Worlds Lost
First, a little background about myself. I was born in Bucharest, Romania, in January 1980, and grew up in a house built in the 19th century along one of the city’s main boulevards — Victory Street! — only about three blocks from a major city center — Victory Plaza. Since I was born in January 1980, I lived through all of the 1980s in the communist Eastern European bloc — right up until the bitter end in December 1989, when, after a swift military trial in the morning, former president Nicolae Ceauşescu and former first lady Elena Ceauşescu were executed by firing squad on Christmas 1989. Communism was over in Romania. “The dictator has fled! The dictator has fled!” I was confused: Who was this “dictator”? I hadn’t even heard the word before. Up until yesterday he was always “our beloved leader.”
The whole thing — revolution, trial, atrocities, Ceauşescu fleeing in a tank, his trial and execution — was broadcast on freshly liberated Romanian television (the only two television stations at the time, TVR1 and TVR2, were owned and operated by the state) because — why not? The country needed closure and a symbolic end to the era that began in 1952 with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. That might have been traumatic for a 9-year-old to witness after spending 10 days inside the house while revolution raged outside, with tanks and AKs firing in nearby Victory Plaza (as it’s still called). But there was no such thing as emotional trauma there and then.
The world I was born into and grew up in, literally and symbolically, is gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. I never liked New York and I never got used to it, even after living there for 25 years — which means there is nothing for me to go “back” to anywhere. For example, the corner of Victory Plaza closest to our house began to be developed shortly after I started school, and by fourth grade, when the revolution came, the hulls of unfinished apartment buildings were already standing. Needless to say, these got shot to shit before they were completed. I don’t know what happened to them after that; in January 1990 I turned 10, and three months later, in April, I moved to New York City with my family. Between that development and our house, on a corner of our very street was a lovely park that featured prominently in my childhood. My happiest memory was of a snowstorm one evening that blanketed everything, so my father took my sister and me to that park in the dark, when no one else was out. The foreign feeling fresh snow lends to familiar surroundings, the orange streetlights, the lack of traffic, the big flakes all conspired to impart such a sense of excitement as puppies might experience at the sight of fresh snow.
That was us then — my dad, my sister and me. Today that park is a Starbucks Coffee in a commercial building, the neighborhood is the new financial district of Bucharest, its priciest real estate, and our house at str. Frumoasă nr. 8 (“Beautiful Street No. 8”) was knocked down long ago to make room for a multistorey villa on the same lot that houses something called the American Council. (In fairness, at some point the old house would have needed to be updated or condemned; it was sold by my uncle in the early 2000s, who used the money to build a replica house somewhere else.)
Just as communist Eastern Europe disappeared along with my childhood, so too have other worlds come and gone: the “pre-9/11” world, the “pre-Great Recession” world, the “pre-pandemic” world, the “pre-January 6” world and so on. Today we live on the precipice of World War III, with wars in Europe and in the Middle East not like recent wars, but like the wars of the 1940s. Humanity is picking up right where it left off. The “pre-” worlds of the United States — pre-9/11, pre-COVID — feel nostalgic and quaint when compared to our world today. So many worlds have come and gone and things are changing so quickly that it doesn’t feel right to get attached to any of them any longer. Let history flow; I am only a witness. And as a witness, I would like to make a few critical observations of my adoptive culture — America — realizing they might not be well received but having no interest in the reaction. These are my own notes.
Brief Observations on American Culture
Maybe it has always been the case in America, a nation founded on opportunity and enterprise that never quite found time for things without material value, but today the West as a whole no longer recognizes people of intellectual stature, the original thinkers among us who make lasting contributions.
In the United States we simply don’t have the time or perspective for such cultural indulgences — and we don’t like experts unless they’re selling us self-help. To be a writer today means to cash in on your existing celebrity by hiring a host of people to create a “brand” (agent, publicist, publisher, assistants, ghostwriter, editing, design, legal team and so on — it takes a village). The other options left to a writer are writing either pulp fiction or children’s books. The truth is, no one really wants to think about or remember how we got from the 17th to the 21st centuries, or about the existential threats we currently face. What we desperately need is escape! — so who wants to think about all that depressing shit? Not the people I meet. We’ve got to stay positive, be mindful, be kind and send positive vibes at all times — which you just can’t do if you’re questioning the prevailing wisdom.
