Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Americanization nation

Everybody knows that Americanization is bad. Just ask any German you may or may not know and he or she will gladly tell you so, although he/she won’t necessarily be able to tell you just why that is. Just is. And this is especially so when it comes to national foreign policy, German national foreign policy, I should say. We don’t need no education, no Americanization, I mean.



So that’s probably why Chancellor Merkel’s CDU is about to unveil a totally way cool and original new foreign policy platform idea which has never been tried before in the Western World and has been custom-made just for Germany. It goes like this: They are planning to consolidate most of Germany’s foreign policy authority directly within Merkel’s Chancellery and thereby create a super-special-super-staff which will then have the capacity to coordinate security policy right there! Wow. Why didn’t we think of that? They are going to call it "the National Security Council", I think, only in German, which will make it sound even more secure. Or maybe they’ll just call it the mini-National-Security-Council-me instead.

None of those reckless, American-style experiments here folks. And it only gets better. Word is that they are also going to propose that Germany take steps to better protect itself from the threat of a nuclear attack from so-called rogue states (no, not France - they mean Iran or something) by supporting the introduction of something they are planning to call “a missile defense shield over Europe”. This is friggin’ brilliant if you ask me, which you won’t, but for that I’m now asking myself why didn’t any of those Schlafmützen (sleepyheads) back in Washington ever think of this. I mean, like what the hell do these people get paid for anyway?

The SPD seems to be against all of this for some reason and has ordered her talking head types to continually repeat the mantra “American-style mistakes, American-style mistakes…”, which wasn’t really necessary because that belongs to their standard mantra repertoire already but sicher ist sicher (better safe than sorry).

Amerikanische Verhältnisse bis zum Umfallen.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 16:33:27 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Israeli no problem of ours

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag (Happy Birthday), Israel! They’re doing their sixtieth this Thursday, you see. But don’t ever ask for help from us if the going ever gets any tougher than it already is. Military-wise, we mean. We won’t be there any more for you then than we aren’t there now for anybody else out there when the going gets tough, wherever that might be, despite our official foreign policy of explicitly stating otherwise.



Or at least that’s what most Germans think, if you want to believe the latest greatest survey out there. A mere 13 percent of Germans asked would be in favour of providing Israel with military support were that country to come under attack, again, for instance.

The young and the restless-type Germans in particular could particularly care less when it comes to what might happen to the Jewish state, too. A whopping 65 percent of those surveyed below the age of 40 do not believe that Germany has a “special responsibility” towards Israel because of its history.

That results like these seem to make Chancellor Merkel’s ritual recitation of this official “special relationship”, this “cornerstone of German policy since the days of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer”, ring hollow at best, like it has with all the Chancellors before here, well, who cares? She’s just attending a birthday party, after all, everybody here is thinking. And if push ever comes to shove we can always apologize for our official change of heart later.

Eine schöne Bescherung, oder?

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klar.

Posted by clarsonimus at 17:05:32 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Let’s all not get it together

Proving yet again that you can be a smart and politically-aware German intellectual type and still not have the slightest idea what the Berlin Wall was, photographer Kai Wiedenhoefer and his Left and Green Party supporters in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district will be exhibiting an exhibition which will equate the West Bank “Wall” with the Berlin one. This exhibitionism will be taking place on the eastern walls of the East Side Gallery, itself a wall, the largest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, get it? Am I going too fast?



That he doesn’t know why the Israelis have built the wall in the West Bank is perfectly understandable (he doesn’t want to understand, that would only make him sad), and that the US Americans only want to oppress Mexico by building the one along their border to that country is an established establishment fact (Canada is next, by the way), and that there are many, many, many much more such walls out there of this nature than he or his friends or most of the rest of us are even aware of is also understandable (hmmm, makes you wonder why he picked out Israel, doesn't it?), but die Mauer itself? He really doesn’t know why it was built? I’ll give him a little hint: It was built to keep people in.

But to be fair, Herr Wiedenhoefer has explained why he is so concerned and why an exhibition like this is so absolutely positively necessary right now. “The UN said border walls are illegal,” he said in an interview. “People need to take notice of this.” Well there we have it. Now if the UN ever gets around to making suicide bombings and illegal immigration and all that other nasty stuff some of us insist upon relating to illegal border walls like this illegal, too, well, that will be a great leap forward for mankind or something. Think of all the exhibitions we will be able to do then.

“We don’t need no education.”

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 10:47:22 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Friday, May 02, 2008

Euro Schmoyro

If you ask most Germans, and I wouldn’t if I were you, they will tell you that they want to have the Berlin Wall back. They also want the Sandmann, the World Cup, cheaper beer and gasoline, snow in the winter and Sabine Christiansen back, too (ich will, Anne Will, we all will). They will also tell you that they want Tempelhof Airport back and it isn’t even gone yet, but that’s another story. Well tough tooties, people. You can’t have them. It’s over. Move on.



