Romania, deep down at the core

Much like their US counterparts, the Romanians are also spying on anyone they can get their hands on and invading any privacy in sight with the collective drive of a famished tribe of cannibals happening upon luscious, well fed adolescents tied nude to a tree.

Unlike their US counterparts, however, the Romanians are mostly spying on the governmental agencies and the statal apparatus. In general private citizens are widely ignored as long as they're not doing business with the foregoing.ⁱ This difference I think is very important, if the PRISM system was chiefly used to leak to the press Harry Reid's private emails and Nancy Pelosi's five hundred year old sex tapes from back when she was doing pot in college and playing nice for the frat boys it'd be, I think, a much more popular endeavour.

Just like the US, Romania is also roughly split in two groups, the President's men and the populist horde (unlike the US, the president here is actually the good guy) which are going at each other with rapt abandon, which is fundamentally the engine driving all this effort. The current installment we will peruse consists of the populist horde trying to lynch the president's chief of the local equivalent of the IRS. The head tax man, as it were. This comes on the heels of the president's chief of DNAⁱⁱ pretty much sealing the fate of the horde's 2nd man, one Dragnea (dood with a moustache) which in turn comes on the heels of something similar which in turn and so ad infinitum as far as memory serves. I underscore this to make it plain that we're not dealing with any sort of exceptional anything here, it's quite business as usual, as expected and, I guess, as normal.

The press gets all these bits and publishes them, while trying to act all shocked and indignant over various imagined scandalousnesses that nobody, absolutely nobody in Romania gives a shit about. Consider the following exchange between Sorin Blejnar, at the time the head of the ANAFⁱⁱⁱ and an unnamed employee of his^iv :

Sorin Blejnar: Alo. Ce faci?

Alo, what are you up to ?

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Ce să fac? Fac o p...!

What should I be up to ? I'm up a cock^v.

Sorin Blejnar: Ce faci, mă?

What, dude^vi ?!

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Fac o p..., asta fac!

Up a cock, that's what!

Sorin Blejnar: Adică?

Which means ?

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Adică nu fac nimic.

Which means nothing at all.

Sorin Blejnar: De ce nu faci nimic?

Why aren't you up to nothing at all ?^vii

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Pentru că aşa-i viaţa!

Because that's life.

Sorin Blejnar: Sorin Blejnar sunt.

This is Sorin Blejnar.

Bărbat Garda Financiară: A... Scuzaţi-mă, domnule preşedinte!

Oh. Excuse me, mr President^viii

Sorin Blejnar: Ce p... faci?

What the fuck are you up to.

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Îs şucărit, ce să fac, scuzaţi-mă încă o dată.

I'm pissed off, my apologies once more.

Sorin Blejnar: Vrei să te muţi la Curtea de Conturi sau cu chestia aia?

Are you moving to the Accounting Court^ix with that thing ?

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Cu chestia aia. Unde să mă mut?

With that thing. Where should I move ?

Sorin Blejnar: Mă, Nini Săpunaru ăsta cu cine-i prieten pe acolo?

Yo, who's this Nini Sapunaru dude friends with around there ?

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Ziceţi că-l sun eu.

Say so and I'll call him.

Sorin Blejnar: M-a atacat acu' o oră la televizor, m-a făcut infractor. M-a făcut... Eu n-am avut în viaţa mea nimic cu el.

He attacked me an hour ago on the TV, he called me a rackteer. He called me... I've in my life not had any dealing with him.

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Îl sun eu, băga-mi-aş p... în neamul lui şi-n gura lui!

I'll call him, may I stick my cock in his entire family line and his mouth.

Sorin Blejnar: Da, acum o oră. M-a făcut hoţ, impostor, traficant, cum i-a venit lui la gură! Eu n-am văzut emisiunea.

Yeah, an hour ago. He called me a thief, an impostor, a trafficker, whatever occured to him. I didn't catch the show.

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Îl sun eu acuma, băga-mi-aş p... în neamul lui să-mi bag eu! Acuma îl sun!

I'm calling him right away, may I stick my cock in his family line to stick my cock in it!^x

Sorin Blejnar: Da-i dobitoc?

Is he dumb ?^xi

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Pot să-l sun pe-ăsta sî-mi bag p... în neamul lui şi-n gura lui?

May I call this guy and insert my cock in his family line and his mouth ?

Sorin Blejnar: Poţi să-l suni. E dobitoc? Ce-are?

You may call. Is he dumb ? What's with him ?