The cultural fashion here is to be an idiot your whole life and never be an expert on anything. It’s deeply offensive to Americans to pass yourself off as an expert, like you’re better than everyone else, unless you have a resume worthy of a webpage, a compelling personal story of adversity, and of course something to sell — in which case they’ll worship you. The average urban or suburban American of the generations coming after me is a lifelong student who enjoys yoga classes, guided meditations, podcasts and video games, is timid and socially awkward, avoids confrontation and risk, likes to plan out their weekends, becomes a “Cat Mom,” puts stickers on their car that say “Tell your dog I said hi,” does countless other things I’ll never understand, but doesn’t like to read or think.
As for the working class, for fun on weekends they reward themselves by going camping, “haul loads” in “toy haulers” towed by diesel trucks, load and unload, tear up state lands with their toys, kill animals, launch boats, pollute rivers, make an infernal noise, and generally destroy everything they touch. They can’t enjoy nature except by destroying it. Having no imagination and no capacity for reflection, the only thing they can think of to do in their spare time is more work — fortunately that’s our common national value, working ourselves to death.
A Corporate Culture
Unfortunately, the United States does not have an organic culture that grew naturally out of millennia of shared experience and problem-solving; instead it has “corporate culture” — culture for profit, a culture imposed from the outside by corporations seeking to connect with their consumer audiences. Therefore our culture comes from brands, from media, from celebrities — from Hollywood — and it changes frequently as needed. But who actually creates it? I would say that Western media has completely rent the fabric of American culture during the past 40 years, but America had no “cultural fabric” to begin with — only diluted subcultures that limped along. That’s a big part of the reason corporate culture was so easily imposed in the first place. The biggest advantage of this model is that corporate culture can be altered or replaced at any time, as needed.
You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. Like there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is. But it’s there, like a splinter in your mind. Driving you mad. … You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work. When you go to church. When you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes.
—Morpheus, The Matrix (1999) Courtesy: Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures
For example, in the early 1990s parents and religious groups petitioned Congress to add the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” warning to audiotapes and the new medium of compact discs (CDs), especially following the release of N.W.A.’s debut album Straight Outta Compton in 1988, with its namesake track and ‘Fuck tha Police.’ At the time, this thoughtful gesture was intended to protect fragile and impressionable young minds. Fast-forward 30 years, past the rise of the UFC into what it is today, the films and series being produced by artificial intelligence (AI) for streaming companies like Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and others, and the meteoric rise of “gaming,” which fits all the criteria of a dangerous addiction (loss of money, harm to relationships, lack of interest in doing anything else), and a fragile young mind today is exposed to more violence in one hour than it was back then in one year.
The unstoppable success of the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise has led to a normalization of mindless brutality not seen since the Dark Ages — which in turn has pervaded other forms of culture and media, such as films and games. Since profits must still be made, the boundaries must be pushed constantly, new lows of human degradation must be dreamt up afresh each day, with the effect that our culture today resembles something no parent 30 years ago could have imagined in their most dreadful nightmares. Yet today, it’s all so… normal.
It is the normalization of immoral behavior that has so degraded “culture” in the United States. From the 1970s through the 2000s, and perhaps for all of human history before that, revenge could be enjoyed only when it was pursued for just cause — when it was “justice.” Violence against fellow man was culturally acceptable only when endowed with a moral justification. The traditional cause, from Death Wish to Gladiator, was a man having his family raped or killed, or both. That all changed in 2014 with the John Wick franchise — now grown to four installments, one announced spinoff and one cross-platform videogame — in which the namesake character singlehandedly massacres whole armies, all because they killed… his dog. John must’ve been a “Dog Dad.” At the very least, it shows that today we hate our fellow man so much that we prefer animals to strangers.
Personal Truth
My personal truth is that I can’t talk in depth or honestly to anyone I meet. I got used to it long ago, although for many years I rued the fact that I will just never fit in. For starters, most of the Americans I meet don’t have two cultures, like I do — and even if they have two or more cultures, the other one isn’t my culture. So a fundamental dimension of how I experience the world is already missing. On top of that, I am isolated by my hobbies and intellectual pursuits (reading, writing). That’s why I feel I can only relate to and have conversations with the dead writers of the past — and only one living writer, Cyril Glassé (C.G.).