I’ve just read today, that 70 % of romanian kids do have an Internet acces.

Romania is part of the EU and the globalized world, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find local food here… the multinationals are using every dirty trick possile to get the market, and the EU regulations helps them a lot (a lot of usual things and processes becames illegal, based on irreal standards, which favors big businesses). All kind of poisons are forced on us, the miracles of Monsanto and so on. I’m part of a consumer coop, so I can get ecological, local food, and there still are food courts, but there is a strong lobbying against them.

There are McDonad’s and Burger King’s all over the place, paying their employees like shit, and… ok, you all know the story about them.

so then they get in some village, find some people who still own traditional clothes, pays them to wear it, and to pretend, that they haven’t been exposed to all this… and then even in a blog like this, the comments are still talking bullshit like “When the people of the town make food for the Burger King folks and share it. This is real cultural exchange”.

No, dear, this is no cultural exchange. It’s colonializaton, first exploiting the land and forcing our sustainable ways of production (ok, it’s a long story, actually, but still) in their toxic, non-sustainable, but form some companies highly profitable ways… then using the rest as a theme park.

I’m no longer part of this traditional culture, and I have no motivation for pretending that I was (I have no traditional clothes, or no folk music in my laptop – ok, maye with the exception of some tracks from evan greer, and I also have some flamenco, bu that’s a personal story…), but this kind of explotiation really makes me… maybe not angry, but disgusted.

I couldn’t stomach even a full minute of the first video, myself, but I also wanted to echo that there are parts of Romania (like the uplands toward Moldova) that remain more remote on average than relatively well connected Transylvania.

The villains or pagans were much more likely to resist Christianity in favor of their traditional animist beliefs than the urban dwellers of the time, so they were obviously very bad people in need of barbecuing. Ironically, I used to live near a place called “The Village Inn Barbecue” but they didn’t serve pagans (as entree’s I mean).

The following quote is from English Etymology, Or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language By George William Lemon (published in 1783):

VILLAIN i vicus, domus ; u t pro Oivo», vi- num ; aflreet, row of houfes, or a country town; and a villain in our antient law books fignified no more than ,; villager, or one who inhabited only a fmall country’town, and was a client, or vaffal to his patron, who lived at the metropolis.

I have no idea how the term villain managed to remain so negative while village ended up mostly referring to quaint and often high-end retail areas (ironic!) or places where people have never seen hamburgers (or some places in Wisconsin that aren’t cities, I guess). I suppose the term doesn’t really mean much at all anymore.

Maybe I should just be “The Idiot” then? Naw, it’s a great filler word that’s sort of like a Rorschach word-blot when used in the context of my pseudonym (or so I’ve noticed).

I don’t think language is natural. And “village” seems to be a word we use to make a distinction between us in the Western world and groups that we think of as possibly cute or neat, but ultimately culturally backward. Pay attention to who gets called a “villager” (or, for that matter, a “tribesman”). It seems to be a cultural marker of sorts. We occasionally use the term village in to name places in the U.S., and it sounds like they use it in Canada, but rhetorically, most of the time I hear it, it’s used to describe people in less-developed countries. And I think that’s worth thinking about.

That doesn’t mean it’s *intrinsically* a problem. It means that, in the context of an ad where I felt that people were being depicted as exotic, isolated, and quaint, the use of that word just might be meaningful.

And, frankly, I doubt a bland mass-produced burger rates high against a nice platter of grilled mici (sausages, also known as mititei). It’s not as if burger chain food is the highest exponent of American cuisine, for goodness’ sake.

For contrast, here’s a NY times article about why American burger chains haven’t fared so well in Germany: döner kebap places have already won the market. It’s a pity that it’s from 1996, but since then döners have taken half of Europe, so…