The new Rom chocolate bar and our mother

The advertisement is deliberately designed to cause outrage.

In doing that, its creators are looking precisely to generate reactions such as this one, in other words, to make us write that "it is crape", that "we are proud of being Romanians" and so on, etc.

In doing that we would be promoting the advertisement and implicitly the product itself, in its new wrapping.

This process should happen in an almost subconscious manner, but it is not our case.

We have assumed that discussing that infamous clip, we would be doing exactly what it was created to do: advertise its product free of charge, like its authors did.

It"s trap a that we are going to spring by our own choice, because there is more at stake here than the market share of a product.

• The first observation: the ad is obviously misleading.

It"s definitely a lie to claim that you can proudly eat a product wrapped in the American flag anywhere in the world.

I"ll provide a few examples of places where it would not be wise to do so: in Gaza, in Belgrad, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in some places in China, inside the Guantanamo prison.

I am referring to places where even though the authorities do not outright reject the American flag as a symbol, but rather the feelings of revulsion and/or horror of the citizens.

In order to dodge any possible objections, I am going to restate that I will deliberately ignore the commercial purpose of the ad (I don"t suppose we export chocolate to Guantanamo, after all), it"s just that the expression "anywhere in the world" used in the ad is misleading and is abject.

Compared to that, the rum chocolate wrapped in its old package could innocently be eaten anywhere in the world. It had no ties to Ceauşescu. It did however have ties with childhood, for some of us.

• The second observation: denigrating the national symbol is a criminal action.

Recently, there was a major hullabaloo around the act of policemen throwing their hats towards the Cotroceni palace, because in doing so, they had actually thrown down the Romanian flag, placed on the badge located at the center of the hats.

Because of this and of the fact that the policemen in question were carrying weapons, there was talk of applying criminal sanctions to those policemen. I for one wasn"t completely against the interpretation that the policemen in question had actually disrespected the country"s flag.

However, the advertisement of the "new Rom" leaves no doubt on this matter: the product wants to boost sales by insulting the Romanian flag.

Normally, that would be a criminal offense.

The National Audiovisual Council most certainly was supposed to protect our feelings and to prohibit the ad.

The website created for this campaign states: "The three colors of the package were replaced by the American flag, the obsolete national spirit was pushed aside by the free, undefeated and full of optimism of the "American dream".

• The third observation: "The American Dream" no longer exists.

Obsolete though our Romanian spirit may be, for better of for worse, it is still active, and it hasn"t embarrassed itself like the "American Dream", which has brought down the whole world around it. After all, the economic crisis revolves around the "American dream" of owning two or three houses.

As for the claims of the ad that the "American dream" would be "undefeated", then it would most likely concern the fact that the financial and economic destruction it brought around it spared nobody.

I am sorry that some of my fellow compatriots have gone along with this garbage.

They must be high-fiving each other seeing articles like mine and others like it.

My dears, you are completely alienated.

For some bucks ...

Is it worth it?

Think about it: your mother embodies the spirit of the nation.

Is it worth it?!