(My mobile device crashed this week, and something is now wrong with my mobile blogging client, and I haven't figured out yet what it is; today's entry, for example, is actually being posted from a desktop at an internet cafe. Anyway, so that's why this might be the last entry you see for a bit, as I try to figure out what's wrong with my mobile blogging software. Oh, and my email settings got wiped out too, and I never wrote down the complicated way to set it all up the last time I did it, so I've got to get online and figure that out again too; so, no emails from me for a bit either. Grr!)

Okay, so yesterday I got to talking about this big new massive 30-million-euro ad campaign that's running in Germany right now, called Du Bist Deutschland, which is basically this sophisticated media effort to say to the German public, "Buck up! It's okay to be proud to be German! No, really!" (And by the way, I've been reading more English posts on the subject, and now I'm not sure if the 30m euros came from the government [like I claimed yesterday] or was collectively donated by the ad agencies creating the campaign's content. Ugh, it is so frustrating sometimes to read about politics via translated text, because something like every tenth word is wrong, and you never end up learning exactly what the person was trying to say.) But that doesn't really matter anyway, because what I want to talk about today is the campaign itself, not how it's getting financed, and to ask a question that I think seriously needs to be asked: do we really want to encourage Germans to start taking unusual pride in their country again?

And let me just state right away for the record that today's entry is not going to be 2,000 words of Germany-bashing, because I've traveled there twice myself, loved both trips, am eagerly looking forward to visiting again, and just love my German friends to death; and besides, just about every country in existence has some nasty dark part of their history, that they now have to reckon with in the modern world. (Hell, here in America alone we have slavery, Native Americans, Japanese interment camps, McCarthyism, and now "The Great Shame" [aka the Bush years].) But that said, the record does show that Germany has had an especially bad track record with this subject; they were at almost perpetual war, after all, from their founding in 1871 all the way to Hitler's suicide. And let's not forget that both the Goths and the Barbarians originated from the Germanic Lands too, long before there was a unified country; so, you know, tack on several thousand more years of unusually high violence and bloodshed in the area as well. Oh, and of course the Reformation started in Germania as well, which of course led to hundreds of years of violence and several plagues simultaneously, and something like a third of the entire human population wiped out by the end of it all.

What I've found remarkable, though, about my own visits to the country, is just how profoundly and permanently the German population really has retrained itself to look at the world, since the end of World War II. Because that's the easy joke, isn't it, is to poke fun of Germans' aggression and long-time embrace of fascism, or to make snide comments about kicking a certain someone's asses during the war. And see, even the Germans eventually realized this about themselves, although in their case it did take two entire worldwide wars, with the second one basically converting their entire country back into rocks and dirt. The Germans, in fact, have been acutely aware of their past behavior since the very end of the war, and is something they've spent a lot of time thinking about and paying attention to ever since. I mean, just look at their very first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who ran a popular administration under the slogan "No Experiments!"; I mean, he did just tremendously good things for the country, of course, and is worthy of a lot of respect, but he did create an environment where Germany's fascistic past was to simply be put behind them. No crazy new political theories, no frenzied cult-like politicians, no experiments, let's just continue the hard, simple work of rebuilding our country.

I'm told, in fact, that many in that generation came to later refer to the entire Nazi era by the term 'Sonderweg' - literally translated as "the other path," but more realistically as, "That horrible thing in our past, where we all went so wrong and so crazy for awhile, that's just so terrible that we must never speak about it in public again." (Although to be fair, this was apparently not a generation-wide thing; many young Germans I've spoken with, in fact, never heard their grandparents use this term.) And so what you had there in Germany in the 1950s was, I think, a very interesting thing - a populace just shell-shocked over how badly the war had gone, coming out of this sorta haze where they suddenly started realizing how horribly they'd all been behaving. And with an American government pumping billions into their economy, via the Marshall Plan, and a Chancellor who is telling them, "Let's just quietly get back to rebuilding our country and living our lives," and with suddenly all these freedoms and choices that came not only from democracy but from having a middle class - the televisions, the private homes, the cars, the world-class educations and all the rest. And then suddenly the 'Wirtschaftswunder' as well, or so-called 'Economic Miracle' of the period.

And so from the start you've had this interesting irony going on in post-war Germany; that because of an obsessive desire to put the past behind them, to no longer even think about war or fascism or aggression or nationalism, they've had no choice but to create this incredibly peace-loving, liberal, well-educated economic powerhouse. Because let's think about it - if the US suddenly today was no longer allowed to have a standing military, like what happened to Germany at the end of the war, where would all those billions and billions and billions of dollars we're now spending on the military go? We'd have no choice but to invest it in education, health care, social programs, infrastructure, public transit, highways, the arts and the like. And this is exactly what happened in Germany after the war, duh! And it was the creation of this environment, of course, that led to the radical-left Green Party gaining national power in the '70s, which was just such a shocking thing for me to learn about for the first time, because I can't even imagine a radical-left party controlling both the White House and Congress here; and that's what led to all the cutting-edge environmental laws that are still in place there, and the now near-obsession that most Germans have with the outdoors, exercising, pets, recycling, alternative energy and all the rest. And now you have this new generation of Germans, of course, who are far enough away from the Nazi era to be able to have this healthy, balanced way of looking at it all, but who are still the product of two generations of people who fostered this environment of never taking pride in your country, never hanging a flag publicly, always remembering your violent past. (Yeah, kinda like the Vulcans...you fuckin' nerd.)

