism of his family godfather, Obren Saša Urošević II (affectionately referred to as Junior OSU), or the mocked Montenegrin villager, because this Milo sort of Jackal could only be loyal to himself.

Milo Narcissus Gusle’s ego was of a soft burnished sort, the kind of lovely passive-aggressiveness whose nasty aspect was presented in the effeminate dark side aroma of the flower he was named for. As a real villager, you just did not want to get too close to the self-assumed ‘villager’ Narcissus if you were to enjoy the genuine natural beauty of his expression. And so it also was with the OSU sponsored dialogues he so expertly organized for the world to know the truth of why the USA’s ‘Camp Toadstool’ threatened no havoc in the Balkans.

When Milo self-gazed into the reflective pool of soft loveliness in his ego, he could detect no offensive aroma. His ethnocidal nuance as applied to Montenegrin village thought and philosophy was of a much prettier and more refined sort than that established for his intellectual forebears in the psychological literature developed by Erich Fromm: who’d postulated the Nazis much enjoyed the smell of their own farts.

Advanced beyond the primitive camps and ovens, the ethnocidal ‘thrust’ of Milo’s ego-priapismic tendencies was to bring about the immolation of the village beliefs and thinking with grandiose graphics of impressionist urban imagery surrounded by tropical fruits & vegetables extrapolated to western print: advertising the many Brussels ‘Fudds’ (PhDs) he would gather alongside the ‘village experts’ in the Western anthropological science; in a grand orgy of psychosomatic, ego-stroking masturbation in high intellectual workshops or, better said, indoctrination in Soros’ multicultural discourse.

Some of the villagers fell for it in the beginning. It was attractive, because Milo, who could mimic their dialect, was master of ceremony and that fact, taken together with the promoted agenda of village life’s relationship to the OSU philosophy of geopolitics, convinced villagers in the beginning they might benefit from learning something. Well, the villagers did learn some things, but they did not learn what had been expected, like a wider understanding of a future village life reality in relationship to geopolitical exploitation. The villagers learned only fiction had been offered by the OSU scientists and learned absolutely nothing from the PhD Montenegrins because they had no idea at all of how OSU geopolitics functionally worked.

Damn, it was sad. Not one PhD, not a single PhD from either side of the cultural divide, understood that to be a Montenegrin villager in thought and philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with exploitation. PhD. Wow. The OSU scientists were sometimes frustrated with the Podgorica University scientists who could only tell stories from village life in anthropology that were totally out of context and consequently nonsensical. That fact only made the Podgorica scientists equal to the OSU scientists totally out of context with village life, and consequently nonsensical, propaganda.

At first the villagers simply observed. After a few years the villagers contributed a little bit of real village thinking and frightened Milo because it looked as though the entire event could be shown up as a case of ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes!’ Then, the villagers had tried to explain to Milo how some things could change to open up the dialogues to real learning, like getting smart and dis-inviting OSU but those who spoke out were put up against a wall and shot. No upsetting the Brussels-based corporate gravy train of ego allowed here!

Rather the ‘face’ of the event was to be preserved at all costs, a portrait of the mysterious and knowledgeable geopolitician, Milo, presiding over a dialogue that might one day yield his great secrets held in abeyance: to his lesser village beings and the handful of toadying, sycophant academics who peered upon his OSU holiness with expressions of Heavenly reverence as though they were alter-boys seated upon the left and right hands of God. In fact, it appeared to the villagers that Milo didn’t know shit. Milo only knew how to rest on his laurels from his Village Life Studies directorship at Podgorica University, look important, and, invite the villagers to a future life of employment in the Ikea cafeteria; to which the Montenegrin villagers replied: Work! Are you serious? We could never be made to work for the Turks, how would we ever be made to work for you?

Milo is still searching for his answer but not to worry, eventually OSU will think hard and provide it for him but, of course, it will be the wrong one…

“Camp Toadstool”

© copyright 2020 by Ronald Thomas West: for profit and mass paper media redistribution prohibited

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