Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu
Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Critical Theory at the University of Western Ontario
The Zeitgeist perspired: „the precipice crumbled under the bridge, the bridge under the horse, the horse under Vadim, Vadim sub Mission”.
Coz’ winning Vadim those elections, the Greater Romania Paranoia came overnight into the being of a bestiola. As in his youth he had been closely associated with Calderón de la Bârca in the „Life’s a Dream and I a Nightmare” cultural project, Vadim wanted to change his name into the more humongous Ion Quijote; but that wasn’t in the books. Until he won, Vadim was regarded as a charisnoic – his slogans were „We’ll be again what we had been and even more than that!”; „Vote for yourselves: through me!” – whose peculiar vision about Romania was to present this country as greater because it was always beside itself (this is why he was not tried for high treason on the national territory): a country unlonely, aura-bearing, covering Hungary (the only country neighboring only on itself). Vadim was unfolding the map frozen by the gaze of NATO and the European Union and was pushing Romania in the avant-garde of Neuropean political police (Gestaltpo). [...]
During the week following the elections, the printed press was writing: „Butimanu invades Romania at the speed of Vadim light”; „Eternal semifinalist wins a country larger than itself”; „Vadim – President. The others must pay!” Then: „PC’s (Punish-Commandoes) ready to act”; „Finally the mines are transparent”; „The 2004 emigration – ten times larger and faster than the one following the 1940 48-hour ultimatum given by Stalin to the Eastern Romanian regions”; „Three hundred newspapers prohibited!”; „38000 victims in traffic accidents, the TV channel reports”; „In the southern counties, the decimations are 200% ahead of the original plans”; „The illegal riches liquidated – unprecedented floods follow – some mountain regions already peninsular”; „Borders closed tightly; lack of clients cited”.
With his quill plucked out from one of the Securitate wings, the new President began promulgating Big Ukases. In the first one – „Fabula Rasa” – he defines such the castratification of the society: „From today on Romania becomes an ecstatic country: forever beside itself, it calls on the people to occupy its true space, inherited from its Ancestors. All other visions of history are murderous. The political, industrial and intellectual Mafia members will be executed on the spot. All Romanian citizens will fall in love. I will descend from the mines to the cities. I am Virtue. I am the shepherd of Innocence”.
After the media entered the hibernation season, the only trace we have found of those years (2004-2008) was the well hidden diary of Anonymous (on his funeral monument it’s written only „Guess who”). These pages preserved for us, in fragmentary and succinct form, the progression of the events:
The stadiums began to bellow: newspapers and books are burned non-stop on the „Do Them Good” stadium. / Every Sunday they have these gladiator fights between former politicians from the Liberal and Socialist parties / They shoot mammal targets on the „Bella Fascia” and „The Sixth of December or January” stadiums. / High school student are kept till midnight to assist at the workings of these courts of purity. / The younger students have to be back by 9 p.m. in their orphanage beds. / Those lucky enough to have their names on the black lists were machine-gunned, timidly, during the first night. / The black lists were to be refilled with new names: on Wednesday through Government decrees, and on Saturday through the Badlucky Lottery. / The-Sacred-Carnival-of-Xenophobia-and-Zoophilia is being celebrated monthly on the first day of the Caligulag: then gypsies, Hungarians, Cumans, Ambassadors and some Arabs are given to the beasts. / Hunger in the mountains. / The country has been prohibited from leaving the President’s brains. / One million detainees are digging in the subterranean tunnel between Bucharest and Tirana. / Apple suicider for the Opposition. / They caught the two Giampi sisters with their attic full of olives (I knew them both from the sanatorium): they put them to shame and then flayed them in the Round Square of the Renativity. / The rubric „Black Grin” announces that the inventor of the Sea-Wave Making machine is Romanian. / Bio-social practices: one blackmail – one erection. Cops’ truncheons periodically recharged with nostalgia. To be is to perspire. / On the „Vadim Towering the Sunset” Boulevard are allowed only light armored vehicles. / Science and culture are now administered by the Ministry of the Morgue. / Eve, the first ever Romanian woman, known to have given sleeping pills to the serpent: our glorious infantry divisions celebrate her by bathing their soldiers in cologne once a year. / Living with less: the phone numbers reduced to five digits. / All avortons to be delivered in abortion clinics. / Good news: unrecycled cherries were sold this morning at the market. / They’ve introduced e-scatology as a teachable in high schools. Where are we headed? / All University courses will be taught in the Cathedral of the Nation’s Redemption. / They have replaced all the tractors with horses from Mongolia and Argentina. / They are working on the Grande Eugénie. I think that the population has reached down for five million Romanians (there were only 22 million in 2004). / They changed the name of the capital from Ubucharest into Vadimgorod. / We have signed the pact with de Sade in pure phlegm. / Romania is now East of itself and West of us. / The border with the Internet is defended by home-grown cyborgs. / They’re coming!
Călin Mihăilescu