On Friday, Noe Joaquin Manuel, a 43-year-old functionary who works for the Defense Ministry, cracked open beers with friends on the balcony of his spotless new apartment.
Hours later, news came that his uncle, Arif, a forty-five-year-old functionary in a local government office, who lived a few blocks from the snooker hall, had also been killed: "He had come to buy bread for his children when the second blast killed him".
And in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, an old Clinton functionary, won the governorship against Ken Cuccinelli, a Tea Party-backed candidate by a much narrower margin than expected, forty-eight to forty-six per cent.
"The old party functionaries and the western investors found each other very quickly and worked out how to get the subsidies from Brussels," said Klaus Schröder, head of a research group at the Free University in Berlin.
(I met a former government functionary whose family survives on the $17 per week that his 13-year-old son makes by cleaning a print shop).
Mr. Akayev, a 56-year-old former scientist and Communist Party functionary who has been Kyrgyzstan's only president since independence in 1991, is considered likely to be re-elected with a comfortable majority.
The old ones were faceless functionaries that went wobbling down the streets on various errands, but these are sleek new servants designed to go in every home with trim humanoid bodywork and a blandly smiling face that gives them the air of what in the army used to be called "dumb insolence".
Amid the chaos, many former state functionaries turned into entrepreneurs.
An old ally of Mr. Chirac, a lifelong government functionary and former culture minister, Mr. Toubon knows the ancient art of protecting himself while oh-so-delicately criticizing an opponent.
"There's that lady Catherine Day, who is the secretary general of the commission, and she was on the radio," said the old man, correctly identifying the most senior non-political functionary at the commission.
There was an overlap between the old regime and the new government – securitate members got rich, functionaries in ministries continued to be self-serving and incompetent.