And now they come at you heuldend (whining) about wanting to have their money back, too. Their old German as in Deutsche Mark currency money, I mean. Actually, they’ve wanted it back ever since it was yanked away from their cold and clutching fingers thirty or forty years ago or whenever it was and have made no secret about it ever since. The word on the street is, unreliable as it is, that consumer prices basically doubled here with the introduction of the euro and everybody’s still mad as hell about it and isn’t going to take it anymore (that prices here in Germany are greatly lower than in other neighboring countries is something they are either not aware of or don’t care about).

Not only that, lots of these new fangled euro coins and bills are from other European Euroland countries other than Deutschland ITSELF and this appears to make Germans nervous or suspicious or something, having to carry around somebody else’s foreign money like that, I mean. Unless they are coin collectors or something, of course.

In other words, who cares what the Germans think? They are the last to give a you-know-what about whatever it is Germans are complaining about at the moment themselves. They don’t take any of this moaning stuff seriously themselves, in other words. So why should you? Oh, you don't either? Damn. Then you could live here, too.

And überhaupt (and anyway), what’s so bad about the euro? They ought to see how far they get tying to spend dollars these days instead.

Je oller, je dollar.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klar.

Posted by clarsonimus at 08:12:11 | Permanent Link | Comments (5) |

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Been there done that

This discussion about lifting the ban on Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Germany, I mean. And although it’s nothing new when foreigners like me are dismayed about the fact that Mr. Psycho Man’s manifesto is still unavailable here (at least not openly and through the “proper” channels), I vaguely remember having read parts of it once in high school, by the way, it is a bit out of the ordinary when German historians openly push for its republication, now, or even now, or especially now, before the copyright lapses in 2015, that is.



Of course not even these guys are prepared to hand the rag over to their countrymen pur (straight), on the rocks, no chaser, so-to-speak. Germans being Germans and used to experts telling them what and how and sometimes even when to think (mischief makers here, German or otherwise, regularly criticize this pronounced German tendency to Bevormundung or paternalism), these said historian guys want to bring out a special high-speed and highly annotated version of Mein Kampf so they can make absolutely sure that any German reading it knows at all times that this is a very bad book indeed. I mean, we don’t want to cause any misunderstandings and get everybody all riled up again, now do we?

But I don’t know if this is such a sound idea. And not because the Germans who might read the book already know quite well what the deal is. My concern is this thing is already some 700 pages long as it is and by annotating it, well, this could even add more insult to the already grievous injury it is. I mean, if you’re going to take the effort to publish something like Mein Kampf, you don’t have to make it unreadable, it already is.

Is this annotation stuff maybe just some kind of a clever backdoor ban all over again or something? Or maybe these guys are just on LSD. Whoah. The colors.

Da muss man jetzt schon kämpfen, um überhaupt weiter zu lesen.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 17:15:43 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, April 28, 2008

Tempelhof is dead, long live Tempelhof!

It was democracy in action again yesterday in Berlin, and it all went terribly wrong. Well, in my view it did. We all know that a government is only as good as the people who elect it (or vote it out of office), but if anybody ever had any doubts about referendums, well, here we have it. The same holds true for them, too.



Let’s do the numbers: Although opinion polls before the vote indicated that 60 percent of Berlin’s population was in favor of keeping Tempelhof open, only a mere 21 percent of those eligible even took the trouble to vote. Unfortunately, a 25 percent turnout was the minimum needed for the referendum to pass, the first such referendum in Berlin’s history, by the way.

But hey, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of a century-old chapter of heroic aviation history and the “Mother of all airports” (Sir Norman Foster). And who knows? Maybe something good will come out of this, other than all the cool new graffiti we’ll be able to enjoy on Tempelhof's walls starting this October, I mean.

New ideas are being sought for what to do with the monstrous facility, after all. I just hope nobody suggests putting any of these new ideas up to a vote.

If it wasn’t for disinterest, I wouldn’t have no interest at all.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Logisch.

Posted by clarsonimus at 16:55:21 | Permanent Link | Comments (7) |

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Help me man, I’m sick

So like here’s the latest and greatest only-in-Germany, help-me-because-I’m-a-victim-too-industry startup. Starting today, a group of business-savvy Berlin psychologists are opening Germany’s first advice bureau for stalkers. These guys are going to make a killing, too.



I know what you’re thinking: An advice bureau for stalkers? What, advising them how to stalk better or what? Nichts da (no way). This outreach center is actually designed to help cure those poor and unfortunate victims who have even poorer and more unfortunate victims that are still out of reach for them. At least for now, huh, huh, huh.

