From the Media Mutant Gallery: Valentin Stan

At the beginning of the 2000s, I believe, when Romanian television was just discovering the pleasure of the cruses between “talk” and “show”, an individual somewhat different made his appearance. Not regularly, but with quite disarming confidence and sufficiency. Because of his structural edginess and pathos, a lock of hair would fall over his forehead every other minute out of his backcombed hair, giving the concerned a slight post-war illegalist air. Valentin Stan, for it is him I am talking about, would have also gotten lost in the menageries of TV anonymity, unless he wouldn't have brought along a completely new tool: a laptop at which, every now and then, he's look focused, as if he'd find there explanations on the fall and rise of the empire of the ewe.

He made his first appearance, how ironical!, at “Naşul” (The Godfather), Radu Moraru's show, then he was in others, quickly being dubbed “the man with the laptop”. People started wondering first about the laptop, and later about his owner. So it came up this was a history university professor, graduate of God knows what courses for diplomats. He was proving to be an inconvenient guy, the quarrelsome type, ready to find faults anywhere, great master in “crackpots and fancies”, to put it in the style of Creangă from Humuleşti. The impression of a free man was what took precedence; somewhat “away with the fairies”, but with no prejudices and copyright on what he uttered. An independent, a solitary, a free thinker.

Valentin Stan's arrival, together with his laptop, on Antena 3, in the team of noise and circus coordinated by the theosophist Mihai Gâdea, represented a change in the paradigm or, to put it more colourfully, a weltanschauung transfer. Previously polyphonic, Stan became a reliable soloist in single voice concerts on the television station of Felix the magnate. Together with other sinister discourse, recurrent and bark sounding, like that Mugur Ciuvică, Valentin Stan's discourse, ever louder and unkinder, brought satisfaction to lovers of intellectually polished cusses. Inclination for anecdotes, covered in spiritual slime was expressed by various means: jitters, impersonations, mimicking, intentionally subtle ironies, videos found on YouTube and presented in resemblance as an illustration of reality, songs in the service of “clear explanation”, abundant gestures, heehaws and giggles. An excess of theatricality turned the character Valentin Stan into an extremely interesting media mutant, where the cheerful stooge and the dissimulating clown shake hands to unceasingly lament over the requiem of the national political tragedies.

For behaving and always making his homework, for being loyal and lacking ideological inconsistencies, the “guest” Valentin Stan was given the opportunity to confirm further, So that, for several months now, every Friday evening, on Antena 3, the citizen with the laptop (a state-of-art one recently) edgily performs in his own show called “Conexiuni” (Connections). Located at the same time as “Tănase and Dinescu”, Stan's one man show never managed to impress. The return to the initial status of a “lonely wolf” was no longer possible, for reasons of over-packing and over-doing. In a scenery in which blue is the predominant colour, from a pulpit he rarely leaves in live, meditative walk to show the crowd how thought is born, Stan heralds, week by week, the Apocalypse. Either because of the pensions, or of the salaries, democrat-liberal deputies, or that of the great foe, Băsescu. For argumentative methodology he employs the same infinite interpretation at the heart of which parallels meet undoubtedly and where one can easily claim that, after all, the only alien civilisation is humanity.

What can we blame Valentin Stan for, after all? I believe that the ideological regimentation is the first condemnable aspect. As a historian, our man would have been supposed to have the reflex of an unbiased eye, a vocation of distancing, without with the perspective constantly eludes; on the contrary, his subjectivity is enormous and  constantly focused in one direction. There are TV shows in which, looking at him, I get the feeling that I am watching a patient confessing about unusual traumas called Traian Băsescu, DLP (Democrat Liberal Party), Elena Udrea, Emil Boc. It seems to me that Valentin Stan ended his critical exercises on these topics a long time ago, and they ended up, as I said, in the area of psychoanalytic obsessions. Secondly, as a specialist in diplomacy, as he sometimes recommends himself, one would have expected a more elegant approach of the issues under analysis, of that velvet gloves refinement pouring poison in tall champagne cups. After all, as a pedagogue,  what is the lesson the Valentin Stan imagines he's giving his History students, in such mono-thematic, unidirectional discourses?!

Sick with himself, of a megalomania hypocritically dressed in self-irony, loud to hysteria, piercingly  histrionic, Valentin Stan insists on making us believe that the laptop is the country of absolute truth and that he himself is no one else but the herald of universal justice on Romanian land. Let us then regard him as just another hybrid born out of the fermented dough of our every day media…