| Europe is boring |
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May 7th, 2008 // by Nataša Velikonja
 flickr photo by cemre However, Europe was not boring in the past, it is boring today. European squares and villages are boring. Actually, they have always been boring, at least from the moment they got rid of Rabelais and Hoffman, but they are even more boring now as one by one they are transformed into small duplicates of Luxemburg’s Schengen, of this ravished epicenter of European provinciality.
Since European cities are boring too, there is no way out of these quasi-historical entities, exhibitions of renovated baroque facades and renaissance little angels, cities full of stands with china pigs and amulets of European hope and happiness with national state emblems imprinted on it. European cities are the ultimate traveler’s adventure with tourists in mountain shoes and rucksacks strolling around without taking even one break, chewing hard roasted almonds and always looking up at the European walls.
Europe has renounced its tradition, its arcades, coffeehouses; it has renounced Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. It has renounced its streets and turned them into corporative promenades with corporative shop-windows and corporative small restaurants. Here in these fully lighted milky restaurants equipped with uncomfortable seats made of metal and linen on which one can only sit in an upright position; seated as if you were in a short briefing session and your role was only to receive orders.
European space, with its mental and bodily hygiene is boring; it deprives people of pleasure, the pleasure of rest, conversation and ease. Europe has just stepped out of the 20th century, and all that it has managed to bring with it are the techniques of little gods: checking, rejection, exclusion, censorship, repression, control, violence.
European art is being bought by capital desiring to remain undisturbed; this is why 21st century Europe does not need Dadaism, the theory of relativity, disharmony and atonality. To find interesting art in 21st century Europe, one must wade through all these thick layers of boring corporative high print run pulp fiction or else create it themselves – but then you should never sell it off to capital, since then you will become stuck in monotony forever, you will start to visit cultural institutions, buy a white leather sofa, and in your detoxicated cage that you name home you will stare at a plasma screen that shows corporative singers who imitate Billie Holiday’s voice; the circle (yours and ours) would in such a way be completed. In this changing process, you will become the kind of person who could drown Billie Holiday in a teaspoon of water. And same goes for Edith Piaf, regardless of whether we are dwelling in the European intercultural dialogue.
Not only European art is boring, but also European science, which is becoming more and more objective and ethnographic. European science has jumped resolutely from the 21st century directly into the 19th century (bypassing Freud’s 20th century); it produces a collection of scientific papers on the erased and migrants, with not a single author being from one or the other; on the contrary all the authors are well positioned, with diplomas in their pockets. European science produces miscellany about the sexual habits of homosexuals, edited by straights as well as homosexuals from time to time, but only those that know what the accepted sexual habits are, in order to prevent eventual deviations. All European science is terribly boring, since it does not acknowledge anything that goes beyond pondered expectations, i. e. beyond the university.
The only critical view European science is capable of holding are European resolutions drawn up by the Euro bureaus based in Brussels, and the only alternative it can offer are again European resolutions.
Hey, boys and girls do you have any idea at all?
Boring is Blair and his Third Way that “fucked up” millions of people with fake promises of a better life. Blair first destroyed the British schooling, health and job systems, later sending the citizens of Britain to war, who were expected to in the end, after his millennium fraud, be thankful to one of the most boring of all institutions of European history, the Catholic Church.
“Nothing has changed, has it?” stated Lucia Atherton, a surviving Jew, in the film of Liliana Cavani The Night Porter (that takes place around the mid 1950s, a decade after the era of WW II Hitler and his comrades) and this sentence is far more truthful than all the European Truths.
Boring are the people that have given up revolutionary communism in exchange for revolutionary capitalism. These are perpetually impoverished, perpetually humiliated people who nevertheless repeatedly vote for the “Nazis” to whom they firmly attribute growing percentages of votes in elections. Boring is the European consensual politics that leads toward this pro-Nazi trend with freedom on the one side and violence on the other, and in between them, negotiations; this is the formula of a pan European society of minimal freedom and maximum violence. But Europeans remain Europeans.
 A map of Europe, from the back of the 100 euro bill, flickr photo by Samuel Rönnqvist Europe holds a centered perspective, it unites, balances, accepts everything within the circle under the twelve golden stars of the Queen Virgin. The only news we have heard in the last few years (and we all know this) are that there are fundamentally no boundaries inside Europe, no outskirts, no margins and no voids; all these people are EU citizens who are well aware of their rights and responsibilities and can now claim whatever they like.
They want a 15-year loan, or better a 25-year loan. They refuse the stench of tobacco, because all of a sudden they can not breathe anymore. They want to vote, for Sarkozy for example. They reject the lumpenproletariat. Many of the good old lumpenproletariat disappeared out of fear; homosexuals have turned into heterosexuals, but heterosexuals have not turned into homosexuals, which is boring.
Boring are the lesbians, who in this anti smoking pan European psychosis can only think about how to get (a) child(ren). The European sexual policy has finally managed to enter the “uterus” of the lesbians, something that could not be managed in the past by either the European Pink or by the European Black. The Social life of gays and lesbians in Europe has ceased to exist. The gay quarters with gay restaurants, where gay “managers” stuff themselves with those disinfected fluorescent lettuce leaves and who in such a way, with their anti-lumpenproleterian state bodies, repay Sarkozy and the like for their anal sex, are boring.
Eventually, everything concerning homosexuality today is ultimately boring. In the first half of 2008, Slovenia will is the Presidency of this perfect Europe, which nevertheless seems to be a tiny conceptual mistake as there are no gay quarters in Slovenia where one might get bored. On the contrary, there is not even one lesbian bar in Slovenia, and I keep on saying it, but in vain. Today the “Slovenians” that are Europeans are waiting in front of the only place in Ljubljana – the club K4 in the centre of Ljubljana, where it is still possible for gays and lesbians (but only once a week) to kiss each other and dance – waiting to beat them, and this is regarded as being European.
By the way, Christianity should absolutely and necessarily enter the European Constitution – as is the case of the free movement of capital. It is the moral overreaching heritage on which the act of Europe is based and it presents the Europe lesson of truth; otherwise we will find ourselves again in the diabolic 20th century, full of oppressions and repressions. This could be in fact the very special Slovenian contribution to European integrity. It has always been so.
But I live now, and I resist this machinery as best I can. There is no collective underground resistance that would last longer than a night. The bearers of the new, sooner or later want to slip into the old good social realm of prestige. I am old enough to follow their stories. First they resist for a while, later just vanishing only to reappear in front of the cameras and take the speaker’s platform, seated on those uncomfortable seats made of metal and linen while participating in a fast briefing session. They are changing more and more into Methuselah’s amphibians, and without noticing, in the end they no longer know who they are speaking to. I think I will keep on looking for illegal holes in the outskirts of the city where it is possible to smoke cigarettes, flirt and fuck with lesbians, smoke and drink at billiard tables, listen to rock ‘n’ roll and discuss daily matters with friends as long as it takes. Something (good) always comes out of it.
Nataša Velikonja is a sociologist, poetess and lesbian activist. She lives and works in Ljubljana. Translated from Slovenian by Tanja Passoni. Text is originally published in reartikulacija no.3, march 2008 under Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Creative Commons License.            |
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