....And, the Germans are fed up and not going to take paying for the EuMed welfare queens anymore!
M2RB (Will, put on your wrist brace. This one's for you, luv!):
But when I saw her laid out like a Queen
She was the happiest...corpse...
I'd ever seen.
I think of Elsie to this very day.
I'd remember how'd she turn to me and say:
"What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret."
The party's over and this is going to be the mother of all hangovers.
B
COLOGNE, GERMANY - I’m still in Germany, and keep noticing a predictable, but
continually interesting, pattern in talking to Germans of all walks of
life — tourists, hoteliers, guides, drivers, casual bystanders, or
students. When Greece comes up (or rather is brought up by Americans),
there is a noticeable tension. Brows tighten. German smiles momentarily
vanish. A second later a forced recovery and grimace follow, accompanied
by a sort of pained EU propaganda speech, along the lines of “Well,
yes, we all have to get along” or “We Europeans of the Union must work
something out.” Then after the platitudes, we are back to silence and a
look to see whether their constructed optimism worked on you.
The Scratched Veneer
But then if you press with a polite question or two — something like
an innocent (or perhaps not quite so innocent) “But is it really true
that the Greeks find ways to retire in their fifties while you work to
67?” or “How did those deficits get so big without being detected?” —
the façade crumbles. Your German friend takes a quick look to the side,
to see whether anyone is listening. And then in a quiet, but soon to be
louder and finally animated voice, he starts in on the “EU racket” and
“How in the world is Germany supposed to pay for all these freeloaders?”
In minutes you begin to sense that the entire cohesion of the EU is predicated now on two dubious premises. One, of course, is 70-year-old war guilt.
I do not mean that in the logical sense as it pertains to the use of
victimization by Mediterranean debtors (after all, how can once fascist
neutrals like Spain and Portugal, or the successors of Mussolini’s Axis
Italy, piggy-back onto Greece’s World War II suffering?). Rather, there
is a larger guilt about the Holocaust, Hitler, and starting a war that
ended up killing 50 million and, obviously, wrecking Germany (Germans
like to point out the extent of the 8th Air Force’s and
Bomber Command’s destruction along the Rhine, where 60-80% of some of
the larger urban centers were destroyed.) War guilt, then, looms as the
lever to pry out German cash, and after three generations the Germans
are getting tired of it.
The second premise touches on a vaguer issue — the near admission
that with a wink and a nod German companies and banks set up a sort of
mercantilism, in which a Mercedes or Siemens found lucrative markets in
Mediterranean Europe, got banks to back buying on time, and then sold
things on credit to dubious government-sponsored entities and private
corporations. After all, the Athenians had no business having one of the
highest per capita rates of Mercedes ownership in Europe. Did Germans
really think that siestas and 9 p.m. dinners led to prompt repayment of
Audi and BMW loans?
No Players Left?
In other words, Germans seem to admit that they were playing poker
with amateurs, that they knowingly took the players for a ride, and that
they now find themselves with all the chips and no one anymore with the
wherewithal to keep on playing. And yet they don’t think they can start
over and divvy up the chips, not just because to do so would be to
forfeit their winnings, but also because they suspect that the game
would repeat itself identically every five or six years. They are right,
which explains why the euro in its present manifestation is doomed, and
why the Germans are exasperated for doing everything rightly that is
now condemned as doing everything wrongly.
Worrywarts?
The EU crackup and the looming costs for Germany — are Germans to
work until 70 or are they going to put off another bridge over the
Rhine, or pass up building an autobahn? — seem to lead to other — how
should I put it? — “exasperations.“ The
Muslim population in places like Berlin and Cologne is growing and not
being assimilated. Meanwhile, the good-life, statist Germans are
shrinking and aging with one of the most depressing fertility rates in
Europe. The angst grows because the Germans themselves brought Muslims
in, kept them as permanent second-class aliens, and now are quite
confused over their proper status — both not wanting them to become full
Germans (there is still a word, after all, Volk, in their language, which, like Raza,
denotes a solidarity beyond mere shared citizenship), and yet resentful
of their chauvinism and often militant Islamism. As one of my
conversationalists put it, “Oh yes, the Turks — how can their sons
somehow afford our BMWs?”
