Sweet dreams #5: Mostar bullet holes

Taking a break from the Probation Officer story. 

I’m leaving Mostar this afternoon. It was a beautiful city once, before evil nutcases started killing people for evil and stupid ethnic and religious reasons. The bridge over the Neretva river was one of the most beautiful things in the city and for a hundred or so miles in any direction. So evil morons blew it up, with, I expect, a passionate sense of righteousness.

Every so often I’d be sitting in the sun of the new peaceful Mostar, having a rakia in some coffee shop. Rakia made of fermented fruit, and it will burn a couple of layers of the skin of your mouth or throat every time you have a sip. And leave claw marks all the way down the throat. So it’s wonderful. You can relax, eye off girls, and talk about not talking about politics with people who speak English.

mostarBut if you’ve in a shop and you look behind a hanging cloth, or you’re in a market and you happen to see behind a piece of three-ply wood that catches the wind, you’ll see bullet holes in the stone or the old wood. And you can only hope that whoever tried to kill someone there, just a few years ago, missed. But it takes away some of the summer cheer.

Écrasez l’Infâme. In particular, écrasez religion, all of it, including the supposedly harmless stuff that gives cover to the murderous stuff. And the ideologies that work like religion, like communism and fascism. Fuck them all. Fuck ethnic nationalism, too. 

On the other hand, they’ve rebuilt the Old Bridge. Using as much of the original stone as possible. Hope, I suppose. 

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