The Romanian Question

WHEN A GUITAR PLAYS THE BLUES

The National Salvation Front government, accused by critics of being closely linked to the Communist Party of late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, appears to be trying to mend the damage to its international reputation caused by last week’s events.

ReuterlMajorca Daily Bulletin, 24 June 1990

“IT’S NOT MUCH of a job and you don’t get a whole lot of respect.” Jerry brushed rain off his sodden fedora. “The pay’s no good and the hours are lousy - yet there’s something in you has to go on doing it, the way other guys get hooked on dope or, maybe, a woman. Someone has to walk down those streets respectable people don’t like to know about, especially when they might have a relative living there. Someone has to take the insults and the bruises and, occasionally, the bullet, so that those respectable folks can sleep peacefully in their beds. In some ways you’re a messenger between two mutually selfish sections of society - the Glutted Rich and the Vicious Greedy. Well, maybe that’s exaggerating just a tad…

“There’s a lot of people in between, a lot of little people. A lot of bad women gone right, and good men gone down, and whores who should have been virgin brides in Wyoming, and judges who a more enlightened age would recognise as calcu-lating psychopaths - and all the rest; every piece of human flotsam, and every kind of virtue… Courage-in-adversity, rotten wealth, Church-pure poverty, damned near insane self-sacrifice and the pettiest, meanest kind of greed you ever heard about. You wouldn’t believe it. You don’t have to. Only I have to believe it. It’s my job.”