There are a couple of recurring issues in Slovenian public life along with several figures that emerge periodically to give them a new and fresh spin. Usually this happens just before general elections and it seems that this time we shall see no exception.

The especially prominent and always dazzling role has been played by the Hribar couple: The Moral Authority Wife and the Philosopher Husband. In the last fifteen or so years this honorable couple has committed that many personal political upheavals that it is just impossible to recall and even less name them all. 

The Moral Authority was first the ideological forerunner of the Slovenian spring but has turned against them and cried: Wolf, Wolf, or rather: Halt the Political Right. It was halted indeed for 12 years. Then the Philosopher stepped in and delivered his damning verdict blaming the left of the Vulgo or, even more obscenely, of Vulvo liberalism. The left lost for the first time in the independent Slovenia and the political Spring very much cleaned of the old guys took the floor. 

Yet, now the time has come for another salto mortale. The Philosopher has just announced a new political judgment. In the leading Slovenian newspaper - in its widely read and influential Saturday Issue - he literally debunked, also on a personal note, the Prime Minister and the government as such. His diagnosis of the government's work is through and through fatal - actually so deplorable that the Philosopher spent long sentences excusing himself for the support he had initially awarded the government with. But he has been, as all the voters indeed, betrayed. For the best, if truly inconceivable, comes at the end: the alleged final aim of the present government is to reinstate Slovenia as a Catholic State. The circle is now complete.  

And here we are back in the future. Again the time has come to scare the moderate voters, the political middle, by the Evil of Catholicism and its proponent the cross-waving Church. Were this not Slovenia, I could not believe that it is almost 2008. I truly do not and can not understand how philosophers and moral authorities just do not see that their virtuous enterprise constantly trumps the feelings of those who belong to Catholic faith and who have all and equal rights to be full citizens of the Slovenian polity.

Moreover, I would imagine to myself, at least that much I have learned so far, that morality and philosophy are about identifying principles to which one SHOULD stick. It can not be that any elections and even shorter term benefits of certain political caste, be it left or right, merits abandoning causes about which we should feel and care deeply.  Or perhaps morality and philosophy ceased to be what they used to be and should be.

There is something terribly wrong... in Slovenia, I am afraid. In the public spirit and in the collective conscious and subconscious. It has never been cleared of poison that has been accumulating in its veins from 1848 on and culminated in a complete collapse of its immunity system in the 1945. Therefore the positions are skewed and volatile, prone to shift from day to day.

However, there are still some, I believe, whose eyes remain open and capable of looking and, indeed, seeing... Those remain genuine moral, if perhaps not, philosophical authorities.