Open Letter to the BBC

Apparently it is time to revive this blog. And what better occasion than to call out the BBC's atrocious reporting on the refugee crisis affecting the Middle East and Europe.

The BBC continues to insist on calling the refugees migrants. Migrants are people, and understood as such by the public, who leave their homeland for economic reasons. Does anyone in their right mind think that people are running away in their millions from Syria because of economic reasons?

Also, in case Europe has her panties in a bunch about 500,000 people coming to their shores one needs to point out that Lebanon already takes care of over a million refugees from Syria. Lebanon has 17 million inhabitants. The EU over 500 million.

Also, in case our dear leaders have amnesia, which is a rhetorical flourish, they should remember that the direct causes for this refugee crisis are the wars that the USA and her Allies, for example Europe, have waged in the Middle East for the past 15 yeas and counting.

So here goes nothing, because unless I stand with a Molotov Cocktail in front of the BBC's office, they won't listen to little old me, unless you make this go viral. You can also write the BBC yourself here.

Dear Madams and Sirs,

Please rectify your naming convention of the people fleeing the Middle East. They are not migrants, they are refugees. 

Migrants denotes economic reasons for leaving a home country. These are not economic migrants. It should be obvious, even to a formerly highly regarded news organization such as the BBC, that women and children are not economic migrants.

Call them what they are, Refugees from the war torn Middle East. 

You might as well do some real reporting and talk about the power vacuum, which is the cause of this refugee crisis, left behind by the departure of the USA and her allies, after having destroyed any semblance of civil societies in the Middle East. 

Sincerely,

Peter Illetschko

trying on that wide angle lense

In respecting the sentiments of CMC, a patriot and warrior on Memorial Day, I was going to post the below at a later date. But I realized this debate is what Memorial Day is all about. I hope to hear similar debates, if hopefully better informed than I am, between the contenders for the highest office in this country. Too long we have been forced to listen to canned prepared 60 second speeches.



You think war is hell because soldiers die, soldiers come back with bad wounds, and some of them go crazy. You think that running around in a strange land shooting people is the ultimate sacrifice for your country. As horrible it is to point your gun at another man, as horrible it is to see life snuffed out all around you, as horrible as it is to see your brothers die around you, you do not know the hell of war until it reaches your mother’s doorstep. You do not know the hell of war, until you have to worry about a gang of soldiers coming into your house and raping and killing your family in front of your eyes. You may have seen all of these things, but that horror is not yours. You do not know the consequences until your home has been reduced to rubble and you go through the remnants to find your grannies dentures, because that’s all that survived the napalm. This explains why Europe is somewhat fearful of the trigger happiness the USA displays. They have in living memory destroyed everything around them. They did it themselves, have nobody to blame but themselves, but it does engender a sense of restraint. When this country invaded Iraq for the second time my mother called me to tell me that the man in black leather boots is walking again. She has the same visceral reaction to these kinds of events as you have on the Fourth of July. War is hell, and the sanctified version (where are the body bags?) that the American public is served with their daily dose of “we are the saviors of the world” should make you, a Vet, cringe. Or do you accept this little white lie as a small price to pay, truth as the collateral damage so to speak, in order to keep the home front in line?

Small countries around the world are constantly engaged in unspeakable atrocities, and the way the USA justifies going to war against her enemies is somewhat of a role model for them. How many times have you recently heard some little petty dictator call his political opposition terrorists and proceed to drop American made ammunition on them? He has as much right to do that as we had a right to go into Iraq. And how do you think that opposition feels when they pick up a dud that says “Made in the USA” in loud and proud letters? You think the USA goes into every conflict freeing some innocent peoples of their dictator. But if the best, the most moral, the most glorious, the most democratic, the most land of the free and home of the brave lends legitimacy to might over right you can be sure that all the little bad guys will follow our lead. Especially when they see how well the propaganda works in the USA. Of course it is not our fault that these little dictators follow our lead, but who else are they going to follow, especially since we do it so well?

You equate an error in judgment of whether we should go to war to an error of aiming the parachutists in WWII. Aren’t those two completely different shoes? Isn’t that comparing me buying orange juice instead of apple juice, as my mother asked me to, to her asking herself whether she should have a baby in the first place? I do believe that a decision to go to war or not is a little grander than reading a map incorrectly, although it would seem that the US Military in recent history can be accused of that as well. One could allow that the civilian leadership in this country is not very good at reading maps either, since they thought that Bin Laden was in Iraq – but we know that’s not what Iraq was about. If you are not mad at the Republicans for taking you into an unjustified war, at least you should be mad at the incompetence of the leadership of this war. I don’t know what the reason for their inability to consider historical campaigns are, and I don’t understand why their learning curve is so low that it took them 5 years to figure out that they are in a guerilla war, let alone how to deal with it, but I know that if I would put my life on the line for this shit, I would expect a little more skill from my leaders. When Kara Mustafa did not manage to take Vienna in 1683 the Sultan sent him a silken cord. Nobody is asking Rumsfeld to do anything but disappear into ignominy, and the least our current leadership could do is follow him and let some fresh minds work the problem.

So the USA has been messing with the Middle East for the last fifty years. I don’t understand how you think that gives us the right to go in there and bomb the place to smithereens. You know all the history of the former Secretary of Offense shaking hands with our current enemies, using the Afghanis against the Sowjets, installing the Shah in Iran, then turning around and setting Saddam Hussein on Iraq when they revolted against our puppets. The list is endless, and can be continued at leisure in South America without either justifying the current action, or actually being laudable. What would you say if Russia invaded Afghanistan tomorrow, and justified it by saying “Tovarisch, my grand daddy was fighting the mullahs and their American made MPs. We have been in that dusty, godforsaken joint for so long that in the beginning we had to use Camels to get around.” How about Cuba? What if China invades Taiwan, they certainly have been there a minute (if you measure it in millennia)? So does it give them the right?