Bărbat Garda Financiară: Îl sun şi... diseară, ne vedem aşa, un pic?

I'll call him and... tonight we see each other a little ?^xii

Sorin Blejnar: Da, da.

Yeah. Yeah.

So there you have it. The chief observation is that these guys' expletive filled conversation, which comfortably crosses the employer-employee divide, is by no means a guy thing. Consider this bit coming off a cabinet minister's chief of staff, Monica Constănceanu

MC: Dă-o dracului, s-o fut în cur de proastă! N-ai văzut cum zice că-i pocăită, că nu-mi venea s-o recunosc când venea la noi cu laţele şi cu ţâţele pe afară! Vaca dracului!

Which reads

To hell with her, may I fuck her in the ass in retribution for her stupidity^xiii. Didn't you see, she was claiming to be a neoprotestant^xiv, I couldn't recognise her from what I had seen when she was coming by with her reggae hair and outside tits^xv The devil's cow!

You read that right, a well brought up lady in the higher echelons of government proposes anal violation as a retributive means, notwithstanding she's ill equipped for the task. This is by no means exceptional and certainly not outrageous in Romania, and on the plain face of the matter it shouldn't be outrageous nor indeed exceptional anywhere else. If you people weren't a bunch of penticostals^xvi, that is.

The secondary chief observation is that on a human level Romania works a lot better, a lot smoother and a lot more enjoyably^xvii than the ridiculous western alternatives. This would be due to the fact that while ignorant, barely literate and mostly unable to do math, Romania is nevertheless run by adults. This fundamental difference can not be compensated by the castrated pubescent boys and girls pretending like they're government officials in the US or the EU, no matter how well they learn to read or add.

Let us hope and pray that somehow somewhere we manage to construct government by the well informed, well cultured adults, rather than the current alternatives of "either ignorant adults, or else educated children".

1. One particular exception are sexually active young women, such as highschool students, especially when involved in an underage prostitution ring. The phone taps published on such an occasion last year actually inspired me to create a new literary genre, and also write its first representative piece : Sorana, comedie bufa intr-un act. [↩]
2. Anti-corruption special prosecutor's office [↩]
3. Romanian tax authority, the IRS as it were [↩]
4. Technically, of one of the Agency's numerous enforcement arms. [↩]
5. While cock may be ambiguous in English, pula definitely is not ambiguous in Romanian. It means penis exactly in the way cunt means... well, cunt I guess. [↩]
6. I'm not making shit up, ma is this vocative particle best rendered as dude, yo, something. [↩]
7. Not nearly as bad grammar in Romanian as it would be in English. Romanians love double, and even triple negatives. As well as double and even triple entendres. As well as double, and even triple agents. As well as double, and even triple wives. On it goes, Romanians are a multiplexing kind. [↩]
8. This is a common term for a superior and does not strictly denote the head of the country. [↩]
9. Different enforcement arm. [↩]
10. Told you. Repetitions are dear to repetitions are dear to REPETITIONS ARE DEAR TO OUR HEART!!! [↩]
11. Literally, is he a dumb animal, for as far as Romanians are traditionally concerned, animals split in two classes : the dumb and the feral. [↩]
12. Contrary to how this may sound in English, there is absolutely no sexual innuendo in the original Romanian. You may ask to meet another man a little tonight after having stuck your copulative organ in some other dude's masticatory parts just fine, without anyone batting an eyelash. [↩]
13. The pompous form of these in English denotes the very poor cursive practice English speakers command. In Romanian the only retributive mark is the "de", which indicates cause. Am sa te concediez pentru ca esti prost, the calmly indicative "I will fire you because you are stupid" migrates through use towards the more tense "Sa te concediez de prost ce esti." which'd be "[subjonctive] will fire you for stupid that you are" and eventually "s-o fut in cur de proasta". Where, of course, the asshole doesn't exactly denote employment but it does connote it just fine. [↩]
14. These enjoy in Romanian society roughly the same reputation Americans do, with which they are roughly identified. Boorish, obnoxious, mentally fixated people devoid of any ability to decode the finer points of life instead trying to ensure their survival through sheer insistence. [↩]
15. Both of these equally represent displays of immodesty, which annul the one quality neoprotestant sects may claim as an identity. Clever they aren't, a point they have not, all that's there is the weird behaviours such as not properly doing their hair so as to draw attention (as implicitly any woman should) nor displaying their tits for the same purpose (which, again, any woman should). [↩]
16. Yes, this is an insult. [↩]
17. Cock fuck tits fuck assfuck cock tits! [↩]