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The revolution has never existed, in truth. It's merely a story that comes from another world, more unreal than The Twilight Zone. A world full of young trimbulinzi [“eccentrics", a cult term coined by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu], who knew how to send love poems and hold hands. A world of kindness, with people who lived from day to day, looking forward to a handwritten greeting card in their mailbox, the moment that put an end to the waiting.
The Revolution never was, as life itself never existed before the iPhone, or newspapers before blogs, or oracles before Facebook... Today we have a "Tarzan" [a deliberately reckless driver]; a Sile Camataru and a Bercea Mondial [two notorious criminals]; we have Vanessa the clairvoyant [assiduously courted by the Romanian people]; and we have Cassandras to predict earthquakes and the Apocalypse. We also have parliamentarians who drool as they nod off, zombies who have neither feelings nor ill-feelings… So they are playing games in their own world? Fine, we'll take our toys and go play elsewhere.
The Revolution never was. It was merely a succession of theatrical deaths, played out sequence by sequence, with freeze-frames lingering on the pain of the parents. The Revolution is an accident that became an anniversary, dissected by the media as a suicide attempt by a people who had no access to Furadan [a powerful insecticide].
M&Ms, H&M and WTF and OMG
There was no solidarity in suffering, either. There was no Santa Claus, no "Beloved Comrade" [Elena Ceausescu, wife of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu]. No more “Eugenia”, [a biscuit of the Communist era] or rationed food, no jam on bread or "Radio Free Europe”, and no more pioneers’ scarves either.
What did exist, I know for sure, was the immense craving for Vietnamese pork and Australian veal, avocado soufflé and cherry tomatoes, M&Ms, H&M and WTF and OMG. Cheap illusions and breaths of life drawn in deep – pulling on a cigarette butt.
Believe me, the world in which people gazed lovingly into each other eyes but dared not touch, a world without credit cards, without SMS and PIN, without silicone, plasma screens or Swarovsky crystals, a world in which whores would never give autographs in the street and in which no one would dare waste his life and his brains listening to dissertations by semi-illiterates: such a world was too beautiful to have existed.
December 1989 - an era we slept through
No. A simple search on Google will make that clear: a world without malls, without credit at the bank, without Jean de Craiova and his manele [music combining pop folk and Gypsy rhythm], without buttocks slathered in cream, without a virtual space full of perverts and sex.
The Revolution and the world from which it came could not have existed. Because heroic Romania could have not have become an erotic Romania overnight. Could not have become a neurotic Romania. Much wiser to believe that the Opera Square in Timisoara [where the 1989 revolution began] and the dead lying on the steps of the Cathedral are images from a utopian world. Images frozen in time, like those of the dead at University Square in Bucharest. From squares in Cluj, Sibiu and Brasov.
December 1989? An invention of the calendar. An era we slept through, and from which we have abruptly awoken: channel hopping, surfing the Internet. Without being alive. Without hope. Because we come from nowhere, and we’re going nowhere. We can never be the same again. Neither wise, nor trimbulinzi offering our bare chests to the bullets.
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