The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans by Andrei Codrescu

Author:Andrei Codrescu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Garrett County Press
Published: 2012-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

How My Secret Twin Saved Me

OVER THE YEARS I’ve had my brushes with Hollywood. Someone making a vampire picture once called me to quiz me about the density of vampires in Transylvania, where I was born. I advised him on it (there are ten per acre) and begged him to hire a Romanian to get the accent right. The picture came out and the vampires spoke a mixture of Brooklyn and studied Lugosi. So much for authenticity. Next time I saw my country, Romania, was on TV when Joan Collins from “Dynasty” went to a part of Romania called Moldavia, a fact announced by the word “Moldavia” flashing across the screen. It looked suspiciously like the orange groves of San Berdoo. A group of Moldavians dressed like Libyan terrorists left over from the terrorist-movie-of-the-week whisked Joan across the Moldavian-San Berdoo border. That was the last I heard officially from Hollywood until the dramatic Romanian revolution of 1989. In December of that year our television sets relayed to us the most extraordinary images of a country in the grip of a popular revolution. Immense crowds calling for an end to dictatorship. . . the flight of dictator Ceauşescu and wife in a helicopter as students begin burning their books in the central square. . . the first firefights of the army with Ceauşescu’s dreaded Securitate . . . hundreds of young people shot by snipers, their bodies displayed to the cameras . . . the holey Romanian flag fluttering over army tanks, while young soldiers fraternize with the revolutionary crowds . . . the battle for the television station . . . On and on they went, these fabulous images of an insurrection that seemed to spell a dramatic closure to the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe. And there were the horror stories: the torture rooms hidden in tunnels that honeycombed the major cities, the poisoned waters, the Ceauşescus’ alleged vampirism, the murder of the children on the steps of the Timisoara cathedral, the madonna and child . . . It all became indelibly printed in our minds.

On Christmas Day 1989 the Ceauşescus were executed by a hastily assembled execution squad. The next day I left for Romania. I arrived in Bucharest two days later via the first train to enter Romania, the Orient Express from Budapest, Hungary. I had not seen my native country in twenty-five years. I reported on the fighting and the exaltation for National Public Radio and ABC News. But even as I was reporting, the stories from Romania became complicated and mysterious. No one was sure who had been firing on the unarmed demonstrators. The original body counts of sixty thousand dead were downscaled considerably. . . . to less than one thousand . . . there was evidence that the massacre of children in Timisoara never happened, in spite of the videotape we saw. . . . the water in Sibiu was never poisoned. . . . the “madonna and child” image was fake.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.