I've spent the last three weeks, since the latest post, catching a cold and passing it on to my wife, watching in bewilderment the disgraceful show many Romanian politicians and some Romanian media figures are putting on these days, discovering the new, controversial HBO series The Newsroom, taking a short trip to the Jurassic Coast, meeting old friends for the first time, and savoring leisurely, at dusk, the exquisite French food one finds at Thierry Tomasin's decadent Angelus. And yes, we have booked tickets to another Royal Albert Hall event - the late night, late August Whitacre concert. Fingers crossed.
The current Romanian PM is, ironically, a former prosecutor who has recently been shown to have plagiarized his PhD dissertation and who has orchestrated a parliamentary putsch. His actions and complete lack of moral rectitude serve to remind much of Europe that my native country is still a fledgling democracy, caught between its communist past (single-party politics, nationalist demagoguery, vilification of opposition) and its seemingly unending present as a banana republic (kleptocracy, endemic corruption, a disabled justice system). By the way, a comparison between recent developments in both Romania and Paraguay (the June ousting of president Lugo) would probably be quite revealing.
The real drama, though, is not that those in power don't spend much time in front of a truthful mirror (part of the Romanian press has laudably reflected correctly the nature of intentions and machinations on both sides of the political dispute, and the real stakes), but that a worrying majority of the public, old and young, has not had a chance to learn anything about democracy and to internalize its values. Many still respond to puerile dichotomies (one figure or another is always distributed in the role of “the embodiment of evil"), to ritualistic violence (in language or actual public gesticulation), to a carnivalesque reversal of semantics (the thief brags about his honesty, the cowardly accuses others of his own unmentionable sin). It remains to be seen if speaking truth to stupid actually helps.
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