The Unbearable Importance of the Banal in Edi Rama's Political Work

Alfred Lela

The Unbearable Importance of the Banal in Edi Rama’s Political Work
Many in Albania have praised the brilliance of Edi Rama’s idea—the presentation of a virtual minister as part of the cabinet—through the eyes of the foreign media. In fact, it should be the opposite: the significant space it has received in the world’s media is the very indicator of the idea’s banality.

First, because foreign media view Albania tangentially, their interpretations lack essence, which has as much to do with the (ir)relevance of our country as with the limited resources and interest of foreign outlets.

Second, foreign media have no permanent journalists in Albania and rely on “ready-made” reports from news agencies like Reuters or AP, whose correspondents are Albanians, meaning they cannot avoid a conflict of interest. It takes little effort to see the pro-government slant of these agencies, especially that of AP (Associated Press).

Third, international media, in their majority, belong to and support leftist-liberal agendas and narratives, which include, among other things, artificial intelligence—another variant of the “new man” that challenges the conventional homo sapiens, i.e., the image of God according to the great monotheistic religions.

Fourth, to interpret the world’s first AI minister—coming from a small, still poor, and utterly corrupt country like Albania—not as banality but as a “breakthrough,” as quite a few local and global outlets did, finds its historical parallel in the global Marxist-Leninist groups that once believed and propagated the cretinous and banal idea of Enver Hoxha, according to which Albania rose deliriously as the only true guardian of communism’s pure ideals.

When many people believe or like something, it is not necessarily right. In many cases, it is merely banality dressed as discovery (see Big Brother, for example).

This flood of banality—which, it must be said, is Edi Rama’s modus operandi and vivendi—was also present in the “spectacular” dismissal of a deputy minister by her newly appointed superior. The reason: the senior official was smoking a cigarette in a public space. The dismissal in itself is not banal, but the empty philosophy behind it makes it so. Because, behind this propagandistic overture lies Rama’s long-standing paradigm, wrapped in the false cellophane of the slogan “we are building the state.”

Sounding pompous and necessary, the slogan turns hollow at the very moment when propaganda about the state [being built?!?] is out of balance with the fundamental acts that make up the state. Smoking, for example, is cosmetic in the classification of state-building acts, whereas efficiency, corruption, and the merging of party with state are the fundamental pillars.

A minister like Koçiu, who in her first public act as head of office imitates Rama and locates state authority in the official who smokes in public, is banalizing both the state and the fight against smoking.

The media that take up the news, repeat it, and applaud it are likewise part of this banality, where a critical perspective toward the event and the phenomenon is absent. Above all, context is missing. Because the whole thing is part of the philosophy of scapegoating or exemplary punishment, but not of genuine efforts to solve problems or build the state.

If you like, extend this to the Veliaj case, which warrants a separate discussion. To condemn Erion Veliaj in an exemplary, collective, and lynching fashion does nothing for the state or the truth, as long as the system that produced and then expelled Veliaj remains there with womb and mouth open to reproduce and eject any Veliaj to come.

This is why Diella is dangerous and banal at the same time. She is created to exalt the system, to dress it up with glamour and elegance, and, at the same time, to leave it rotten, unchanged, multifunctional, and multi-applicable. To turn it into a new paradigm where good and evil are separated by a third category—the banal—that overlays both and cancels them simultaneously, along with the boundary line between them.

This is the cancel culture that Edi Rama is emitting in Albania. It is not a technological revolution; it is a third sex of political gender, a Mephistophelian creation. Unlike the lesson of Goethe’s Faust, where the monster “returns” to consume its creator, here it swallows the people it was supposedly created to empower.

Through a trick, a deception.