With this the week has passed and got through. After an answer — altered in meaning thanks to an inaccurate headline — to a personal question posed to me in Postimees. I responded, as far as I could tell, as delicately as possible, noting (given Father's Day in Estonia has 'only' been celebrated since the early 1990s, and that as a calendar holiday initiated by the Estonian women's union (sic), arriving here from the U.S., via Finland), using the terms "traditional values space" and "incompatibility," which in my estimation are more descriptive than so-called prescriptive definitions — expressions, in other words, tied above all to ethics.

The verbal scrap that broke out mainly on social media on Wednesday evening, growing like a snowball into a public cultural and political confrontation — if not a civil war — left me gobsmacked.

I called to mind the self-defense recipe from the Soviet occupation era, meant to avoid getting nailed to a cross (is it really, "Back to the USSR?") which was: If you think it, don't speak it; if you speak it, don't write it; if you write it, don't sign it; if you sign it, well then don't be surprised...

The week ended with a statement of public pressure from leading figures of power — the prime minister, the foreign minister (?!) and the culture minister — to the ERR Supervisory Board, demanding my removal from the role of board chair, a role largely administrative in nature. Truly, I feel like I'm living in a shadow play staging "The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War" (by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, usually referred to as "The Good Soldier Švejk," originally published 1921–1923 – ed.).

I am consoling and amusing myself, albeit with a bitter taste, with the opening passage of the first chapter of this masterpiece of world literature, "The Good Soldier Švejk."

"'So they've killed Ferdinand,' said the charwoman to Mr Švejk who, having left the army many years before, when a military medical board had declared him to be chronically feeble-minded, earned a livelihood by the sale of dogs – repulsive mongrel monstrosities for whom he forged pedigrees. Apart from this occupation, he was afflicted with rheumatism, and was just rubbing his knees with embrocation."
'Which Ferdinand, Mrs Müller?' asked Švejk, continuing to massage his knees. 'I know two Ferdinands. One of them does jobs for Prusa the chemist, and one day he drank a bottle of hair oil by mistake; and then there's Ferdinand Kokoska who goes round collecting manure. They wouldn't be any great loss, either of 'em.'"*

I would like to thank both my supporters and my more rational opponents. I would like to wish everyone a productive work-week, and an adult-like attitude toward life and all its different facets. Why "adult-like"? Well because children can't yet use Facebook!

*Taken from the Penguin Modern Classics translation.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!