To those who love to hate the protests

Alfred Lela

When you see them dispensing charlatan remedies on how the opposition should fix the aches of the movement, you’re reminded of the colorful ancient healers. They’re gnawed by an old-fashioned anxiety, the kind that diagnoses both your physical weakness and your sorrow — what comes from the body and what comes from the soul.

Others resemble “Saint Eleonora,” with her healing temple that no one quite knew whether it was a shrine, a synagogue, a chapel, or an illegal clinic for unwanted pregnancies. They wander in confusion while pondering how the opposition should stage its protest, with which methodology, which elixir, just like Eleonora when they moved her from a downtown pit to the hills of the periphery.

The deeper ones among them are the Platonists, Hegelians, Bidoyans, Betonists, who want the opposition to perform something between Lepa Brena, Dua Lipa, Jimi Hendrix, and Carl Orff — an impossible genre which, though it cannot exist, they still demand the opposition invent.

The most astonishing are those who stand with Rama but cannot resist advising Berisha on how Rama can be overthrown. Their recipe is simple: read what they say, do the opposite, and you’ll be fine.

They call themselves skeptics — supposedly distrustful of an opposition that fails to satisfy their profound democratic desire for a blitzkrieg-style rotation of power: swift, certain, like an American intervention in Venezuela.

They are not skeptics; they are anti-opposition. They like the status quo because its udders flow with abundance, turning the sea into yogurt and the city into concrete, where even those who build nothing still manage to profit from something.

Among these “skeptics,” the most charming are the descendants of secret police officers, party bureaucrats, guards, warehouse keepers, and cooks of the old Bloc, who shout that Berisha is a communist and the Democratic Party nothing more than the right ventricle of the great heart of the Party of Labour. So, we are all the same. Why quarrel? Let’s behave like players.

Last in this motley line come the “masters of communicators”: the reason they want to sabotage the opposition’s “concert” is like that of the picturesque feudal lord in a socialist-realist film — at rallies, always comes a speech from someone they dislike. If it were them? Oh good Lord — even Mark Antony’s speech over Caesar’s grave would sprint from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the Lana River just to gape in admiration!

With a cadence worthy of Edward Bernays, who invented this miserable craft, the spin-doctors log into ChatGPT and, with artificial intelligence, compose a political verse where they are the protagonists and everyone else mere spectators.

The curtain rises. The lights go on.

How do those who dislike opposition want the opposition to protest?

The don’t want any. Protests, in general, annoy them. They are not as carefree as they pretend. Protests remind them how they have been bought or castrated. And when someone rises — whatever it may be — their guilt tells them that the rebels are not only against Rama, but also against those who live off the she-wolf’s milk of power.