COMMENTARY: Czech bubbles in hysteria. Babiš is elected by cripples from the villages and Prague wants war!
Hysteria is a disease, Sigmund Freud tried to prove. He couldn’t—just like he couldn’t heal her. And so it spreads freely, untreated by the world. Currently in the Czech Republic. What is happening around the Czech presidential elections is absolutely horrible. From all sides.
For example, one proof of family love, Mrs. Alena Martínková, blonde with glasses: “My son voted for a general. If that warmonger sends him to the slaughterhouse, I won’t feel sorry for him. One less idiot.” I don’t know if Mrs. Martínková, another quote is circulating on Facebook, is real, but you can find such comments in the dark corners of social networks in an endless amount.
Two of my friends, both smart guys, were arguing on Facebook again, one called Pavel an intelligence officer, the other immediately asked me for his friend’s address, saying that he would like to blow his mouth, because Babiš is far more evil. And of course they cursed each other.
To another friend, a neighbor from the cottage, such a nice lady who loves to work in the flower bed, wrote to a photo of his children who were saluting in support of the general on social networks: “Well, if you want war, call him. And most likely you don’t know what it is he is for a man!’
And Jan Hřebejk, the director’s moral authority and anti-communist voting for a communist, tweeted: “Whoever still serves him (Babiš) deserves nothing but deep contempt. Anyone who votes for him is either a complete fool or a moral cripple.”
In short: Babi’s voters are morons, Paul’s elitist townspeople, which drags us into war. Flight. Czechia, January 2023, on the brink of civil war. At least verbally.
How hysteria is treated
I would like to remind you that this is ONLY an election, in which we choose one of two amazing scumbags, moreover, an essentially insignificant official, whose main weapons are historical symbolism rooted in people’s heads. And also the cursed direct election, which gives the president a mandate greater than he should have according to the constitution.
But back to the Czech civil war. Hysteria. This is what has now engulfed the Czech landscape. Sigmund Freud tried to describe hysteria as a disease, he tried to eradicate hysteria from his famous patient Berta Pappenheim through psychoanalysis.
Berta was vomiting, unable to breathe, screaming, even suffering from a false pregnancy. Perhaps you have experienced similar symptoms with your partner (and partners) at home – for example, during the elections, huh…?
But Freud ultimately did not help Berta Pappenheim at all, and later Berta became one of the most famous feminists of the 19th century. Chance? As the well-known Czech psychiatrist Radkin Honzák wrote: “After an unsuccessful treatment, Pappenheim successfully sublimated herself into a leading feminist, even on a Bundespost stamp.”
In the twelfth century, the number of cases of hysteria treated decreased as the “diagnosis” essentially disappeared. She became just a word. It gradually metamorphosed, maybe it was normalized, it hid inside people, inside society.
Yes. It is all around us, in us, as an absolute norm. Still seasoned with fear - fear of Pavel, fear of Babiš. Both sides of the divided republic claim that by electing their enemy, we are basically done.
By the way, have we seen ourselves “finish” almost every election? And what happens when the hysteria dies down? No, nothing at all actually. We will never finish. Nothing will happen. It’s just politics, marketing. Game.
But in today’s big-mouthed, tragicomically shorthand era, there is no time for perspective.
Prague bubble vs. village
I’m from Prague. Therefore, my friends are mainly people from the capital. “If Prague were a state, we already have Pavel here,” I heard after the first round, when Prague gave the general over 51 percent of the vote. On the contrary, classically smaller cities, villages, poorer regions – all want Babiš. And peace!
As Pena Batíková, a belligerent senior citizen in sunglasses, wrote on Twitter: “People of Prague, you want war.” You are to have her!’
But where did it happen? Why take it? The historical division of the nation into “Pražaks and the others” is pushed to an absurd level.
Yes, it is absolutely beyond dispute that we in Prague live in a bubble. Better to say: in a pleasant vacuum that we fuck our own existence and don’t look around. In the city, I sit with friends who shake their heads and repeat: “Hey, that’s really weird. I don’t know anyone who would vote for Babiš (or earlier Zeman), and yet he has 35 percent! So where are those people?’
