"Take off your panties, Grida!"

Alfred Lela

In 'Reflections', or in one of the first issues of Fatos Lubonja's 'Përpjekja' (a magazine modeled on Branko Merxhani it 'Albanian Effort', Edi Rama, then a public intellectual, is served by an episode from his childhood.

' Take off your panties, Ina! 'was the refrain that he and his friends were breaking during the first erotic dreams in that Tirana of the gray communist years, where there was more paranoia than eros.

This article in the corpus of sexual relaxation laws may be the first public encounter with a transgressive Rama. Later we have him before exchanging kisses on the lips with a famous showgirl. Then still, the lightning of a nude has passed before our eyes. Again he and again a woman. This time an 'Ina' with panties removed, not in the imagination but in the earthquake.

Until Rama decided to 'take off his pants' of Grida, a political mountain in a season full of months of campaigning. Edi of journalism, already a bitter knight of politics, removed a pair of other panties, as he had honored on the wire of public statements that phrase condensed in tendency, but wide in paraphrases and in the Berati textile, filled with panties of Violeta Manushi of felt.

It should be said, for chronicle more than for history, that Grida evokes, with the unconsciousness of a sexual esprit, this fever that Albanian men wear when the Mediterranean pet comes out in front of them, molded with olives, colorfulness, prejudices, and an Edip complex that rumbles between the saddles.

However, not Grida has gathered us here, but Edi. Not the transgressive artist of the nineties, but the prime minister of two decades later, who instead of the pen has squeezed the yataghan of politics.

The phallic microphone he puts in the mouths of the women of politics, or the bull that bulges at the women of the village, or the devil in the belly that he inserts into the women of the cabinet, or the panties on the neck of the permanent PR, are signs of his transition to politics. More than that, are the abuses that our social back bears, like a beast of burden which can not do without the weight.

Men's society does not do that, by abusing Grida, Rama is committing for them that sexual transgression that you lack, and perhaps torment, with the woman in question. Women's society does not stink because Edi makes them jealous, just like their husbands, who in bed journalism, do not write it, but think, 'take off your panties Grida!'.

The additions of women's organizations, and those of the screen, do not carry out the usual NGO-ish interference, because Grida is part of the women's front, but not of the grant quotas. It is not their subject, oppressed, beaten, poor. She is a victim of luxury, as are they themselves. And here they are shared with him.

They do not have to throw stones, but they can kill him silently. And they will say then: silence like that of the delinquents, irises, rudinas, alcoves and other Ave-s of the Bloc and Embassies.

Because any public embarrassment of the individual should also frustrate society. If any.