It's Not The Same Old Romania

Bucharest

Bucharest is a lady and a whore. An unpaved slum and expensive polished hi-rise malls. Peasant fresh-markets, and one of the last remaining rising stock markets. She's drenched in crumbling Deco, dressed in the rubbed raw damaged velvet of a beautiful bygone era, trying on Armani.

She's cobblestones and dust and a thousand new cars a month with streets and alees built for one-horse shays.

She's thirty five and learning fast. And 65 and still trying to make the indoctrinated past work in new clothes that don't quite fit. She's new money and no way to know what to do with it.

She's a sudden teen-age civilization ranting to be treated like a grown-up with the acne pocks and attitude visible everywhere except in the mirror. And an attractive, wrinkled crone applying expensive new makeup.

Bucharest is dust and mud and such unaccountably beautiful parks. City thoroughfares that swell with proud urbanity bordering unseen crumbles and blocks of blocs. Teeming with un-owned dogs the citizens still feel guilty about, love, and feed their leftovers.

Bucarest is a city that is losing its long held American Dream, seeing what a hash America has recently made of itself. But she does love her Kelloggs and CocaCola, and god knows designer labels, the shinier the better. If you could make a foot-wide Rolex, someone here would wear it.

Here Ugly's only ugly if it isn't expensive.

She's been half a century without. And now she's drunk on Multi-national money and too much to choose from. There are no Communist souvenirs, just a dead statue of Lenin still toppled in Mogoasaia Castle Park. She's busy cleaning out her closet, trading her stained red uniforms for new designer jeans.

She's one of the last few remaining markets standing, so she'll stay a little longer at the dance than some of her smaller brethren or her former over-sized over-seers.

And "Hello. And how is your mother?" Sounds like an argument to an untrained ear, so much Slav in the Romance lingo. But at least it's a friendly argument.

She's technologically chic with next year's cell phones, and still wires her walls without sheathing or insulation. Under Construction and Deconstruction at the same time.

She's trying her best and showing her worst. Trying to figure out what to keep and what to tear down. Aching with growing pains and aching to be somebody again. She's 16th Century and 22nd in the same glance.

Bucharest is suspiciously optimistic. And optimistically suspicious. Growing. Changing fast and sticking fast. Clinging to the past. Running headlong into the Day-After-Tomorrow.

She's throbbing and and exciting and pulsing to discover who she's going to be next.

She'll return your lost wallet, and steal your heart.

And She's goddamn interesting as hell. See for yourself:



Bucharest Now 2007-08

View From A Distance

Bucharest

Am I the only one who has wondered how we suddenly had the entire US congress racing up and down the marble hallways desperately trying to find an insta-answer to the fact that the whole US economy - omigod- TODAY! - RIGHT NOW!!! - was gonna come to an awful end, tumbling like the Jherico walls?

Seems pretty damned convenient, if you ask me. Convenient? To whom?

Or perhaps it has already occured to you that this unaffordable Seven Hundred BILLION Dollar "rescue" happened with barely a month or two left to take any more profit at the taxpayer's trough. That this was just the last clear chance for the Cheney-Bushes raiding party, one more time, to crack open the American piggy bank again before exit. To give more government money to their already rich friends!

If you'll recall, George's original bailout plan called for no repayment, no reprisals, no constraints, in fact, NO governing of any kind for this handout to the poor (sic(k)) so-called financial genius CEO bastards who had driven their own companies, and the housing market, into the ground chasing the Gordon Ghekko Credo.

None.

Just give 'em the money.

So Mr., Ms, and Mom 'n' Pop America wouldn't have to, in their wretched little non-country club lives, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune for merely mortgaging themselves into the American Dream.

And nobody in this over-priviledged money club seemed to see it coming. Nobody jailed. Nobody blamed. No parking priveledges at the spa and driving range cancelled.

Gosh, don't you want a job like that?

Didn't it strike you as just a little bit out-of-the-blue odd?

"Wooooolf! Wooooolf!" From the same guy who in 1999 started another pre-election recession by merely proclaiming then that there was one. There wasn't. But after a landslide of press panic - voilla - gee, guess what...a recession.

Makes ya kinda wanna go hmmmmm.

Thank you, Nancy Pelossi, for at minimum collapsing the golden parachutes, and making the financial Stupidity Kings at least promise to pay it back.

Maybe Gordon was right.

If you know the right people in the right places, move in the right circles and you make over 1.2 million annual with options, perks AND bennies:

GREED IS GOOD.

Could someone there please get this over with soon and bring back America so I can come home.