If they went, for example, to the north of Moravia, they would receive fifteen Thursdays of slivovice and then a quick answer. That is, if they didn’t get a quick shot.
Prague is far away for them there. Elusive. Path. Elitist. And most importantly: It solves unrealistic problems that do not concern ordinary people. Any Green Deal? Multiple genders? Cycling over cars? What???
In the village, everyone goes to work by car, because it’s simply not possible otherwise, and if the village went in any way with something “modern-sexual”, it’s homosexuality, but everyone in the village knows “about them” anyway. And plenty of people are bullshit.
It is good to leave the city bubble at least occasionally and find out complex information that is otherwise easily swallowed by the vacuum. Turn off the social network and get on the train. The Czechia is large, colorful and diverse.
And it may happen that you hear opinions that you have never heard in the city…
What does the ONE who created Babiš say
In 2018, during Miloš Zeman’s second election, when the polarizing situation was basically one to one to today’s, we interviewed the advertising magician Petr Topinka for TÝDEN magazine – he became famous, among many other projects, mainly because at the beginning “created” Andrej Babiš. It was Topinka who was behind the entire ANO project in terms of marketing. He invented it. He was the mastermind of the day, he addressed the Czech crowd in a brilliant way.
When he thought about the marketing principles that he used, for example, in the case of Babiš’s ride, he mentioned a key phrase - OPINION STEREOTYPE: “We, people from advertising, must always step out of our opinion stereotypes, each of us – otherwise we will not understand anything. To travel, maybe just to visit grandma, play football, meet people, it’s not even possible otherwise. And leave Prague! Mainly leave Prague! Prague is one big bubble,” he claimed at the time. And it still applies today, even more so.
“When you want to find out a general view of the matter, opinions in the project, the first thing you should distance yourself from is Prague!”
Moreover, according to him, the essence of Prague voter liberalism is paradoxically rooted in tradition and conservatism. As few changes as possible!
So: “The people of Prague are the most boring and conservative. That’s what research says. Ostrava is a mix of new and explosive things, somewhere in between is Brno – terribly technological and new, they are actually rebuilding the whole city. “Prague already has everything, and none of the people who now live in Prague deserved it,” claimed Topinka in 2018.
“We have Prague from the Germans, the Italians, Charles IV. and daddy Masaryk. We have all the beauty, attractiveness and functionality here, for free, and people want to keep it. Just the term flood, immigrant, means that the new arrivals are somehow diluting the original,” added Topinka.
It’s nice to hate Czech
In terms of stereotypes, Prague and the rest of the Czech Republic have nothing to blame. Everyone has their own “one correct” and comfortable template for autism. The stereotype of a Pražák is to close yourself in a bubble in front of forks, the stereotype of an Anti-Pražák is to never even look into a Pražák’s bubble, because it stinks terribly, and besides, he would catch the singing accent.
And lastly, Petr Topinka: “An interesting technique is to find a stereotype and think about how to turn it around.” You find out, for example, that there are already half a million drifters in Prague, and you declare that Prague does not belong to the people of Prague, but to the drifters.” This topic is probably quite often a part of Prague influencers (of which, I’m guessing, half of the drifters will be).
Both bubbles are aggressive, each in their own way - one in a kind of “modern humor” full of social-network cool words like “horses”, the other in a rambunctious “e-mail” way full of strong words and scares, which of course seems primitive to the first bubble.
Of course, both politicians feed their bubbles with the necessary food they talk about.
And certainly, the aggressiveness of both bubbles is accelerated by those accursed social networks, which completely distort people, their behavior, their habits - and let loose unrest, whether it is a mother who would not mind the death of her son in “General Pavel’s war”, or Jan Hřebejk , who in a pharisaical and elitist manner despises a third of the nation, which, among other things, watches his films and has earned him a lot of money with it (then we don’t even care that General Hřebejka doesn’t mind his communist past).
No, we’re just going to hate each other in Czech for two weeks. Oh no. It’s just an election, folks. Peace.
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