Happy Birthday

Today, the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) celebrates its thirty-fourth birthday. If you're older than that you know the story behind that story and that it goes back to the end of World War II and the division of Europe into East and West.

I lived with my (West) German wife and our two children (dual-passported and why not? Their father is two-faced) in a city outside of Frankfurt in Land Hesse, the traditional leather capital of Europe, back in an era where Europeans made things, Offenbach am Main.

I had come to Germany as a member of the US Air Force in the fall of 1976, and when I landed at Rhein-Main Air Base, I compensated for NOT speaking any German when getting into the taxi to take me to American Forces Network Headquarters damals (back then) at Bertramstrasse 6 by speaking English VERY LOUDLY in case the driver was deaf, I guess. 

The exchange rate was two Deutschmark and fifty pfennige the day I landed and the meter read twenty-two marks when we got to the station. I gave the driver a twenty dollar bill and tipped him five bucks and then wondered why he was so helpful.

Patrick was born in July of 1982, while I was still in the Air Force and Michelle came into our lives in May of 1987 while I was a civilian working as a TV production guy for the Army. At the height of the Cold War, and I really hope most of what you've read in the hyperlink isn't new information to you, the US forces in West Germany were practically the fifty-first state. 

We had our own department stores, groceries, hospitals, bowling alleys, liquor stores and clubs, housing areas and schools. I worked for a senior civilian, long deceased, who'd relocated from France when they had invited us to leave in the Sixties, who spoke not a word of German and told me, a skosh more smugly than I fancied, that 'you don't need any German to shop in the commissary (grocery store)."

If, like me, you lived 'on the economy', it didn't hurt (let me tell you) and I made some nice change doing voice-over work for German-based advertising agencies who worked on campaigns for American products marketed in Germany (but whose corporate masters, like me years earlier, couldn't be bothered to learn that Deutsch stuff). We spoke German in my house because it was my wife's house in her country and if our children noticed Dad's language skills were a bit loopy, they were small and took no notice.

When ARD and ZDF started to cover the Montagsdemonstrationen, not just West Germans took notice, but it was hard to understand what those peacefully protesting wanted or what they would do if they got it (though few actually suggested what 'it' might be) but the bewegung (movement), took on a momentum of its own and it was obvious to all of us, on both sides of the barbed wire that demarcated East from West that winds of change had come. 

Some historians have suggested it was Gorbachov who tore down the wall that Ronald Reagan had called upon him to raze. I know a lot of dumbass Americans who think about something to do with vodka when you say Gorby's name, but in my basement is a piece of the Berlin Wall.

All this time after the Wiedervereinigung just about every Trabant and Wartburg has been replaced by an Opel Senator but a lot of work still needs to be done before all neighbors live as one people in one country. Happy Tag der Deutschen Einheit.

-bill kenny

Liberated from the Fall

You wouldn't know it from what Sarah and the TP's (sort of Martha and the Vandellas Through the Looking Glass) dubbed the 'lamestream media', conventional and traditional news outlets, but as someone who knows his way around all the sides of a police barricade, it seems to me the Days of Rage are returning to the Street(s) Where You Live.

When it started, weeks ago, Occupy Wall Street, was a curiosity, a 'let's cross over to the other side of the street now and avoid having to do deal with these people' kind of situation. Now it's starting to look more like a franchise operation with start-ups from Coast to Coast, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston with more promised/threatened. Nice work, NYPD, Mayor of New York et al in not buying the Brooklyn Bridge. The chant brought back memories of Clean for Gene and 1968; the outcome even more so. It's the aftermath I dread.

Here's the pissing in the wind part masquerading as analysis from someone who likes to think of himself as middle-aged but when I was my children's age I would have looked at me now and said 'nope, old guy.' And I'd have been right, because I am. I was part of the Pig in a Python Baby Boom Generation, smack in the middle of all of it, class of '52, though it's been decades since I exhibited any class at all. But here's a bulletin from the Back In My Day Geezer, we've been here before and the ride will get dark, much darker, much faster.

The new mother nature taking over, as witnessed elsewhere in the world this past year (Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria to name four locations), fueled and fed by 'social media' who passed the word faster than Revere and Dawes on meth, has come to the Land of Opportunities (for some). The rhetoric is in places a bit hackneyed and trite, sorry my brothers and sisters, word. Make no mistake, large and growing larger by the hour, groups of people from every strata of American society are f'ing cranked. That we're invoking Ike's Ghost suggests if you dismiss this as a lark, you do so at your own peril.

We've always been a country of divides, not just Continental (or Cadillac, in the interest of equal automobiles) but geographic, religious, gender, and let's not forget race and age, but we've come to the big one, the one that the Bank of America, whose ass Buffett, not Jimmy the other one, saved a few weeks back and money changers like the biggest quartet since The Beatles, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith were hoping would remain unnoticed. Rich and not so much.

It might have remained unremarked upon, if the same folks with all the money (already) hadn't screwed themselves, and then the rest of us, when the financial house of cards they'd built collapsed, one pillar of sand after another. Donne's Bell tolled for one and all, even those who have more balls than bells and if this isn't an emergent occasion, I don't know what would be. We have an atmosphere of anger so palpable you can cut it with a knife, but you'll want to use a spoon to get every drop.

The Founders of our American Democracy watched with equal parts fascination and horror as The French Revolution, modeled on our own, descended into a Reign of Terror, creating misery and mistrust from which Europe spent a half century digging out. Is there a 100% chance that the same fate awaits all of us? Who can say? But in terms of mathematical inevitability, we are the 99%. But the men who spurred us on, sit in judgment of all wrong. They decide and the shotgun sings the song.

-bill kenny