Indeed, the list of other exasperations is growing. The once beloved
United Nations’ UNESCO bunch is likewise picking on poor Germany by “red
listing” some of their tourist treasures. Must Germans really tear down
their new super-modern aerial tram over the Rhine — an engineering
marvel which resembles a designer kitchen as much as a cable lift — at
Koblenz, or postpone building high-rise office towers and apartments in
Cologne just to ensure UN World Heritage status for their Rhine gorge
castles or the cathedral at Cologne (e.g., “So an Iran or Syria is to be
judge of our heritage?”)?
Then there is Angela Merkel’s proposed shutdown
of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants in the wake of panic about the
Fukushima tsunami disaster. Once minor German concerns about geological
fault lines and obsolete designs have now snowballed into a hyped-up
nuclear terror (e.g., if the Toyota-building Japanese can have a
disaster, then even the BMW-building Germans in theory could, too).
But from where comes the replacement electrical power? (The Ruhr
today looks like Detroit and Cleveland should have.) There is still
plenty of coal, but the green Germans pride themselves on being model globing warming alarmists.
The German countryside is dotted with enormous windmills, but they seem
to the casual observer to turn slowly, if at all. I have enjoyed about
three or four hours of sunshine every other day, so I don’t think solar
is going to save Germans from blackouts. In other words, Germans seem
again agitated over their dilemma: the greenest of Europeans cannot
survive through wind and solar power; their coal is politically
incorrect; they have little natural gas; and now nuclear, which used to
be a non-carbon, non-heating approved energy, is discredited. What is a
good pan-European to do? Perhaps buy nuclear-produced electricity from a
cash-hungry France?
Be Careful About What You Wish For
Another grimace comes from mention of their beloved Barack Obama. He
too seems lately to be adding to German angst. Make no mistake about it
and let me be perfectly clear, Germans, could they vote in the U.S.,
would reelect Obama by a wide margin. I’ll spare you the reasons (Bush
comes up in the conversation, of course). But they are edgy with him
nonetheless: Is it really a good time to be drawing down NATO and
redeploying Americans to “Asia”? (As in “who will pay for our defense or
ensure NATO solidarity as the EU unravels?”)
Resentments, or so Germans fear, are building against Germany and
Germans themselves sometimes sound as if they fear their inner demons as
much as do the French in the Alsace. Does Obama — “Polish death camps,” Austrian-speaking Austrians, Berlin Wall anniversary skipped,
the old demand for speechifying at the Brandenburg Gate — appreciate
the contours of Europe politics and the pretensions of the Atlantic
Alliance? Germans assume that we Americans grasp their old postwar
two-step that allows them to snicker about Americans (e.g., McDonald’s,
Texas, George W. Bush, etc.) publicly and count on us privately. In sum,
concerning Obama, there grows a flicker of realization that Germany
proverbially should have been careful about what it wished for.
An Edgy Nation
Let me sum up. Germans are, just as the stereotypes go,
thrifty, solvent, and an industrial people who played by all the
postwar rules. To watch the Rhine is a dizzying experience as barges
zoom by, as if on a three-lane highway, while rail cars roar in the
background and the parallel autobahns are crammed, all beneath the steam
stacks of the Ruhr plants. In comparison, California seems like it is
in a slumber.
Germans rebuilt their country, renounced war and did not rearm,
unified their bifurcated nation at their own cost, subsidized European
development, were good EU and UN head nodders, are at the forefront of
the green global warming cult, are rejecting nuclear power — and are
terrified that they are unfairly not liked. I am not sure whether they
are afraid that the world does not appreciate their efforts or that
anytime the world does not appreciate German efforts, petulant Germans can become a bit scary to Germans themselves as well as to their neighbors.
