windyourneckin

Of all the ‘New New Things’ that nouveau riche entrepreneurs and speculators can acquire, the Automobile is the most arresting and most irrevocable statement of social standing and of dominance over fellow citizens. Its tangibility prevails over that of the house, which is immobile, of clothes and ‘gadgets’, which are comparatively static, and of services consumed, which are fleeting, invisible to most.

Enveloped in the arrogant, space grabbing lines of an Audi Q7 or tank-like blockyness of a Chrysler 300C, the newly anointed Romanian financial elite can scream supremacy without moving a vocal chord at every traffic light and in every car park, garnering transfixed gazes from lesser mortals who have to contend with carrying their ‘ Mega Image ‘ shopping bags on Public Transport or, God forbid, on foot.

The cream of the crop will go one step further in the back of a Maybach limousine where a push of a button can draw a curtain between them and the ‘rabble’ on the street, much in the same way as exorbitantly priced ‘de fitze’ catering establishments draw lines between those who can afford to splash an average month’s salary on one meal, and those who can’t.

Society, a streamlined sorter of individuals into the distinct categories of ‘smecher’ and ‘fraier’, haves and have-nots, permits little deviation from the norm. Insufficient competition makes for a seller’s market , where you buy the package as it comes or buy nothing, that is, if you even own disposable income . The individual may try in vain to define himself as ‘other’, through the culture he consumes in his spare time, but only within a niche community will he be recognized as that which he has intended himself to become. To the wider consensus, however, he is a ‘fraier’, or fool, because the distinct lack of horsepower under his bonnet, or lack of designer sunglasses on his head, define him as such.

All the while, the limousines get larger, ‘full option’ breaks new boundaries of fullness, new things cause hysteria for no other reason than that they are new, trend cycles forge ahead with the certainty of agricultural five year plans. The price of a coffee in a Dorobanti cafe reaches the price of a day’s unskilled labour. The Groundhogesque phenomenon of striving to own what is new and exclusive over what is good takes on ridiculous severity as Romania becomes a vacuum of goods regurgitated, retouched, tweaked for the mood of the moment and re-served to the market like microwave-reheated French fries to a fat kid.