Rama's helicopter flight and an episode with America's Big Three

When the CEOs of America’s auto giants set off for Washington, D.C., in November 2008, what would otherwise have been routine corporate travel became a national sensation. The heads of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler flew from Detroit to the federal capital on chartered jets to ask Congress for several billion dollars in anti-bankruptcy bailout packages. In any other year, this would have been little more than business as usual — the wealthy exercising the power that capitalism grants those who arrive first at the station of fortune or ability.

But 2008 was not an ordinary year. Major American banks had collapsed, Wall Street was on its knees, and millions of Americans had lost their homes in what became known as the financial bubble. Some banks were rescued by federal intervention under the principle of “too big to fail.” The same fate awaited The Big Three, as the legendary Detroit automakers were called. Chrysler, Ford, and GM were part of the national fabric, emblems of the American way of life.

Amid bankruptcy and the deepest economic crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, frugality and modesty became the watchwords. How, then, could the executives of the three major companies, in a time of belt-tightening — at the very moment the federal government, with taxpayers’ money, was saving them from collapse — travel to the White House on chartered jets, burning thousands of liters of fuel? Why did they not fly commercial?

These questions were raised in anger, as a demonstration of the powerlessness embodied in the phrase “too big to fail,” which excluded ordinary citizens.

If one scales down the comparison between America and Albania — accounting for differences in economic power, population, and so on — the same cynicism can be seen in Prime Minister Rama’s decision to take a helicopter to Korça.

If the American case described a deep economic crisis, the Albanian case reflects a deep infrastructure and governance crisis. For nearly a week, the southeastern axis of Albania — connecting Elbasan with Librazhd, Përrenjas, Pogradec, Korça, and hundreds of surrounding villages — has been blocked by successive landslides above and below the national road.

Thousands of residents are isolated in villages, while thousands more have spent long hours trapped in traffic. Regional freight transport moving along Corridor 8 has been blocked or suspended. Images from the collapsed sections are apocalyptic. While citizens blame the companies' management and the government for the repeated collapses, Edi Rama and his officials blame nature—or God. What Rama does not say is that God was there before him too, with rainfall and unpredictability (the Year I begins with Christ, not with him). A “rebellion of God” in Rama’s fourth mandate is difficult to believe, but the Prime Minister is known for pirouettes and has never lived close to facts — nor to the sacred.

Beyond this, his helicopter flight over a region where ordinary citizens are stranded was Edi Rama’s “fuck you” moment to his people. In a post following the uproar caused by the opposition and social media, Rama did not address the substance, did not apologize, but once again exercised himself in the dead parallel of disdain and arrogance — judging his opponents and critics while they judged his standards.

Naturally, this was not the reaction of the American executives back in 2008. There was contrition; the episode was attributed to haste and irresponsibility; there was a step back.

Not for Edi Rama. He flew over the sunken roads of his own governance, somewhere between Corridor 8 — which has collapsed into the Shkumbin — and the Via Egnatia built by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago.

What a brilliant paradox of history. Along the road once traveled by legions, caravans of goods, and punitive expeditions of the Roman Empire, today struggle the subjects (nearly EU-bound!) of Edi Rama.

Overhead, to avoid the mud — especially the mud of his own failures — surely with an imperial sensation in his gut, Edi Rama helicopters above. He leans out to look down into the abysses of the provinces, where those who vote for him and those who cannot stand him live, then returns to his phone to compose an anathema against those who complain.

He no longer governs. He merely manages the bendings of his instinct for power. In Washington, he stands behind the Emperor of the New Rome, Trump, with the humility of a slave from the Provinces of Illyricum; in Illyricum, he flies without touching the ground, above the heads of subjects he has left in the mud.

Most likely, he whispers to himself: Vae victis!