You know, explain to these guys, in this case during the course of 16 well-meant and emotionally-bonding counseling sessions, how it is that most people don’t consider stalking to be very polite or nice and how their obsession, although certainly no fault of their own, is often even perceived as being socially unacceptable and socially irresponsible behavior (or misbehavior if you prefer) and maybe even, as some would say, socially criminal, or criminal, at the very least.

Anyway, other countries have attempted similar anti-stalking programs in the past - in my country, for instance, we call it “jail” - but none have addressed the wants and the needs of the stalker himself with anywhere near the depth and efficiency that this one does, or should.

It’s called The Stop Stalking Office or something, by the way, but I couldn’t find their link anywhere. I do think I know where they are located, though. And now I am going to go out there and find them and observe them, long and hard, no matter what, again and again.

Neue Lebensinhalte braucht der Mensch.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klar doch.

PS: I would buy stalk in this company. Get it?
Posted by clarsonimus at 15:34:20 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Monday, April 21, 2008

Democracy? Nein, danke!

Think the old Pink Floyd “we don’t need no education” line only replace it with democracy and that’s what you’ve got here in Germany, folks. If you trust these latest survey results, that is (which I don’t, nicht wirklich). Hey, that was from The Wall, wasn’t it? How ironic.



Anyway, according to the Leipzig Institute for Market Research, only 60 percent of Germans surveyed have confidence in the democratic system as it is practiced today in the Federal Republic of Germany (in the eastern part of Germany it’s less than half at 44 percent). But when it comes to authority, the survey says that 85 percent of Germans trust authority figures, like their police.

Don’t get me wrong, I think trusting the police is a good thing. But how does all of this fit together? On the one hand you’ve got this perpetual gebetsmühlenartig (repeated like a mantra) “Nie wieder Krieg!” and “Nie wieder Faschismus!” and down-with-authority chant going on 24/7, while on the other hand the same people seem perfectly prepared to toss their tried and true democratic system out the window (the only system that has ever really worked here, by the way) and maybe even make themselves comfortable for a while in the next police state experiment while they’re at it. Or what else does this mean?

And these are the same Germans who want a permanent seat in the UN, too? Like I said, none of this fits together. But how do those other old lyrics go again? "You don’t miss your water until your well runs dry."

Democracy schmockracy!

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Logisch.

Posted by clarsonimus at 17:09:33 | Permanent Link | Comments (9) |

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Back to the future to the past again

Germans can be einfach kompliziert (simply complicated) sometimes. And they don’t even seem to notice or mind all that much when they are being that way, too; which is kind of what makes all of this so complicated, which is simple enough, when you get down to it, really.



Take Oskar Lafontaine of the Left party, for instance, please. This guy belongs to a party that just got over “an issue” about firing one of its own for openly being a communist (the Left party, communist in essence you see, does everything it can to gain some middle ground here by telling everyone that they are in fact not) and now he wants to yank the rudder back over again by calling for parts of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to be officially adopted as party policy (the Communist Manifesto, unlike Mein Kampf, is not banned in Germany, by the way). Whatever.

It seems that he finds parts of the work to be very contemporary because of all of the “naked, shameless, direct and brutal exploitation” going on in Germany these days. Uh, okay. I haven’t seen those parts of Germany yet but I’m sure that they must exist if Oskar says they do because he’s a street fighting kind of man who has had to punch and claw his way up from the dregs of society or something to the top of the heap where the other dregs live to become the multi-millionaire media megalomaniac he is today.

Of course Oskar’s real problem is something else altogether. He, like Marx, wants to be “Europe’s most dangerous man” and it’s just not happening. He is certainly one of Europe’s most ridiculous men and/or political Witzfiguren (laughing stock figures), I think, but he may not have the wherewithal to distinguish himself as the clear number one among all the others out there. The competition never sleeps, you know (see Berlusconi). Quoting Marx in 2008 isn’t a bad move, I must say, but something tells me it just won’t be enough.

Karl Marx: “Ich bin kein Marxist.”

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klar.

Posted by clarsonimus at 18:24:47 | Permanent Link | Comments (12) |

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Power down and out in Berlin

It looks like there’s a new twist to German plans to bury their excess CO2 when nobody else is looking and no one really is looking all that close if you ask me.



The new twist seems to be that piping their hot air underground was more of a pipe dream than anything else and won’t wirklich (really) work so they’ll just begin shutting down some of their coal-burning power plants this summer instead, in old-fashioned American-style rolling blackout fashion, and get rid of even more CO2 than they were not getting rid of before by not creating it in the first place.

That half of Germany’s electricity is produced with coal is bad enough, I guess, but that they won’t even be able to pump the CO2 created in the process into some super cool secret underground repository for future generations to let out into the atmosphere later when they need to is, well, that’s even worse, I think.

Give me warp power, Scotty.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klar doch.

Posted by clarsonimus at 01:23:10 | Permanent Link | Comments (3) |
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