Observing Hermann...

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The locusts are coming! No, wait. They’re already here. Or they are still here, I should say. Just when you thought that all of those evil American imperialistic McJob McGlobalizers had already sucked the life blood out of Germany and must have moved on to greener pastures down south (out east?) by now, word leaks out that US companies are continuing to invest heavily here.



According to an American Chamber of Commerce survey, a top 50 list so-to-speak, US firms are still pumping billions into Germany and directly employ over 800,000 people here, many of these actually believed to be so-called “Germans” themselves. Global Empire of Evil flagship McDonald’s employs most of these powerless, walking dead McZombies, of course, but it is closely followed by other American bloodsucking exploiteurs like Ford, ExxonMobil, IBM, Coca-Cola and Hewlett-Packard.

Many concerned German politicians now fear that these jobs are here to stay, too, most of these companies already having the biggest part of their relocation and downsizing process behind them. And to complicate matters even further, many American managers have an inexplicably positive view of Germany at the moment. They are under the mistaken impression that the Germans have somehow managed to “reform their system” and have “pulled themselves back up by the bootstraps” again. Stupid capitalist swine.

No mass protests are planned for the moment, but grassroots citizen groups have begun collecting signatures in the vain hope of fending off the money-hungry Geld geil (money hungry) ghouls before it is too late. But it already is much too late, of course. Stupid anti-capitalist swine.

Ich hätte gern einen McJob zum Mitnehmen.

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PS: Thanks for the Strike-Bike link, anonymous, was quite unfamiliar with it.

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PS: Thanks for the Tom Lehrer link, Indeterminacy.

Some people are destined to have more than their obligatory fifteen minutes of fame. Bruce Darnell understands this and has acted accordingly. So be the first (not) to get your original “The Handbag Must Live” t-shirt here. And if you’re not sure you want that t-shirt just yet have a look at an exclusive collection of some of Bruce Darnell’s way coolest videos here. You can even find posters of this guy pushing friggin’ cell phones at LIDL now, too, for crying out loud.

 

Yup, everybody is absolutely crazy about Bruce around here these days. It's a veritable Bruce boom. And it even looks like Germany’s Next Top Model show may soon have to start looking for its next top model catwalk trainer dude because of this. Bruce is off to bigger and better things. Was, noch besser (what, better than that)?

Why not? The sky’s the limit. After all, he did turn out to be the “secret star” of Germany’s Next Top Model show and somehow managed to outshine Heidi Klum and all of those other beautiful women traipsing around in, well, Bruce Darnell fashion. Yeah, right. Well that’s what one guy wrote here at least, although I’m convinced that he must be a closet Bruce Darnell fan.

Anyway, Germany’s ARD is trying to set Bruce up with a show of his own now. And I don’t really understand this because Bruce already is a show of his own. But if this adds more “drama, drama, drama” to his life, hey, more power to him. As long as you don’t take over for Anne Will later, Bruce, just keep knocking yourself out.

Irgendwas sagt mir, dass dieser Typ homosexuell ist.

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“I used to think America was dreadful,” says German media artist Florian Thalhofer. “But now I’m going to actually prove just how sucky it is.” “And I’m going to tell everybody all of the awful things they think they already know about Germany,” says his American counterpart Mark Simon. “Not that anybody out there could care less or anything.”



The two touchingly naive artist types are planning to spend their own kind of biblical 40 days in the desert, traveling through their respective enemy territories on a quest for something they like to call “authenticity”. Worse still, they are actually going to film all of this nonsense and show it to others outside their close circle of friends or immediate family.

An authentically bad idea, anybody out there who has ever taken a step outside his own Dorf or cow town already knows what the two will find: Thalhofer will come to the realization that authentic Americans really are loud, pushy, superficial, overweight and under-cultured while Simon is doomed to discover that Germans are authentically pedantic and aggressive, obsessed with order, speed on the autobahn, watch way too much soccer and really do drink lots of beer and eat tons of bratwurst.

And this idea isn’t terribly authentic, either. This type of America/Germany bashing thing has been done before. In fact, it gets done every day of the week. It’s called “the news”, or die Nachrichten, if you prefer. And you can’t change channels, either. Not really. You can only change countries, or deserts, if you prefer.

