When in Romania...

Romanians are different from Americans. When one of their great poets dies, thousands of people turn up to mourn. Adrian Paunescu, a figure of national literary fame, was extremely popular despite the odes he wrote to Nicolae Ceausescu. NPR reports:

Carrying flowers and beeswax candles, thousands of mourners gathered hours ahead of his funeral at the Bellu Cemetery in south Bucharest where he was buried next to another famous Romanian man of letters, the 19th-century poet Mihai Eminescu.

And his literary gifts are even described in religious terms:

"God loved the Romanian people so much that he gave us this volcano of a man ... who was born for poetry that flowed from his brilliant mind," said Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a nationalist politician, writer and friend of Paunescu.

Americans to Romanians: you are weird. Don’t you know that poets should die in poverty and relative obscurity? That’s how we roll in the G-20.