And how did we go from justifying this invasion with “Them boys got WMD and Nerve Gas that will make your skin come off in bubbles” to “Saddam has been a threat to the governments around him for years” to “He killed the Kurds” to “Man, we been there for 50 years”. I hope you have a larger context in mind than just a temporal one. Because when I look at the justifications above, I see them all as fairly applicable to the USA. You know more about weapons in all shapes and sizes than I do. Tell me do we have stockpiles of nerve-gases? Do we have suitcase-sized nukes in violation of none-proliferation treaties? How many times have we invaded a country in the last 50 years, compared to Saddam Hussein and Iran? Are we going to fight wars in all places when they disagree with us just because we have built a base and hung around after the last ass-kicking?

If you have been involved with a region for fifty years, wouldn’t you hope that this, the best, the most moral, the most glorious, the most democratic [here insert more tiresome, patriotism inducing rhetoric used in each and every country around the world; Austria is the best country in the world because of our music and our mountains] country in the history of the world would do better than what we see now? If morality, right over might and most importantly history are on the side of the USA, on top of us being just absolute hot stuff, shouldn’t you demand better results than what has been delivered by a huge majority of Republican Presidents over the last 40 years? It can’t have been the Democrats’ weak FP since they fumbled themselves to only three victories in that time period. Somehow we always are told that these things take time. That just around the corner you can see the final solution to the problem. Ask me when this final solution will become real. And I will tell you that it will remain the mirage that it is until the day the oil runs out and the day Christian Fundamentalists get it on with Muslim Fundamentalists in some mythical battle to ring in the Apocalypse. Hopefully this will coincide, so that my Middle Eastern friends will only have to bury their families once. Of course by that time we will have found ample reason to be camped out in some other country that we just bombed back into the Stone Age. Did I tell you that you do not know the horrors of war until your sister is raped with the business end of a gun, so that she may never bear children to her rapists’ enemies?

Considering the results of voting a Republican into the White House all but three times these past 40 years, I will concede that I do not understand this country, in as much as the definition of crazy is expecting different results from repeating the same actions. I admit I do not understand crazy. You wonder why your friends, your sons and daughters die in distant places, you wonder why your treasure is spent on annihilation instead of edification, you wonder why the crazy people get thrown out of their asylums and the poor turned out of the hospitals (How The Gipper became so revered is beyond me, your blue collars are gluttons for punishment by the rich; at the most he played better poker than Gorbachev), you wonder why the rest of the world looks on in astonishment as you greet the end of the Cold War by building suitcase-sized nukes. I do not think that a Republican victory will happen again in 2008 because I have more faith in the mob-thinking of the masses, as I just do not see them being able to think as independently as you and those unidentified Republican pollsters. But if it were to happen it would send a great message to the rest of the world. That finally that horrible baby boomer daydream/nightmare, which has managed to vote a literal dynasty of Democratic Presidents into office, kept the poor Republican minority not only out of power but also forced to follow a weak FP and listen to lefty elitist mass-media propaganda is over. Oh, you say that only three Democratic Presidents were elected into office over the last 40 years? Well, then those Democrats surely must have been successful at running the joint behind the backs of the guys with the Veto Pen. A Republican electoral win would also send a message that this young nation is no longer naïve, altruistic and optimistic. That she has left behind that early childhood stage of blind trust in the goodness of others. That she has entered full blown puberty and must thus be given the freedom to act out for a couple of years. Unfortunately, she is not a harmless little teenager, whose worst action could be to mess up her own life because she didn’t know about condoms since her mum was busy either in the Women’s Power Association, or in her church. Instead and unfortunately, she is the 800 pound gorilla and liable to break some China and there is a lot of China to mess with. In due time she will come to sit at the family table, slightly remorseful over all the shit she put her poor parents through.

In the meantime how often will she bring the true horrors of war to the shores of foreign lands? Your claim to nobility, that you are not using your mincemeat-making arsenal (even though you say you are not superman - which one is it?) is so beyond me that I can’t even come up with an appropriate simile. How many Philippinos, Vietnamese and Iraqis need to die conventionally before you admit to yourself that merely not dropping your nukes does not make you civilized? You label Europe sophisticated, and somehow that is an insult, when you yourself are victim to the most fascinatingly sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of the world. You could throw a dart at a world map, you are welcome to use that terrorism map on your wall, and as long as you aim south of the equator you will most likely hit a resource rich country in which the USA installed and/or supported a regime of horrific proportions. In fact, we both know that some of the worst terrorists come out of those places. Yet you insist that we are doing it out of the goodness of our bleeding hearts. Wouldn’t it be intellectually and morally more honest to stand up and say “Yes, we run this joint as we see fit, and for the maximum profits of our people”? Because that’s what we do, and our outstanding standard of living is based on it. And that is the reason in a nutshell that this country keeps voting Republican. Deep down inside we are all selfish, and we want that cheap oil, the cheap gadgets from china and the lovely diamonds from the Congo. If only in a very small measure we reaped what we sowed on 9/11 I am mildly perturbed to think of the future reaping we will be going through. Of course we can always ratchet it up, fight a harsher war, build bigger bunker busters, chase them more, but will that create anything else but a spiral of violence? How did that work out for Israel so far? Do you want to put your child on a bus and worry if that bus will implode in some idiot’s righteous anger?

And yet you still believe that you are the savior of the world, because your government somehow manages to pull the freedom wool over your eyes when you should have been seeing the money trail all the way from your pocket to the war in the Middle East and back to record profits in the coffers of Exxon Mobile (the funniest thing is how surprised all the business analysts are now, at the news that those companies are not making billions of dollars anymore when a Democrat is about to be elected). Personally, I am going to throw up if I get another tax refund check because I was taxed incorrectly for the Spanish American War.