Sind Sie ein echter Amerikaner, oder bloß ein wahrer?

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Or never thought of asking, I should say. What is it with these public people out there these days anyways? First Eva Hermann commits reality TV hara-kiri by using the N-Word tantō, then Gabriele Pauli decides to switch careers and become a standup comedienne/cabaret artist by suggesting that marriages get stamped with a seven year shelf life, and now Berlin’s party-animal-self-made-gay-man-SPD-flip-flop-I-am-bored-with-the-city-of-Berlin-now-and-want-to-be-Chancellor-instead-but-don’t-tell-anybody-just-yet mayor Klaus Wowereit has published his memoirs. Thank goodness he made it in time too because he just turned 54.



Klaus (some call him “Wowi”) has been subjecting his Berlin subjects (and others like me who just happen to live here) to annoying little tidbits about his less than fascinating life in the Bild all week long now already already already and shows absolutely no sign of slowing down at the moment. In fact, he appears to just be “warming” up. Hardy, har, har – “warm” in German is a reference to being gay, kind of sort of. You know, as in “he’s so warm he can iron his clothes with the palm of his hand”?

Anyway, that’s about the only thing that is even mildly interesting about Klaus Wowereit, if you ask me. Okay, and the fact that he worked his way up from the bottom of the social ladder. I have to like that; I’m an American (it’s in the Constitution or something). But other than that, the guy is a dreadful, pompous bore, completely stuck on himself, blind with ambition and Profilneurose (obsessed with the limelight), and completely lacking in having any genuine idealistic conviction or real (real man?) character.

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In a sensational bid for leadership of the staunch and stuffy conservative German Christian Social Union (CSU), sensational looking Gabriele Pauli has suggested that marriages automatically dissolve after seven years.



Everyone here is shaking their heads in disbelief at her naiveté (or chutzpa, if you prefer) as nobody has yet figured out how to get a marriage to last even that long. With 38 percent of Germans marrying today getting divorced (herself included, twice), Pauli believes limiting the affair to an affair would be more efficient in the end and save everybody a lot of heartache and pain, not to mention all the dammed paperwork and drudgery that goes along with filing for a divorce.

Her idea actually makes sense somehow, somewhere, in a way, sort of. If you don’t do love, family, religion and all that, I mean. Hmmm, maybe that’s why she joined a party called the Christian Social Union, hard to say for sure, though. At an rate, her suggestion is officially doomed to failure from the start and that’s probably why she made the suggestion in the first place.

That and to get a little attention, I mean. Although I can’t understand how this woman would ever need to pull publicity stunts to get any of that. After all, she did get her start here, didn’t she (1990, I think)?

PS: Thanks for the values link, Indeterminacy.  

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After a dozen film festival showings and a good year and a half delay following its premiere during the Berlinale 2006, the Mecca of politically correct film culture, an obscure film distributor called Farbfilm Verleih has finally shown enough courage to bring out “Hamburger Lektionen” (The Hamburg Lessons), a reconstruction of video recordings taken in January 2000 of Imam Mohammed Fazazi in Hamburg’s Al-Quds Mosque. Fazazi held close contact to three of the four 9/11 suicide pilots who belonged to the Hamburg al-Qaida group.



No film distributor here has seen the need to touch this film up until now (think Danish Mohammed cartoon crisis, Germans in Afghanistan etc.), and the big film guys still pretend that it doesn’t exist and wouldn’t touch it anyway. Offering reconstructions of two entire Fazazi sittings given at the mosque before 9/11, the film is said to give insight into the inner-logic of Islamic sermonizers who, well, sermonize about Islam to al-Qaida suicide squads. And who wants to see that?

This sudden show of civil courage is purely coincidental and has nothing at all to do with the recent foiled terrorist attacks in Germany planned by plotters who had close contact to another Islamic preacher of hate (Said Khobaib Sadat) I am sure, but gee, I guess coincidences like these can be wonderful things, too (now Germany is threatened so maybe people finally want to see a film like this after all).

The Hamburg Lessons? Will they be as easy to learn as The Lower Manhattan Lessons were? Lots of people here don't seem to have even learned those yet.

So, liebe Schüler. Das hier ist ein Steuerknüppel.

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