Thus, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe do have daily papers and magazines and periodicals and television. What they do not have is media even remotely resembling the Western ideal. In some countries, this ideal is disparaged as a Western manipulative ploy or, worse, naive idealism. In others, it is a kind of holy grail to be pursued only in myths and narratives. Yet others view it with envy and aspire to it, but without much hope. To them, it is an ever-receding mirage. Perhaps that other phantasmagoria, the Internet, is the solution. In it, budding, fresh beginnings of irreverence and courage seem to coalesce into recognizable - though virtual - media. The small number of web surfers currently limits both their outreach and their survivability. But if Western trends are anything to go by, this is a temporary state of affairs. The Internet, this immaterial and ethereal medium might yet spawn the first real media and a return to reality. It might yet liberate the prisoners of all the telenovellas, foreign and domestic. It might yet win. (Article written on February 5, 2000 and published February 21, 2000 in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 7) Return The PCM Trail It is a typical bar in a typical Balkan or East European country in a typical yellow haze, air-polluted, very late evening. The din of raucous and numbingly repetitive music reverberates through the smoke-enshrouded joint. It is an external pandemonium intended to silence internal ones and to obviate the silences of solitude. Sofas with shabby, mutilated upholstery in bordello scarlet. A dim, bawdy luminescence. Huntresses and prey study each other wearily over oily drinks. The former scantily clad in cheap imitations of haute couture, lips enclosed in heart shaped, provocative, lipstick, their make up invitingly gross. The latter - foreigners, owners of coveted passports, cars and money (PCM), a ticket out of hell, a path to paradise, a promise. In the near and paranoiac past of most countries in transition, terror-filled xenophobia was both a wise survival tactic and an indoctrinated instinct. Self-insulated and psychotically suspicious regimes quarantined their populations and portrayed all foreigners as carriers of the malaise of social disintegration and the perpetrators of espionage and sabotage. In a classic cognitive dissonance, foreigners were denounced by the people and women who befriended them were pronounced whores. Only a select few could interact with the capitalistic plague and these were especially trained to prevent contagion.