We were better off back when Ceauşescu was in power

We were better off back when Ceauşescu was in power

Mădălina Manole committed suicide, the Ceauşescus were exhumed, Dan Diaconescu wants to be president... After a few weeks spent in the USA years back, I exchanged my plane ticket because I wanted to leave early. One of the reasons was that the milk tasted like bananas, the bananas - like fish, the fish - like bread, and the bread smelled like the hotel room, and they all tasted like flavored condoms. That's kind of like the taste I'm left with when I hear the breaking news, red alerts and all that filling the screen lately. The remains of the Ceauşescus, Mădălina Manole's poisoned body, Dan Diaconescu shoving his fat finger through the screen, directing it at the populace; they're all made of the same thick, pasty, colorful, slimy stuff, wrapped in really bright colored foil, and if you push too hard on it you feel the urge to wash your hands right then and there. My journalist colleagues mix this dough for days on end, with endless inept questions and "historical" ineptitudes ("Ceauşescu, President of Romania since 1965!"... how about 1974, please?), trying their hardest to milk some ratings from the silly group of the same pseudo-polymaths always getting called to show their mugs on the telly. And they actually try to bake this paste into real bread. It's a tall order.

I've refused the invitations to comment these "super-news" on TV, dear readers, because I don't think any of these should mean that much to Romanians today. Mădălina Manole was a star that just wasn't that much of a star anymore, and she was so self-involved she couldn't tolerate her lack of success and the closeness of old age anymore; through suicide, she just blatantly cheated her child, whom no one asked if he'd like to be born and then grown up motherless. And she did it in a country where many a mothers hardly have enough to be able to feed their children. Goodbye and good riddance or, I don't know, maybe say a few words about her just before the weather report.

The television weasel that is Dan Diaconescu, after having had Corneliu-Vadim Tudor and Gigi Becali on as guests for hundreds and hundreds of hours, said to himself he'd learned enough of how to be a megalomaniac and say one stupid thing after the other to take their jobs away from them. I can only despise them, and feel sympathy for those who actually love Vadim and Becali, but what can I say about those ready to prostrate themselves at the caricature of what would happen if we spliced the two together?

And last but not least, with Ceauşescu's heirs, seeing as they can't reclaim Parliament Palace and all the houses the "Comrade" had on Primăverii Blvd. and in all the large cities of the country, and they can't bring back the times when they were like emperors, they'll take whatever the hell they can get their hands on: in this case, the rotten carcasses of the Hated Dictator and his Sinister Consort. And if the DNA analysis proves that those are dog bones, so what? Does that mean the Ceauşescus are alive in North Korea? That after they were shot after a surrogate trial, which they really really deserved nonetheless, instead of being buried they were cremated like Elena Ceauşescu wanted to do with the thousands of dead she wanted to see in Timişoara? OK, so what? That they didn't get a proper Christian burial? WHO didn't get a proper Christian burial!?! The couple that at one point ordered the media to remove any and all words related to the church, including the word cross (the Braşov train line crosses the Suceava train line), who banished and tore down Bucharest's churches, who has a red star on his cross in Ghencea Cemetery, where he's supposedly going to be reburied in a Christian manner? Let's just wait and see for how many of Romania's elders there will still be enough money left for actual funeral rights.

From what my colleagues are telling me I gather that the Ceauşescu exhumation is getting some pretty good ratings, not as good as Mădălina Manole's self-imposed eviction from life, but pretty good. There are quite enough citizens that claim it was better back in Ceauşescu's time, as far as living standards are concerned. I humbly opine that it was better solely as regards the average IQ level.

Intră în comunitatea Facebook Gândul, locul unde ziarul vorbeşte cu tine