Here’s an excerpt from Bill Hicks’ routine from nineties i am particularly fond of:
Watch CNN Headline News for 1 hour, it’s the most depressing thing you’ll ever do. ‘WAR, FAMINE, DEATH, AIDS, HOMELESS, RECESSION, DEPRESSION. WAR, FAMINE, DEATH, AIDS, HOMELESS …’ Then, you look out your window … [makes cricket noises] Where’s all this shit happening? Ted Turner’s making this shit up! Jane Fonda won’t sleep with him, he runs to a typewriter: ’”By 1992, we will all die of AIDS.” Read that on the air. I don’t get laid, no one gets laid!’ I’m writing Jane Fonda: ‘Will you screw this guy so we can get some good news, please?’ I want to see a well-laid Ted Turner newscast: ‘Hey, it’s all going to work out. Here’s sports.’
This reminds a bit on Serbia’s situation in the nineties, only completely opposite. While we had a terrible situation in the country, you couldn’t hear anything about it on TV. Why? Well, as well as the CNN has the propaganda power today, that’s how the state television (RTS) had it back in the nineties. Main news cast started at 19.30 and all was well, all the time, and a lot of people actually believed everything that was served to them over the screen. The regime quickly realized this and used it to it’s advantage throughout the decade. If it’s on TV it has to be true, right?
This gave a lot of space for manipulation for get-rich-quick-scheme con-artists all of kinds. All of a sudden you had a dozen of so called TV fortune tellers making big bucks by giving false hope to the poorest layers of society. If you aren’t familiar with this type of occupation, it’s person claiming to have divine, or supernatural powers and ability to see future, predict what’ gonna happen to you, your family, your friends and your pets in the near or distant future simply by hearing your voice over the phone during live broadcast. The service was free of charge for those who managed to speak with them on air. But the TV shows were there just for advertising – people could arrange a meeting with fortune tellers over the phone and then come to their ‘office’ where they would be so to say, robbed of all their money just to hear some good news. It’s a fact that this dose of good news was addictive so a lot of people came back for more, only to pay more money for nothing (and chicks for free). It was a broad daylight robbery.
Another kind of robbery was invented by the state itself. Under the cover of the state people were asked to borrow money to Serbia so that it would try and use that money and invest it in recovery of economy and rebuilding and renovation of infrastructure which began to fall apart since the sanctions came in ’91. This scheme was titled ‘Zajam za Srbiju’, roughly translated as “Loan for Serbia”. Loan, because people were told that they would get their money back when Serbia stands back on her feet again. But the small print was actually too small to read. It probably said that no one would get their money back if Serbia fails in getting back on her feet. It also probably said that all this money would than go into pockets of key government people, and their friends and families. And so it did.
Yet another money sucking machinery was invented also in that period, the beginning of the nineties. Several state-supported banks started attracting money from citizens, promising annual returns of impossibly large percents. This type of scheme is called financial or bank pyramid – probably because, when the top of the pyramid eventually fails (because with that rate of annual return, it’s unsustainable, of course) everyone in the pyramid underneath the top loses the money. Eventually this is what happened and an unknown number (but definitely in dozens of thousands) people lost a lot of money, from couple of hundred to several tens of thousands of deutche marks per person, depending of how much trust a person had in state. And you remember that it was all cool on the TV?
So this kind of economic despair that only got worse with every year gave birth to many new interesting and money making occupations. Besides street gas sellers, street cigarette sellers there were also people selling money on the street. These movable exchange offices, called “Dileri” were usually suspicious looking caracters, wearing large amounts of money with them, usually on display so as to advertise themselves, making funny buzz noises to attract more customers and to differ themselves from other suspicious looking characters. Walking down some streets all you could hear was buzzing and see money switch hands, dinars for deutch marks, deutch marks for dinars, depending on peoples needs. Why buzzing, you may ask yourself. Well, Dileri used Serbian word “devize” meaning ‘foreign currency’ to let people know they are in business. “Devize, devize” soon turned into “d’vizzze, d’vizzze”, than to “vizzze, vizzze”, only to become simple “vzzz” in the end. The main reason for the very existence of these entrepreneurs were the banks again, with little or no foreign cash at all, usually changing at much worse rates than you could find on the streets. The hyperinflation only made the state even worse, and dealers made the inflation even stronger so this vicious spiral continued throughout the ’93, probably the worst year of them all. State and power moguls printed large amounts of dinars, managing to get enormously rich in the process of making the state poorer. Knowing when the inflation is going to stop and when its going to soar, when to buy and when to sell, meant something like knowing all the scores of the games you bet on in advance – so you do the math.
This vortex of hyper decline made the disaster in peoples way of thinking, reasoning, and it has created the worst kind of idols in kids eyes – for boys it was young criminals, for girls Turbo Folk singers, promoting some ideals like easy money, carefree life and matter over mind. I’m not saying that the situation is much different today, nor that this is something typical of Serbia only. But i deal with my country in this blog, so i won’t really pay attention to the situation abroad in this post or do some comparisons. Maybe it was exactly like this or still is in your own country too, but i hope you realise it’s your problem, dear reader (and i would like to read about your experiences, of course).
I meant to save the best for last and that is a story about Turbo Folk culture that is still present today. So stay tuned!
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Hey guys when I was in Yugo in 91 and 95 these money echangers were arrested left and right and had a mandatory 3 year jail sentences. I don’t know if it was the same in Serbia proper. If you could tell me then I’d appreciate it.
In Kosovo/a the police were great at giving tickets for no apparent reason. You would either pay them cash and never got a receipt or you’d pay a lunch or dinner for them. It was a common scam amongst the police officers. I went to the police station and asked for the list of fines that were applicable for each infringement and the police were scantless. They would charge whatever they felt like. And a lot of them didn’t even know what the actual fines were. Was this common in Serbia proper????
Peace to all!
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