Glob-a-log

Sometimes you read something that is so breathtakingly offensive that you want to flap your arms like a demented Elmer Fudd, just praying you and your shotgun could blast all that is this monstrously vile and stupid to smithereens.

This Fudd thing happened to me again just a bit earlier, when I was browsing through the online Sunday papers.

The article in question was short enough. As short as it was in-fucking-credible:

A cartoon showing squirrels hanging themselves and throwing themselves in front of cars has drawn the ire of Romanian broadcasting authorities.

The Romanian authorities are grumpy because they’d like to ban it, but they have no control over the cartoon because it is broadcast on a channel with a British license.

The National Audiovisual Council argued that the cartoon is damaging for children to watch.

Right. Yes. Of course.

Damaging for children…

Indeed.

Does the two word combination ‘Romanian orphanages’ ring a bell?

Yes, those hell holes that grew like cancer moles on the bloated, dying body of Ceausescu’s communist Romania.

What’s that? Ah yes, Ceausescu is indeed long gone and good riddance too – but the orphanages are not.

This is what was going on there as recently as in 2006:

After the fall of communism in the 1990s, the world saw horrific images of abused children living in deplorable conditions in state-run Romanian orphanages. Those images and stories led to an international uproar and an outpouring of humanitarian aid to the country. After the initial furor died down, most people assumed the situation had gotten better.

ABC News, however, had an exclusive look at a report, which was released today by Mental Disability Rights International, that details the horrible abuse of handicapped children in Romanian institutions.

Over an 18-month period, the organization found 46 disabled children and teenagers ages 7 to 17 inside a hidden ward at a psychiatric hospital for adults. Many of them had cerebral palsy and had been abandoned by parents, some of whom had been told their children were “biological garbage.”

When Eric Rosenthal, the organization’s executive director, visited an institution in the midsize city of Braila, he captured the misery on camera — a 17-year-old girl who looked like she was 5 years old and weighed only 22 pounds; children wrapped in full-body restraints with sheets tied to beds and cribs; and children so malnourished that their skin peeled off their bodies.

“What I saw in Braila was the worst I have seen anywhere in the world. It was just an absolute horror,” Rosenthal said. “These children, 46 children, were near death.”

No wonder Romanian officials are so grumpy. They don’t want any cartoon squirrels threatening the state monopoly on harming children.

Give those damn squirrels one inch and before you know it they would insist on torturing and killing Romania’s children just as enthusiastically as its government has been doing for decades.

One last suggestion to the Romanian National Audiovisual Council, before I go off Fudding and flapping my arms for a little while longer:

If you, like some bizarre and very unlikely ostrich-type community, actually did not know about your country’s orphanages, you are unfit for your jobs.

If you did know and still insist cartoon squirrels are the real danger to Romanian children, you are unfit to live. In fact, in that case I sincerely hope the rest of your useless little lives will be as unbearable & cruel and your deaths as painfully protracted as the lives of all the children who suffered and died in your country’s unspeakably vile orphanages were.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 22:36 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.