The Girl with Technicolor eyes (The just-beer interview with Nihad Hasanović)

Remark: All observations and insights by Nihad Hasanović


Before you have finished your breakfast this morning you will have relied on half the world. Martin Luther King


There is a girl sitting opposite at the table. She's wearing a nice bracelet - the design suggests some oriental origin or pattern. It's the kind I've seen in Turkey, worn by a women selling all kinds of stuff in the Grand Bazaar. Her hair is coiffed in a style like the latest TV commercial trying to persuade women to try out Penelope Cruz’s idea of fashion.


There's music playing in the bar, Mexican music, a woman's voice full of pathos and passion. Just right for an evening like this, with the weather like I imagine it to be in the city of eternal spring I heard about from a lady bartender in Acapulco, during a voyage of exploration conducted in one of the city's thousands of VW Beetle taxis.


From what she said, the city of eternal spring lies somewhere off the road from Acapulco to New Mexico. Pretty vague directions but according to what she told me it's a place where there's always a pleasant breeze and the temperature is a constant 25°C.


I'm drinking a beer produced in Germany. A friend sitting with me comments on that country’s history: “Some Gandhi's statements were incredibly idiotic in some respects. There is no such thing as a good politician. You can judge a politician by the balance between the good things and the bad things they've been responsible for. It's outrageous that he thought and even dared to say that the Jews should all have committed suicide during World War II, in order to pre-empt the Germans slaughtering them. He was lucky that at the time the sun was setting on the power of the British. Try imagining the Germans in India at that point, instead of the British. They'd probably have wiped out the Indians. If there's a single reason why the state of Israel was created there, it's not to be found in the pages of ancient myth. The reason was the Holocaust."


But how we come to be talking about India is because the girl opposite is drinking a cup of Indian tea. I glance at my watch – it's a Citizen, a product of the Japanese people's affinity for technology. Time for one more round. So many countries in a single night, so many people, and they're all around me - in a cup of tea, coming out of the speakers, on my wrist.


We need some kind of world government, my friend is saying. That's what it all points to. The people of the New World, the Americas, are proof that identity is a ragbag of miseries. Religions, nations, myths – it's all fabrication, take it away and what we're left with is simply a human being.


Try explaining to one of those outrageously nationalistic Bosnian Serb politicians that bacteria are close relatives of ours. They're unlikely to agree that all that distinguishes us from primates is a mere sequence of DNA. That not a single piece of paleontological evidence among all the fossils so far discovered has even remotely challenged the theory of evolution.


I'm watching Milorad Dodik speaking on television, the same as always, outrageously exalting his Serb identity. He is talking in my language, physically he looks rather like me, but apparently I'm actually a closer cousin to that primate I've just mentioned, roaming around Tanzania at this moment with his very slightly different DNA sequence – at least that's what Dodik is trying to tell me. I don't pretend to understand a word of all that. I'm not even going to try.

My friend is bringing the evening to a close with an emotional flourish, announcing that: "The world has no future unless we can bring ourselves to accept reality. The reality that science has revealed to us. And the reality that the Enlightenment has told us about, too."


So let's have one more for Valentin Incko, the High Representative in Bosnia. It wouldn't be such a good idea for Office of the High Representative and the international community to leave. That's like having a child and then abandoning them to find out everything for themselves - how to talk, how to drink, how to walk. Someone has to teach them all that. And then maybe later, they'll learn about secularism, evolution and modern physics. Maybe.