I mean, I see what the ad campaign is getting at, although I wish they had gone about it in a very different way; because Jesus fucking Christ, if there is one group of people in the world I've hung out with now that has the lowest collective sense of self-esteem out of them all, it's the goddamn Germans, man. (And this, mind you, from a guy who's spent the last fifteen years hanging out almost exclusively with poets, comic-book artists, indie-rock musicians, and stand-up comedians.) Seriously, it got me all sad sometimes to even hang out with them! Nobody in Germany can accept a fuckin' compliment, man, that is just a simple truth about the world; they just all get so awkward, each and every one of them, and stammer and say how it's improper of me to be paying the compliment, because technically they aren't as good as the praise I am bestowing on them. Fuck, man! I was just trying to tell you that you're a good cook! Just smile, say "Thanks!," and let's move on!

Because the fact is that there's a lot about Germans to be admired, and I do think a whole lot of them have a hard time even acknowledging that themselves, and there really is a collective sense of malaise there right now that could use some bucking up. I would prefer, though, that the campaign not be expressed through the terms of nationalism, but rather through individual skills and attitudes; that they really do have one of the better educational systems in the western world, one of the best environmental policies, one of the best economies, a thriving arts community and a thriving gay one. It would be nice, I think, to see more Germans be able to embrace all that a little more, and to get them out of this collective sadness and sense of low self-esteem that they're all going through these days. (There's a reason the word 'angst' was coined in Germany, after all.)

So when I ask, "Is it really a good idea to encourage Germans to start taking pride again in their country?," I guess what I'm really saying is not that I worry about them turning into a bunch of Nazis again, but rather that I'd hate to see any those currently great things about them disappear as a result, the liberalism and environmentalism and all the rest. And needless to say, I think we here in America could do a lot of good by thinking about all these issues ourselves, and to wonder if maybe we're all going to have a 'Sonderweg' period of our own after the Bush years are finally over, once the truth finally comes out about all the horrors that are undoubtedly going on right now in places like Guantanamo Bay and the Middle East. Will we eventually be so ashamed of ourselves that the word "Bush" will become an inherent insult, like "McCarthy" or "Stalin" is now? Will we too have to go through a rebuilding period of decades before the rest of the world trusts us again? Hey, we've been acting like fucking Nazis for the last six years now; people better start getting prepared for the fact that the bill is coming due in 2009, and that we will be spending the next several years after that being horrified by what we discover is currently going on right now. This is coming, America, and you better start getting ready for it; because we're all suddenly going to realize exactly what it felt like to be a German in 1946, and why maybe they shouldn't be encouraging their populace right now to start looking at the world in a nationalistic way again. Some food for thought, at the very least.

Oh, hey, when I mentioned PBS's Masterpiece Theatre yesterday, I ran out of space to tell you more cool news that I learned this weekend; that they will soon be re-running the absolutely masterful Rupert Everett production of Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. Oh, fuck YEAH, man!!! Regular readers will of course remember that I am a dorky, nerdy, completely-ashamed-of-myself dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes fan, just consider it one of the greatest story series ever written, and a couple of years ago even blogged about reading the entire body of work in a row for the first time. So I get all fuckin' nnnneeeeeerrrrrrddddyyyyyy about new Sherlockian projects, and read a lot of the modern novels and see a lot of the modern movies and TV shows. Because how can you not be fascinated with Sherlock Holmes, the character? So intelligent he can barely survive in social envirornments; tortured by his genius to the point of drug addiction; with this frenzied, unpredictable pace, and a way of blurting out deductions that seem almost supernatural; his absent-mindedness, his pipe tobacco always in a slipper hanging off the fireplace; his curious friendship with Dr. Watson, how he sorta loathed and admired and pitied and was amused by him all at the same time; his dabbles into chemistry, history, beekeeping, butterfly classification. Plus sex and murder! What's not to like, I tells ya!

So when Masterpiece Theatre first aired this new Rupert Everett production last year, you bet I was excited; and now that I've seen it, I can honestly state that it is absolutely spot-on perfect, even though Everett interprets the character in a way that I would've never thought of myself at first; as a dandy, that is, a fop, a mod, a haughty, arrogant, pissy little gay man, always impeccably dressed and always with a cuttingly insulting remark about whoever is around him, just wanting to be left alone so he can go back to his morphine dreams. Beautiful, man, beautiful! And really gorgeous cinematography as well, a fantastically Victorian film-noir look to it all, plus of course Rupert Everett with a sharp haircut and a Saville Row suit is just a gorgeous sight unto himself. So anyway, when they re-run it again this spring, if you're one of the Baker Street Boys yourself I highly encourage you to check it out, if you haven't already. Victorian-murder-mystery dorks of the world, unite!