I would be very careful to support Germany as much as we can in
accordance with U.S. national interests. I would not, like Obama,
encourage French-socialist calls for “growth,” which is a euphemism for
inflating and stimulating European economies without commensurate
structural reform at the expense of Germany.
I would also be careful about downsizing and redirecting NATO at a
time when Germany has an anemic military and a growing list of envious
if not angry rivals and former friends. I would cut Germany some slack
(and I have been guilty in the past in print of not doing this) about
its hypocrisies and strained multicultural internationalism, given its
own psychological uneasiness about its past proclivities. And finally,
at some point, cannot some American flat out state that it was Germany
that worked hard, saved, invested, and prospered, and that is to be
admired rather than caricatured and condemned? Texas is not responsible
for California any more than Germany is responsible for contemporary
Greece. An envious Europe seems to look at Germany the way that Obama
has trained us to disdain those above the $200,000 in annual income
Mason-Dixon line.
Yes, we might prefer to vacation in Florence or Santorini, but only
because we are able to — given that there are for a while longer more
wealth-producing Germanys in the world than there are wealth-consuming
Italys and Greeces.
Sophie:
Printing will only buy a little time. Germany will exit, perhaps,
with the Netherlands, Finland, and Estonia, before they allow for
massive devaluation.
As for future bailouts and euro bonds, which Monti and Draghi believe
are nearly a done deal, there’s a little problem standing in the way:
The German Constitution and a recent German Supreme Court ruling.
People keep blaming Merkel. They think that she can just agree to
more bailouts, more printing, eurobonds, etc. Not anymore. She can’t.
She has to get approval and/or the German constitution has to be
changed. I don’t see how that happens when you consider things like
this:
In Germany, the retirement age is 67 and retirees receive 46% of their final salaries as a pension.
In Greece, men can retire at 55 and women at 50…unless they work in
arduous and dangerous professions like television presenting,
hairdressing or radio announcing, then they can retire at 45. Retirees
receive 97% of their final salaries.
Germans are irate and they are not going to work to support the welfare queens to the south.
Related Reading:
Life is a Cabaret - Liza Minelli
What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.
Put down the knitting,
The book and the broom.
Time for a holiday.
Life is Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.
Come taste the wine,
Come hear the band.
Come blow your horn,
Start celebrating;
Right this way,
Your table's waiting
No use permitting
Some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away.
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret!
I used to have a girlfriend
known as Elsie
With whom I shared
Four sordid rooms in Chelsea
She wasn't what you'd call
A blushing flower...
As a matter of fact
She rented by the hour.
The day she died the neighbors
came to snicker:
"Well, that's what comes
from to much pills and liquor."
But when I saw her laid out like a Queen
She was the happiest...corpse...
I'd ever seen.
I think of Elsie to this very day.
I'd remember how'd she turn to me and say:
"What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret."
And as for me,
I made up my mind back in Chelsea,
When I go, I'm going like Elsie.
Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
Isn't that long a stay.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Only a Cabaret, old chum,
And I love a Cabaret!
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.
Put down the knitting,
The book and the broom.
Time for a holiday.
Life is Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.
Come taste the wine,
Come hear the band.
Come blow your horn,
Start celebrating;
Right this way,
Your table's waiting
No use permitting
Some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away.
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret!
I used to have a girlfriend
known as Elsie
With whom I shared
Four sordid rooms in Chelsea
She wasn't what you'd call
A blushing flower...
As a matter of fact
She rented by the hour.
The day she died the neighbors
came to snicker:
"Well, that's what comes
from to much pills and liquor."
But when I saw her laid out like a Queen
She was the happiest...corpse...
I'd ever seen.
I think of Elsie to this very day.
I'd remember how'd she turn to me and say:
"What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret."
And as for me,
I made up my mind back in Chelsea,
When I go, I'm going like Elsie.
Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
Isn't that long a stay.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Only a Cabaret, old chum,
And I love a Cabaret!
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