Dialogue: Let's invite Slobbo to cheer us all up

You've got to pity the poor old Serbs, or Croats, or Yugoslavs or whatever they are.

One minute they're having a perfectly nice time with murderous old Slobbo in the driving seat, steering the vehicle of state with manic selfishness and giving everyone plenty to grumble about, then the next minute Slobbo has caved in with uncharacteristic grace and been replaced by some terribly earnest democrat with labrador eyes and an abiding sadness and reasonableness about him.

Nothing could be worse. The dear old Balkans have had it. They're doomed to prosperity. Next thing there'll be Burger King in Split High St and shopping malls full of women in jogger pants and venture capitalists in MIT sweatshirts strutting the streets of Sarajevo proposing leveraged third-generation internet start-ups.

Five minutes later, busybodies with clipboards will scurry around doing surveys and find that the entire population is as miserable as caged orang-utans.

No more fun stuff like winkling out the cobblestones to biff at the state-directed media centres. No more midnight raids from the secret police to whisk the malcontents out of the neighbourhood and into oblivion for everyone to gossip about with unlimited relish at the communal water tap. No more shows of spontaneous brotherhood, waving of banners and chanting of happy slogans.

The immovable object has moved and been replaced with the great democratic wetness. Give it five years and everyone will be rich and they'll all be as gloomy as a Tuesday night in Gore.

When will people see that they're never happier or more alive than when up against it? Oppression is pleasure. Struggle is delicious. We've spent countless millenniums crawling up the slippery pole of evolution biting anything that got in our way, and it's far too late to change the habit.

We are entirely ill-suited to a life of ease and plenty. It makes us uneasy. It leads to decadence and sulking.

I mean, what they're gunning for in the Balkans is what we've got - the great boons of freedom, democracy, economic growth, the rule of law, peace, goodwill and all the other poop that gods and governments have been promising for ever and ever - and once in a while, and always disastrously, delivering.

And what does it bring? It brings media commentators and letters to the editor. Have you read those letters? There are a few strange ones saying how nice the scenery is and aren't sparrows chirpy chappies and what a pity they're all tumbling out of the sky clutching their little bellies, but all the rest make the Book of Lamentations read like The Boys' Bumper Book of Jokes.

New Zealand's going down the gurgler, confidence plummeting, the chickens leaving the nest in search of plumper grain and bigger cockerels, the Government heading left, taxes heading up and the economic future looking like a sexually transmitted disease.

In other words, people don't think they've got enough money. Well, they've got plenty of money, lots more than 95 per cent of people in the world, but that doesn't matter because other people have even more, and if there's one emotion we enjoy feeling, it's envy.

Take Britain for example, where the economy is swelling its chest and crowing and the people are getting richer by the day and everything's just fine, thank you very much. That's where our little chickens are heading to grow fat. That's where it's at.

Well, according to a survey reported this week, one Brit in four fears a hopeless future, one in three feels downright miserable and one in 10 thinks he or she would be better off dead. Poor little darlings. All those miserable English folk leaning on the bar in the Goat and Compasses weeping into their pints of overtaxed beer. You won't catch them doing that in Belgrade. Not yet.

The evidence is abundantly clear that if the goal of human life is happiness, it is not to be found under the conventional stones of prosperity and peace and all those other vacuous John Lennonisms, but in fighting the good fight in search of those things. Victory's disastrous but waging the war is good. Adversity is the manure in which the roots of human brotherhood and joy grow thick and strong.

What we want down here is Slobbo. Think of the fun. We could all get out on the streets and march and learn the names of our neighbours and battle against tyranny and feel a grievance without having to invent one.

And all the young people would cancel their departures because they've got good throwing arms and they'd sniff the chance of a fight. We'd have exciting things like rationing to bind us as a nation and give us scope for heroism and self-sacrifice and singing songs together over the rat stew.

Head south, Slobbo. We need you. You can make us happy.