Since the electoral campaign is in full swing, we can check and see how little do Romanian politicians and state officials care about the interests of citizens and their national and identity security. No Romanian official has moved a finger to rescue Romanian language and literature from the attack by the Ministry of Education and to prevent the emergence of more innocent victims. The topics for the Romanian literature oram exam high school students are to pass in order to graduate high school show more than the mess and amateurishness of those heading the Romanian Ministry of Education. Students who live in a consumerist society, dominated by the tabloidization of private life and by the new communication and information technologies, are supposed to approach topics that have got nothing to do with Romanian literature, with its values and with what is supposed to attract any high school teenager: fiction and literary style. Since teenagers are in the habit of using abbreviations and emoticons on the messanger, which is destructive to their mind and to their knowledge of Romanian, the Ministry of Education officials too have got to use fishy abbreviations and values of Romanian literature, forcing students into cliches, nowadays very successfully practiced in the family of the 27 European nations. It is not annoying that Jonathan Scheele is now studied instead of Ioan Luca Caragiale and the great European poet Nichita Stanescu. What is annoying indeed is that the fragments excerpted from the texts authored by this EU officials and from other texts praising Europeanism are dull and they lack any stylistic or literary quality. It is bad taste and wrong in terms of education and information to torture some poor teenagers born when Communism fell with the Tismaneanu Report and European legislation texts, since Romanian culture has got great thinkers and writers whose nonfinction works approached the relations between the Romanian social and cultural mentality and the European one. It is deeply wrong because, due to such official means of persuasion, high schools students will get scared of the idea of Romanian literature and language and avoid all of it. The fact that a high shool student has got 4 classes of Romanian language and communication a week, but they are actually classes of communication and anything but Romanian literary texts, will have unexpected effects. Our identity will therefore get under mass communication without communication! Our identity will speak a poorer and poorer Romanian. So Romanians will become easier to assimilate as consumers of European products and legislation rather than a proud nation with what it has got unique: the Romanian language. Politicians' carelessness should be rooted out by this real national security matter: the fact that a Romanian language class has got to mean communication exercises without any national culture or identity contents. So it is left up to the media, whose Romanian is getting worse, and up to the outskirts of politics and monkey public affairs. It is about a Romanian language slaughtered by those supposed to protect it. Traian Basescu, Calin Popescu Tariceanu and the politicians now perceived as nationalists have promised to do anything for the sake of Romania's security. Romanian language and literature are national security elements dumped by the state authorities, elements stabbed in the back due to a boastful and harmful obedience to the 'European requirements'. These national security elements must be protected until it is too late, first of all by the men of education and by civil society. Public debate should open at once to analyze the way students learn Romanian language and literature and the structure of the syllabus, the way speech and mind accomplishments are encouraged. Such a debate, involving arguments and no primitive passion, must consolidate the national security element implied by the Romanian language on our politicians' pragmatic agenda. But do these politicians need the Romanian language?

Dan Mircea CIPARIU