You like the guy like a wise man should like a fool. You can learn from him, but he will never learn from you. This is fine, as long as I want him to dance with some tribal leaders in Africa. But when I want him to consider the consequences of his actions in a place fraught with historical fault lines such as the Middle East, I would prefer a guy whose librarian wife forced a couple (of thousand) history books down his arrogantly uneducated throat. Yes, I think that a man who can’t form a straight sentence should not be running the world. In fact, I would be completely fine with having a guy at the helm that I can absolutely not stand. As long as I think he is smart and moral enough to do right by the world he can be the prick from hell. You think to be smart and eloquent is bad. As if stupidity guaranteed honesty and intelligence implied duplicity. I would prefer to think of the political class as duplicitous by nature, and if they all are that, let’s have one who has read a couple of books along the way. Since the Republicans over the last 40 years have not been able to supply that, let’s give the Democrats a chance to either proof me right, or you wrong for the next 40 or so years.

in response to “The please like us Party”

Once again I must congratulate the Crack Emcee. I love how he puts it all together. Short and sweet sentences, pictures that say more than a thousand words, easily digestible and easier to follow. It’s just hard to read at work, people wonder why I am checking out “Give ‘em Hell, Harry” Truman and Easy Rider pictures while I am supposed to be diligently cogging away in my cube.

The analysis of Clinton and Gore as war mongers who wanted to increase the Offense Budget, while not inhaling, and of Mini Bush (this is an age categorization, when you measure the Bushes by their fuck-ups, he outshines daddy like a stadium flood light would a candle) as the humble Foreign Policy guy, who never really wanted to fly that damn plane anyway, let alone in Vietnam really surprised me. I must have been dreaming when I saw all that “weak on FP liberal” dirt thrown at them. And I must have been dreaming when it was assumed that George Bush would be strong on National Security and proceeded to fumble his way through every international situation like only a Bush can (head in soup in China, planes shot down in front of China, non-signatory of small arms treaty).

However entertaining the above reversal of roles is, the salient point seems to be that once a President is in office, he can not afford to cater to either his hard right or hard left anymore. Real Politik sets in, and the world has to be taken seriously and with as little ideological baggage as possible. The USA is not in an easy situation, the most powerful nation on the planet, everybody wants a pie(ea)ce of her – you know this if you ever played Civilization. Mostly we seem to be running around like a schizoid teenager, who wants nothing more than to be loved for her loyalty and friendship (export of democratic freedoms), yet is painfully aware that if make-up (oil) is not secured in the short run she will loose power, and that for that reason her grand station in this high school (world) relies on dominating commerce and the procurement of certain lipsticks (metals) and mascara (resources). Morals and walking over dead bodies to get the resources you need in order to impose your will is difficult to pull off at the same time, at least not without smallish PR fallouts. Especially while remaining the good guys the USA used to be after WWII - for which I personally am hugely grateful, as I would have grown up either a Nazi Youth, or behind the Iron Curtain.

I suspect that the same situation vexed Truman and grand old Roosevelt, the difference being that not every Joe Blow was blogging their ass off about it, JFGIing every bloody comment while digging up divorce statistic and old campaign buttons. The lies don’t fly as easy anymore. And lies are part of the game. Whether you are Democrat or Republican, you need to play an international game of chess with people who are absolutely ruthless and with their backs to the wall. That’s like putting me in the ring with a rabid, wounded Doberman. I know you gave me a gun to defend myself, but most likely that bitch will be way faster than I can ever hope to be.

I think we should leave the ideology behind, leave the campaigning behind, leave all the rhetoric behind, and judge both Republicans and Democrats by their results. This gets hard when you consider that a lot of these wars stretch out over opposing administrations. But lets try: It would seem that WWII was rather well done. Korean War, was a write-off, probably quite useful though. Vietnam, a big clusterfuck. And the Gulf Wars could only be described as silly, if they wouldn’t be so expensive. What is the thin red line through all these wars? I believe it to be that the USA does better the more right she is. I am all for kicking some ass around the world, and nothing annoys me more than my Euro Friends who just yadda after their media and hate everything the USA does, BUT it seems that when the dust settles and we actually consider if we had a right to enter into a war, we can directly correlate that to our success with it. This makes me hopeful. In fact I rejoice that the USA always looses when she looses her moral compass. It makes watching all those tedious Hollywood happy endings bearable, as it seems as if really only the good guys can win in the end. And whenever even our glorious behind is wrong we fall on it, just like the Ruskies did and hopefully the Chinese will soon.

We did not have the right to invade Iraq. If you base that argument on human rights, you need to ask your congressman (the ones with the actual power to declare war) to invade China right now. And you should have done the same when every single democratically elected government in South America was overthrown with our help. If you base it on WMD, let’s go to N. Korea, and Pakistan right now. Both of which are a lot more unstable and actually HAVE some, compared to Iran for example. If you think that our current success (I measure success by not seeing white boys dying on the beaches of the Korean Peninsular) in N. Korea is based on hardass Foreign Policy you are plain wrong. It is based on what you would call lily-livered democratic “please like us” party principles, which was only initiated because we saw that kicking ass didn’t work in the Middle East, and because we ran out of money. I am not sure which reasoning I prefer.

You, the citizen, were conned into going to war in Iraq; remember Colin Powell and his little sample of whatever-the-bloody-hell scared us just so in front of the UN? Although I do believe that every citizen bears responsibility, and that in this regard you failed only a little less than Colin Powell, I will halfheartedly grant that you were conned into sending your boys to die for nothing. For this reason we need to present a bill for the huge error of judgment and arrogant group-think that was the result of a bunch of neo-cons getting together and trying to reorder the world in their image.

