They say Putin gave Berlusconi vodka.
There are such rumors.
It is as if Berlusconi himself blabbed about this somewhere, but this is not certain.
In principle, it is not difficult for me to imagine such a thing.
Berlusconi really recently had a birthday, three weeks ago.
86 years old - not a beetle sneezed on the tablecloth.
Well, an old friend sends a gift to an older friend (16 years old - the difference, however!)
What to give the patriarch, who already has everything?
This is where you break your head.
But if you do not break, then everyone always gives alcohol.
Even I am often given alcohol for my birthday, although I am no patriarch.
It’s also my birthday soon, because there will definitely be bottles.
Although sometimes you think: why so many, you want my death?
If only someone brought parmesan or olive oil ...
However, it is strange to give Berlusconi parmesan.
But - vodka!
Twenty bottles!
Will he drink?
86 years old?
I am half as much, and even more than twice as much - I would die of horror: how much to drink?
Well, that's what the patriarch is for.
No matter how you look at it, it's a figure.
This is important for what follows - that figure.
So, rumors about the gift reached the European Commission, and as if the European Commission started a check.
The import of alcohol from Russia is prohibited!
A gift is not a gift, and if there was vodka, then it was a violation of the rules.
And this is the most interesting thing.
I would like to say to that European Commission: are you completely crazy there?
One friend sends another case of vodka for personal use.
Not a truck and not for sale - for a birthday.
Why spoil a person's holiday?
Why do you cling, finally, simply to an old man?
To the patriarch?
But then you pull yourself up: you want to say something, but to whom?
European Commission?
But who is it?
Some bureaucratic homunculus without a face, without a normal human name.
On the one hand, there is a patriarch, a personality, a well-known person, on the other, a bureaucratic machine, a thousand-eyed monster, assembled from hundreds of nonames.
Foucault had a body without organs, and here organs are without a body.
You can treat Berlusconi as you like, but he is from that era that still gave rise to characters - bright, albeit sometimes eccentric, but lively, interesting, bewitching.
I want to write a novel about Berlusconi.
And what novel will you write about the European Commission?
The European Commission is a sign of a new era, the era of simulacra, the triumph of the gray masses, the triumph of the Thing.
There is such a film from Carpenter, The Thing, in the Russian box office "Something".
There, people at the polar station are captured one by one by an unknown entity and broadcast its will through them.
Here the European Commission is such a Something, made up of countless people, about whom there is nothing to say, except that no one knows them.
And if sometimes suddenly some name pops up like Ursula von der Leyen, then it would be better not to pop up.
And by the way, the collective body of the Thing quickly rejects such people.
Even such a small person with a very unreliable subjectivity, like an anecdote once told in a drunken company and immediately forgotten - even such an unreliable human reality is not organic for the Thing.
There should be nothing human in it at all - neither human greatness, nor human weakness, nor human contradiction, nor human irony.
A faceless, insensitive machine, pieces of paper that have been carried from office to office for years, a Kafkaesque administrative mechanism, into which it is impossible to either poke a finger or fire a rocket.
And now this machine, with all its indifferent stupid power, falls on an 86-year-old old man for daring - as if!
according to rumors (but the rumor is already terrible)!
accept a gift from an old friend.
It is clear: the Thing does not have friends.
Friends are only for people.
Seen in this something heroic and mythological.
Good luck Silvio!
I would not vote for you in the elections (however, these elections themselves are already a farce in the era of the Thing), but in this struggle I am on your side.
On the side of people who have their own unique character, who live to the fullest, love, suffer and make mistakes.
who are able to make friends.
Do not forget old friends and send each other a box of vodka for their birthday.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.