While Gaddafi’s days are nearly over and refugees leave the African continent to survive, Vienna lives in the preparation of the event of the year – the Opera ball. Every year the same: tabloids have emergency, one knows many weeks in advance, who will be this time the mode designer dressing up the most celebrities (the last year Thang de Hoo, this year maybe the delicate Anelia Peschev ) and it is tipped, who will make his excuse.

Last year – in the middle of the crisis – all bankers have made excuse. Probably someone has after all gave them advice in the middle of shame while requesting rescue, that tanned faces – in the whirl of the ball – are not the best PR strategy.

This year, hopefully even the celebrity number one will find an excuse – Karl Heinz Grasser, by all Austrians nicknamed KHG. Once self-congratulatory the best minister of finance of all times, allegedly the first one with a null deficit (haven’t you heard that already?) of the right-wing government of the coalition Haider-Schüssel, now (after losing influence) the most faithful visitor of the prosecution. From time to time also called Karl Heinz Presumption Grasser. However, who will never be looking for an excuse, is Richard Lugner. You don’t know him? Well, then let me just tell you the story.

If there had been a competition in Austria named “The chuzpah of the year”, Lugner would have overtaken all others for many consecutive years. Lugner is – how to say it only in short? Almost 80-year old entrepreneur in building industry, who won his first money among other by building the first local mosque financed by presents of the Saudi-Arabia’s king (what did not prevent him in any way from supporting the strongly populist party FPÖ – just sidelight: surviving of this today second-strongest Austrian party has been for long years dependant of fat electoral presents).

Lugner – in Austria intimately nicknamed Mörtel (mortar) – got into awareness of the general public by the matrimonial TV reality shows “Lugners” and “Mörtel is searching happiness”. In the latter series, TV cameras followed for many months a scurril competition of wife, in which young ladies were exceeding themselves in captation to the oldster. At that time, you could not escape Luger by any means. He was every 5 minutes on TV, on all tabloid front-pages, within first 5 pages of all quality papers. I must admit, that I have, not anticipating anything bad, seen some episodes of this show, and just goggled in disbelief.

Moderator; “What does your fiancé say to your participation in the competition?”
Candidate from Voralrberg: “We will see. I would not move anywhere, even if I won’t succeed in the competition, well, my Hansi will understand this …”

Richard Lugner has an almost adult daughter with the wife from the first competition (Mausi). We have seen Lugner only some weeks in the tabloids with the winner of the second competition (Hasi), before another one (Bambi) and even another one (Katzi) came up. Lugner doesn’t loathe to talk about his intimicy and is the impersonation of the truth, that any publicity is much better than none. In this sense, he invites every year a guest in his Opera box, who brings him enough medial attention and a first place in the overall ball news service. She is mostly a slightly neglected star of showbusiness, whose fee doesn’t hurt Lugner and who you can aim the movie camera without bashfulness at. Almost every year, the Lugner’s celebrity is source of different scandals and speculations. Did he offend her? Why did she close herself from him at the Opera toilette? Why did not she provide an interview before leaving? And so on …

In the Lugner’s box, you could see celebrities like Claudia Cardinal, Pamela Anderson, Geri Halliwell, Dita von Teese and many other. However this year Mörtel overcame himself: after failing to invite Lindsey Lohan twice (unfortunately she was always in jail at that time), someone from the PR advisors came up with the genius idea. And so this year, the ball at Opera will be favoured by the presence of the target witness in the process against another narcissus. Karima el-Bahroug, alias Ruby. Berlusconi’s teenager toy. Today of course already some weeks adult, what means medially correct for the entrepreneur. As always, shot in the black. This time event the general manager of ORF TV station warned forcefully warned editor’s office for news in a circular note, that the news should not exclusively contain neck of the endowed Maroccan beuaty.

By and large, the ball season in Vienna is high, and the explosion of oil prices and the coalition fight for the cancellation of the liability for service have their turn only after that.

I think there is no need for a big discussion about how racist and xenophobic the Austrian society is. The fact that Austrians dislike foreigners is well known to the gossip of neighboring countries as well as the fact that they do a wonderful chocolate cake at the Sacher Hotel. Sure enough, just like in every other society you will also find enough educated and decent people who love to talk about foreigners as a contribution as soon as they hear your strange accent. But these people are everywhere just an endangered species not far from extinction.

Two events of this week indicate how deep the resistance to differences has crawled under the skin of the middle class.

For the first time in the modern history of Austria, a black news presenter, Claudia Unterweger, appears on the screen of the main TV station ORF. The smarter local newspaper commentators, almost in unison, sticked at the media glorifying charivari, which followed this event. Even Claudia Unteweger said, being sorry about that embarrassing tirade that “Austria ends with racism” (what a pity that countries cannot “stop smoking or drinking” too – wow, we could then have more personal relationship to them): “All the media hype around the black presenter shows how far this country has still to go. I have won the competition fair and square, thanks to the ten years of my journalistic experience and the best results in the casting.”

I must say that although a black TV presenter predicates probably nothing about the state of racism in the society, I was quite proud on the long-term work of Ray Koranteng on the Czech TV Nova.

A second, even tangier event, happened yesterday on the taxi-stand in the front of the Opera. The black soprano Angel Blue was thrown out of the car by a local taxi driver while trying to sit down: “Get out of my car, I do not drive black women”.

During the subsequent investigation, which obviously did not investigate anything, the chief of the union of taxi drivers defended his unknown fellow like this: “I doubt anyone of the boys can speak English so well, the lady has certainly made it up.” Günter Traxler of “Der Standard” commented immediately: “Our nationalists are certainly sorely hurt, that the taxi driver used the language of the proud Albion. It would have been much more patriotic to yelp in the basic Wienerisch: “Schleich di, Bimba!” (Make off, Bimbo! – Bimbo or Bimba stands in Vienna argot for a man or woman with the dark skin).

This incident has not, however, supported my national pride (it may return to normal again), considering the number of meat heads among Prague’s taxi drivers carrying tourists with the corrupt blessing of the grand coalition in Prague.