This is not a somehow diffuse case, with lots of competing variables to consider. Just look for the people who planned and implemented the war. They are gone. Their own party, their own President has forsaken them. This is not a liberal conspiracy. If they would have been right, they would still be dancing victory laps on The Mall. And don't tell us we didn't tell you so. We did, Obama for example. The people of the USA were tired of being conned back then, and they are pissed at being conned now, and they will present a bill to the Republican Party who is, as I write this, running for the hills (yup, an undisclosed location). The upcoming bill will be the second part of a lay-away bill, the first part of which was presented during the last mid-terms.

I think McCain’s story is absolutely fascinating. Nobody can even come close to imagining what it is like to spend 5 years at the Hanoi Hilton except for Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. I have tried, but I gave up. I admire his politics of the past years even if most died-in-the-wool Republicans wanted to vomit in their mouths when he was driving campaign finance reform. And he was nominated exactly for these reasons. He won the Republican nomination because he is the most Democratic of all Republican candidates. So please spare me all that talk of why Republicans are better on FP. They are not; they conceded that by nominating McCain. Campaign Finance Reform? Bring it on! Marrying one hot woman who looks just like the last one he dumped? Bring it on! (I am Austrian; I have no problem with how he lives his private life. You do though, you hated Clinton's BJ, so be honest.)

But supporting the President unconditionally in regards to the failed policies of the Middle East? That is unacceptable. The Republican Party and John McCain have to learn that lying to the people will cost them dearly. It might even usher in a new Democratic Age, how ironic that would be, and so sweetly and justly making Carl Rove rotate in his little southern (yup, undisclosed as well) plantation grave.

aryan mum bitch slap

This is funny:










This is funnier:







Well, what else do you expect:






Apparently too much:





Aryan Mum Bitch Slap:

the EU, such a small country

Being such a small country as Europe is, it is really amazing that you speak, like, so many languages there. I mean, we have, like, 40 % Mexicans in this country and we don't even speak Spanish", says the eternally surprised, marginally endearing, like, stupid woman. I will not dwell on this specific achievement of intellectual absenteeism, but instead share with you the traps of deer eyes.

This is the second time in three weeks that I am looking into a pair of huge orbs of liquid. Exquisitely shaped, lovingly manufactured they nevertheless remain pits of emptiness which manage to briefly distract from the rest of the sagging façade. At first I think “My, what big eyes you have”, then I realize the façade is just that - a Potemkin Village melting into the mud it arose from, the window frames remaining the only solidity left behind. They, the pits of emptiness, or if you prefer, the huge orbs of liquid, do not however distract from the other pair of orbs gently nudging me a little lower - equally exquisitely shaped and lovingly manufactured. I have your attention? I know I do, nothing garners attention in this large country (it’s a country, right?) of linguistically challenged prudes as the mention of over sized lovingly manufactured orbs.

Because of that I will now dwell after all. To state the obvious, sort of like her empty orbs, Europe is not a country. I might as well gently nudge you and tell you that yours does not contain 40 % Mexicans. Even though I know you like to exaggerate, again, sort of like your orbs gently nudging me, this is too much. Just because there are a lot of Latinos in Arizona, doesn’t mean there is an equal amount in the rest of the USA. If you would be correct in your estimate, there wouldn’t be any white people left. Some might say this would be for the better.

Also, if you would bother to take a closer look at any minority in any of Europe's many none-integrated countries, you would find that neither do those countries learn that minority's language, nor does a minority have anything to do with the fact that Europe harbors a gazillion different languages. Please stop trying to impress me with your none-existent suave worldliness. If your biggest goal in life, and some might say that this is for the better, is to have blue-eyed children you should probably be glad to be born in this wasteland of the mind. I certainly am, that you are. Your gently nudging orbs and lack of response to outside stimuli will be quite sufficiently impressive in their own rights to reduce me to the quivering mass of meat that I try to lift myself above on a daily basis. Thank you for making it easy.

America, my favorite catholic schoolgirl

have at first blush nothing in common. In fact many of you will yell “Au contraire!” After all, wasn’t it hard for JFK to convince voters that it is ok to vote for a catholic? Funny, that. And it surely has to be depressing for the pope to visit the USA. One mass in Rio has 100 times more attendees than three weeks of christmas here. Similarly, and to this day, I, being the eurotrashy anti-religionist that I am, do not understand how people here are all part of one christian sect or another but can’t stand what is the original christian sect. The ones who got thrown to the lions way back when.

But as with all things catholic, many contradictions have to be weighed and balanced against each other. If you disagree, just read on, and at least have a good laugh. This might be hard for you if you are either American or catholic. If you are both, and still laugh at the end of this, congratulations. Please send me a note and I will try to insult you better next time.

So let’s get to the second blush, the one where we get down to the nitty-gritty or as an American cartoon character would say the “the gigidy-gigidy”. Here, I believe, the similarities between the USA and a Catholic School Girl can not be denied. Even though catholics are weird to you Americans, the prim and properly boring nature of your relationship with your lust is decidedly catholic. You need to be more at peace with it.

For example:

• The USA always thinks that she is being attacked by an evil doer who wants to take her virginal (you think nobody else has it) freedom away by force. Girls here think that what they have is constantly craved by the next guy, and only to be given away under certain tightly defined circumstances. With which I have two problems: first, who says I want it so bad that I am willing to convince you that you do too? Second, when will you grow up and learn that it is yours to enjoy instead of give away? The tightly defined circumstances you are yoked to have nothing to do with your own needs or wants, and everything with certain catholic-seeming societal dogmas. Liberate yourselves to enjoy yourselves. Since you are still running into the glass ceiling, you might at least have some good sex, which contrary to local popular believe is your own to achieve.
• The USA always has the biggest guns, just like Pamela Anderson’s breasts.
  
• The USA always comes to help those in need, but only after imposing strict none-preventative measures of birth control. Reminds me of, I don’t know, every girl that I ever was with in this country. Sho really wanted to be there with me, just not really at the same time as me, if you catch my drift… out. If you did not catch it, let me quote Billy Connolly, “20 wild horses could not make me go the other way!”
• Every once in a while (read: all the time) the USA goes on a bloody rampage, causing mayhem in various more or less uncivilized places around the globe, and then spends years feeling guilty about it. If that doesn’t remind you of a catholic school girl nothing will. Mayhem = epicurean pleasure principle, or what feels good must be good; where the Nation drops bombs in righteous anger, and the girl discovers that her body is a temple of untold, numberless and mind-blowing pleasures. Uncivilized places = with a boy. Years of guilt = self explanatory.

So, now that we can all agree that if one would want to define the USA by way of an example from our human experience, the closest we can get to a true simile is a Catholic School Girl. The only cure for this lamentable condition is a thorough undermining of all previously, misleadingly so, held puritanical notions in order to help you establish a peaceful relationship with your lust. Barring this, a good fucking will do.

USA needs you Mara

We need more politicos like Mara in the USA. Not just because she would slap our homegrown public personas in shape real fast. If our puritan closet freakish men and women would be distracted by tits and ass a little more, maybe they would forget about figuring out new ways to drop scifi weaponry on stone age civilizations.

You think I am kidding? How many murders does a child see on day-time TV before age 14? How much tits and ass does the same child see? Which one of the two viewing habits is more naturally conducive to peace, love and happiness? How many years did the average continental European, the one you think of as a perverted freak, spend in some leafy jungle or some scorching desert chasing some imaginary enemy? How many children of your tits and ass hating nation have you sent to die in those places?

If your boys, your men and your leaders would be a little more comfortable with sex, with nakedness, with themselves, it is quite possible that they would not feel the need to go out into the big world and prove themselves as real men in the only way they have seen and learned from a young age.

Instead they could revel in the joys of their's and their lover's body - I just wanted to write that at least once in my life :) Does that sentence make you a little uncomfortable? Is that why you laugh a little forced now?

Don't get me wrong. I am not talking about hard core porn on day time TV (that should only be on late at night:) Being an American that is naturally the only way you can think of a naked body. To you it always is dirty, it always is demeaning, it always is something that your little girl/boy would never do. I am talking about a scene on TV, where it is implied that two people just got down, but somehow the girl covers her breasts after coitus. Now, why would a girl cover herself AFTER she just fucked the living daylights out of the hunk, whose hung you would definitely never-ever-never-ever get to see on American TV (now I realize why the girls always look so surprised)? The result is that you think to be naked is unnatural; it makes you think what just happened was dirty and wrong.

Instead of this farce it would be nice to see people act the way they really do after having sex, when waking up in the morning, when going to the master bathroom or when doing any number of things in life that happen to involve some degree of nakedness. It would also be nice for your children not to be subjected to endless gory repetitions of bullets exploding out of heads, knifes slashing throats and land mines leaving a fine red mist behind.

So let's bring on Carla Bruni, I mean Sarkozy, and lets bring on Mara Carfagna. If you don't like their breasts, maybe you can go for their lovely names. And maybe one day your son's eyes won't perpetually pop out of his head on his first Euro trip. And maybe a couple of years later he won't come home in a body bag.

PS: Do click on the image above.
PPS: Do run this query with your teeny-weeny adult filter off.
PPPS: I wouldn't actually vote for a girl that decides to go into politics because she only placed 6th in the Miss Italy competition. If I lived in Italy, that is. Strikes me as a bad choice for a future legislatress. On the other hand, here in the USA, she would be a welcome addition to our... uhm... body politic
PPPPS: Ok, If I would vote for her, I would watch C-Span even more than now.

confuse and castrate

Sex in the City is not a TV show that I watch diligently. So when my Dutch friend told me that she sometimes thinks that our lunch conversations resemble those of your dear heroines, I was naturally inclined towards suspicion. Because, or maybe in spite of this, during this particular lunch we chatted about the reasons for humans having such an enlarged thought processing unit, when compared to other mammals. Namely, the seemingly futile effort that both human species have been engaging in for eons: to find a rudimentary understanding of the other.

This conversation happens after another one of my episodes of Dating the American Woman, which usually provide hours of highly entertaining plotlines. Never mind the details, just know that it’s funny and that most of the time I try to tell myself that I enjoy contradictions. If you picture yourself starring in the movie “Sideways”, with a bottle of wine, and a feeling of emptiness where your cojones would usually be located, you are halfway to the embitchenated state that the American male finds hisself in. Which is what I try to avoid.

As a small side note: I have not seen this movie. My prejudice against movies about the castration of the American male is large and my patience limited. All I remember of the trailer are doe eyed dudes in convertibles drinking red whine and wondering where their balls went after the last one chopped them off and sacrificed them on her Altar to Confusion. Unfortunately, the girls here think they can bring the same strategy of Confuse and Castrate to the euro trashy boi that I am.

The husband of my Dutch friend is the envy of all men in my group. What is usually referred to as a woman’s insanity or propensity to wreck dramatized havoc in an otherwise pleasantly uneventful life is seemingly absent from his. She tells me this is so because Dutch men do not put up with the drama, they will simply leave when the girl tries to throw them for a loop. Before you cry wolf, know that when the guys try something that doesn’t fit into the rational pattern of human interaction developed by the low-landers the women do the same thing.

Now imagine young leetle Hansje, walking down a tulip infested street in a village just next to the canal, and this lovely leetle Marietje comes rolling along on her bicycle (which my Germanic grandfather grudgingly returned as part of the last war reparations in 1998). They see each other. They like each other. They agree to meet for coffee. They drink coffee and … (one month interlude here, they are good people, not HOs) kiss. They agree to meet again. Before that happens she lets him know that she thinks it’s not a good idea to keep going in that kissing direction, that she needs more time. But when they meet again, instead of this being true, it is only a matter of proving Hansje’s honorable intent; the game that ensues is a test. If, and only if, he jumps through any number of emotional hoops, he will get to kiss her again. If not, she will deny him. Now, if this would happen in Castration Central (CC) Hansje would gamely try to pass the test, jump through the Emo-Hoops and please his leetle Marietje to no end, just to get some satisfaction. Which, of course, he can't get. But since this is the low country he decides to keep his cojones around a little longer and moves on to a Marietje that puts her money where her mouth is… namely, between her legs (I don’t actually mean that, it just flows nicely, she can put her money in a piggy bank if she so desires). This being her fifth Hansje, Marietje learns that drama is unacceptable if she wants to hold on to a Dutch guy. And Hansje is similarly relieved of whatever silly macho notions he had about how to act around Dutch girls.

Seems to me that for the low-landers it is not about dominance, about castration or about who is on top. Instead it simply is alright for them to demand respect and to give it.

Which explains why the Flying Dutchman is the only one who doesn’t chime in when we share stories from the trenches of dating in CC, and why I am looking for a Dutch mail order bride catalogue. Feel free to send me one at any time.

1 is a tragedy, 1 million a statistic

killing prudes

The freshly showered man enters the locker room – with a towel around his waist. The towel stays wrapped around his waist as he twists himself into a pretzel and pulls his boxer shorts over his knees in a supremely awkward manner (he had just worked on his Latissimus and Gluteus Maximus). All of this contortion to shield his oh-so-privates from the prying looks of men. Usually one can only witness the other species of humanity do this on the beach, but then it is a pleasure. Considering that the freshly showered man just spent 2 hours chained to so many machines in order to improve his masculinity it is indeed surprising that the best of such symbols may not be shared with other similarly equipped humans, even though presumably that’s where the competition lies.

The freshly trained man walks down a dusty road – with a machine gun around his shoulder. The machine gun comes off in a flash as he falls to the ground and fires a stream of bullets with supremely devastating effect (he just did the work of a citizen). All of this carnage to shield our private interests from the prying hands of humanity. Usually one can only witness this happen to those other, mediocre tribes, but then it is a guilty pleasure. Considering that the freshly trained man just spent 2 months in boot camp, chained to so many of his compatriots in order to improve our masculinity it is not at all surprising that we share this symbol with other dissimilarly equipped humans, because that’s where the competition lies.

1776

Anyone ever read any David McCullough? I just read his book “1776”. I am partial to Mr. McCullough because I really enjoyed his biography on Harry Truman. From the couple of history books I have read in my short and brutish life I find his words the most accessible.

So this book deals with the beginning of the revolutionary war of the USA against the Evil Empire. It does not deal with the whole war, but only with the events from the siege of Boston, to the evacuation of New York to the battle at Trenton at the end of 1776. Mr. McCullough is a very popular describer of American History, he does it in a fresh and nicely disguised patriotic manner. You don’t even realize his bias, which is fine, since he probably does not either. Those brave Americans always faced the greatest odds, had the worst equipment and the most gallant of them all was his Excellency, Mr. Washington - God’s humblest servant - a man made of benevolent granite whose only foible was the correct construction of his home. If Mr. McCullough were British his work would unleash a physical revision of history.

I ate it up, there is nothing that gets me going like a well-rounded heroic epic of underdogs making good. But let’s just say we take all of the odds that the American revolution faced in that first fateful year at face value. What the reader must conclude then is that America is a nation born of war. With little means to defend what it thought to be its inalienable rights, with few men to stand up to the greatest army in the world, with even less equipment for those men, with no money to pay the peasantry so called to arms and with military leaders that surely had no clue as to the intricacies of killing and maiming as many of their opponents as possible. It is utterly beyond me how the Brits didn’t just absolutely massacre the Americans in a really short amount of time. The situation was so bad that at the end of the fighting season of 1776 there must have been somewhere upward of 40.000 redcoats around New York State and roughly 7000 American Soldiers, most of which had no shoes and the rest was sick to death, hungry, hadn’t been paid in months and shouldn’t even have been called a militia. So here is a collection of peasants with no protection against New England winters, no bullets, no intelligence (as in spying) and no leaders yet still they manage to somehow hang on. And in the end they triumph over what was supposedly the greatest army of all times.

This helps me realize why this country is the most secure in the history of humanity, yet the most insecure in its own mind (Chomsky). It was born form war, and it sucked at it. This hasn’t changed much over the last couple - three hundred years. The USA still likes to go to war, and she still sucks at it. The intelligence in both spying and plain strategic brainpower is still horrible. Mr. Washington had no clue what the Brits were doing, and neither do the modern Armed Forces. Usually we, the population, need to give our representatives and military leaders quite some times to get knocked about a bit in order to learn the lay of the land. And even then it is not to be taken for granted that all that firepower will guarantee a victory over those originally proclaimed to be easy prey bad guys. Don’t get me wrong, nobody is as excitable as my current country men when they think a good cause is on the horizon. They are just a little stupid when it comes to understanding who is holding that good cause up, and to what end. So in order to make up for sucking at fighting and strategery this country shoots up steroids like Roger Clemens. Rightly, they figure that if they can not compete in skill and motivation they at least can be twice as big as the other guy. Which of course only works a little bit, because if you are not good at kicking ass, and primarily rely on being grossly large, there remains the thought that there always is a bigger dude out there somewhere. Hence the perceived insecurity.

So lest you wonder why the USA is so easily aroused, consider that she was a child of war, like the last two generations of Afghanis, and that seemingly every weakness and strength of character and skill can be traced back to the Revolutionary War.

marx vs. tits = O : 1

Right now I feel like a very small Galilei who apparently told the inquisition "...und sie bewegt sich doch!" (Stamos, this quote is for you). Yes, I enjoy being right. Please forgive me. In exchange I aim to please with this here lovely piece of news.

This is for all you people who think that somehow the USA is lacking in certain cultured aspects, which the EU on the other hand supposedly breast feeds its lucky little ones. Apparently 2000 years of history, the museum at Bilbao, periodic Darwinian culling via disease, classical music, the Alhambra, Shakespeare, and finally a blessedly progressive union can not quiet Vox Populi. Which in this case screams so loud that even the institutions (sorry statisticians/accountants everywhere) which you think are genetically incapable of knowing of such things have to acknowledge what is important to the proletariat: Tits and Ass

The welfare of the masses doth not arise from backbreaking work in garment factories any longer. Neither does repairing of such humble devices such as your microwave count. Marx has finally been overtaken... by the breast implant. I know, we all expected the dictatorship of the proletariat after Capitalism and exploitation of the masses got hammered by Socialism. Sorry, the nose job beat them all to it.

As funny as this is, and it is way funnier then a crutch, it should give pause. Does the proletariat really need either the intelligentsia's protection or the trickle down economics?

you get the leaders you deserve

Winston Churchill, he of the immortal blood and tears speeches, left behind a legacy of wonderful quotes, one of them about Democracy being the least of all evils. I humbly usurp, and by no means without pleasure that ”In democracy you get the leaders you deserve”. Since I currently reside in the USA this is for at least one more year a juicy subject. One might say it is the reason for writing this piece. Mostly because I am sick and tired of everyone and their dog jumping on the Bush-hating bandwagon. In reality you are not getting on the wagon, you fell off a different one. You loved the little gunslinger and his paroles of letting those evil-doers hear from us very soon. You loved him so much so that even when you had the choice of correcting your error a couple of years later you abstained. You wanted more and no, you did not suffer from Stockholm Syndrom. For that to happen you would have to be taken hostage first and I do not subscribe to that arrogant left paradigm of the people being hoodwinked by the spectacles of propaganda. There was no hostage-taking of public opinion; there was no hoodwinking of the unsuspecting masses. Not even a little bit. You ask how I know this? In 2004 only 55.3 % of all eligible voters participated in their Oh, so cherished democratic duty. That’s a hot 4 % more than in 2000, when supposedly you just didn’t care and no pressing international agenda was on your mind. Of that grand half of all voters 51 % threw in their lot with Mr. “Put food on your family”. The supposed leader of the free world, a man who can’t form a sentence that makes sense for the life of him, was elected by 25 % of the eligible voters, or 62 Million Voters.

Instead of this apathy in the face of what is becoming a crisis of extinction level event proportions you should have either resoundingly kicked is ungainly behind in the gutter to be swept onto the trash heap of history, or at least provided him with a real mandate. Something like 80 % of the population for example. Of course The Brain did not care that 25 % is not a real mandate and sent his heralds out into the land to proclaim the advent of a new age of republican dominion.

Possibly the first time around - you like to blame voter fraught in Miami Dade (or Vice) county - you can be excused to pick a scion of an emerging dynasty, who very obviously was not fit for the job, over a hapless and prideful inheritor of a supposed political genius. But the second time around? You said to this cretin and to the rest of the world that you liked the state of affairs. That you were happy with setting fire to the Middle Eastern fuse and in the process providing a windfall of profits for all of his financiers. Now, when it becomes all too obvious that he and his laughably arrogant neo cons fell flat on their faces, and he remains the last one standing (wobbling may be a better choice of words here). Now, that the baby hawks all left the nest. Now, you think nothing of getting the hell out of Dodge as well. Excuse me, but I am not going to let you get away with it.

In awe, you were of the genius of The Brain. The dudes in the little fast boats you ate up with patriotic gusto. And the other guy was married to a really rich woman – goodness, she might turn the tax code to her advantage. Possibly, he even spoke French! He should have just said that he speaks Freedom, than he would have been more in line with your dumb patriotism and the 50 % of congress without a valid passport. Yes, you vote for people who are not allowed to travel to Canada! Those poor schmucks can’t even go up there on one of their investigative junkets to smoke a joint, which would quite possibly increase the average IQ of our national leaders – yes, they would have to inhale.

You think medical care for everyone is un-American. You think that putting 500 Billion Dollar into the Offense Budget is just fine and dandy. You are stupidly surprised when you get a letter from your cell phone company that refunds 50 Bucks to you because they overtaxed you for the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR!!! Just in case you suffer from the illusion that we freed the Philippines from the centuries-old yoke of the Spanish Crown, keep in mind that we killed 200,000 of them when they did not want to be folded into our own burgeoning empire after we kicked the Spaniards to the curb. You are as fine with that as you are with today’s adventures in oil. Forgive me if I sound a little ticked off now that you are all wearing the mantle of innocence. That you think you can just wait for the next gal, and tell the world and yourself that you didn’t know because you were deceived. You were not deceived, not even a little bit.

So instead of riding into the sunset with the baby hawks please stick around and help this bumbling fool out. Help him not to save any face. Help him be even more incompetent now that he is making feeble attempts at reconciliation with the world and its climate. Help him not to fix his syntax errors so that we may at least be entertained a little longer. Anything else would make you dishonest in addition to being stupid. And who wants to be dishonest, right? That would make you a politician and I would have to take your passport and pot away.

Instead live in disgrace for a while. Enjoy the rotten fruit of your labor. You deserve it. You can not blame the merciless despot at the top, because there is none. You may not blame the media, because in the paraphrased words of a certain comedian “you don’t turn around to look over your shoulder to look for the media when you take money out from the ATM late at night”. I will not even let you excuse yourself by saying that you are too busy making that monthly payment on your second car. Take the bus, and while you are at it vote for a politician who will make that bus drive on alternative fuels. You don’t know what alternative fuel means? Let me give you a hint, it’s not the flex fuel sticker on the back of your Hemi-powered Dodge truck that lets you drive in the car pool lane while filling up on 92 octane. Oh right, you say that flex fuel thing will not work either because the evil oil lobby with their billions of dollars bought all the evil passport-less politicos and now you and your poor little children will have to suffer from the nasty West-Nile Virus because it is getting hot. You, my dears, deserve it all because you voted for it all.

Maybe, just maybe if you would have picked the guy who got you seatbelts forty years ago you could now drive in a clean car, take your child to a dentist without paying a cent, not worry about the Chinese polluting the globe because we just plain gave them our cleanest coal power-generating technologies, still call French Fries that, get the oil that you need for your penicillin cheaper, install solar panels on every house in the Southwest and power the entire USA, make peace break out in the Middle East because nobody buys their oil anymore, and earn the love of the world because you are finally the good guys that you think you are. And when all of that happens, I will grant you your pride in your accomplishments. I will applaud you as the enlightened savior of humanity. I may even joyously intone “God Bless America”. Because you will finally and for the first time in a while deserve it.

the eternally optimistic pessimist

One thing that fascinates us Euro Trash about the land on the other side of the great pond is its inhabitant's eternal optimism. Always friendly, always open, always ready to take on the world and make it better in some mysteriously important way. It's not just fascinating. It’s also reasonably annoying. Like a layer of clammy cotton candy, clinging to you, suffocating you with sweetness – The Great Pink. If cluster bombs and Agent Orange wouldn't be included free of charge we (read: the rest of the world) would all die of diabetes.

Can we please have a little negativity served with our daily dose of the American Dream? I know, I know it's a great marketing ploy, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…" etc, etc. I am sorry if I am not exactly jugging the Kool-Aid, but that marketing ploy needs to be dismantled like that last truly great one "Build me a steeple in every village because I died for your sins". Americans seem to have a yen for great and simplistic tag lines.

I am bored by little kids that go out into the real world thinking it is their oyster. Thinking that if they just try hard enough, believe strong enough, smile big enough with their perfectly straightened teeth, and above all if they have a big enough supply of clammy cotton candy they can achieve anything. You wouldn't need to get up so many times if you wouldn't try to fall on your ass in the first place.

My personal problem is that somehow now The Great Pink is starting to cling to me in copious amounts. I can't hardly wait for my next trip to the motherland and hear people tell me with their slightly nasal pessimism "Du schaust ja wirklich schon wie ein Ami aus!" The fact that I talk, dress, act and walk like one is implied. One hates to be rude. Strangely enough my accent still works over here, in the home of the brave and somewhat free (for instructions on how to score by accent, instead of by accident, email me at inurkrautdreams@wonderland.com). Somehow I have the pleasure of the worst of both worlds. Americans subject me to a continuous stream of vitriol against their own inanity – stop drinking the Euro Trash Cool Aide guys, be happy with your historical ineptitude. And Euro Trash, when they deign to come down of their imperial trash heap, hand a helping heap of jealousy and forgotten glory on my poor confused global citizen's head.

Let's be serious for a moment. A short one I promise. Let us compare negativity with positivity. One forces a silly grin on our face, the other helps us expect the worst. One makes us think that strength of conviction is all success expects of us, the other drowns us in expectations of doom. One makes us fall down and get up all the bloody time, and the other makes us lie down pretty much from the get-go.

You see, seriousness is probably the bane of all great marketing tag lines. If people would take the tag line seriously when it is first circulated they would laugh their heads off. They would only be too happy to scream at the top of their lungs "Take my bloody wretched", and "Go ahead fool, crucify yourself for me". But since nobody really does that, the tag line quietly lives on, growing little roots in our heads and sneaking in unrecognized. Making us drink the Kool-Aid in little daily doses instead of big gulps of The Great Pink.

You may think what a silly man I am to even question whether optimism or pessimism is better. But let me posit this: "Does the universe care?" If you would please follow my circuitous route to this statement in the following:

I like being Euro Trash with a cotton candy coating. Sort of like a bitter pill served inside a marshmallow to unsuspecting little ones. I like that my mother didn't tell me that if I just believed hard enough, one day I would dunk like Michael Jordan. That way I didn't fall on my face trying to jump over my 6'5" balling buddy. I like that my father didn't tell me that if I just studied hard enough, I could become a brilliant scientist. That way I didn't get tangled up in a web of string theory. Instead a healthy dose of realism was served in my home and hearth on a daily basis. This is especially useful when I examine my life and prospects, because it means I don't have to buy a cane for the bad hip I would sport by now from falling on my ass all the time. But, hey that getting up sure builds character. On a side note let me ask who needs character when one can buy it at the next Mercedes Dealer? But wait, that's an American precept as well.

I know it’s confusing. If my parents would have just told me often enough that I can do anything that I put my mind to I would go out, take a quick community college class on sociology and really examine this oxymoronic labyrinth for you. They didn't, so I won’t.

But I also like telling my American friends that I am going to study sociology and write a comparative book on historical marketing tag lines and their impact on dialectical discourses in relation to what are commonly known as positrons and electrons (does the Universe care). I like it because they will not blink an eye, they will not look at me askance to consider whether I have lost my mind, they will not LOL me into the ground. Instead they will say "I think you can do anything you put your mind to." It’s fairly addictive to have other people convince me of my greatness, instead of having to do it myself all day long. Who is the socialist bastion now, I ask? This constant giving of love, support and smoke up my ass is decidedly communist.

I think I just convinced myself to decide I will worry about the cane and the Mercedes later, when I finally sell my bestseller called "String Theory and YOU".

By now it should be obvious that my circuitous route is exactly that, a circle. There is no logic that governs pessimism or optimism. In equal measures they both suck and they are both useful. Meeting in the middle seems as impossible, if desirable, as Atlantis chilling in the middle of the great pond.

I can only suggest to stop drinking everyone's stupid Kool-Aid and instead to find the happy medium for yourself.