Over the course of that brief civilization certain trends emerged: a preponderance of skyscrapers, hyperactive modernity, and a valorization of the personal automobile. Parking lots dominated and at the end of its second century important regional centers emerged. These formed an excerpted America amongst the endless massif central of imprecise nothing and farmland overlaid by roads. Metal capsules propelled hopeless optimists into the hearts of these cities; meanwhile a certain residual respect clung to property and the written word.

It was a nation of individualists, with its good – endless self-realization, refusal to form herd mentalities – inextricably bound up with its bad – repulsive selfishness, exurban sprawl. Here the logical consequences of human life conceived of as a personal adventure could be observed, as well as the intense congress of people of diverse origins. Somehow this endless diversity in material goods and personal attitudes resulted in a sense of great sadness in me. In order to understand whether this sadness was personal or American I left where in fact it might have been better to stay.

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http://open.salon.com/blog/lost_in_berlin/2013/02/06/berlin_europes_surprising_comedy_capital

Intro of ‘Let’s Stay Together’ plays.

Obama: Baby, I know we’ve been through some hard times. I know things haven’t been good lately, what with you losing your job, having no money for groceries, getting stiffed at the pump. But the question is – do you really want to break up with me? Is that what you really want?

Think of all those good times we had together babe, think of when we passed that health reform bill… Yeah… And think of how we let all those gay people serve in the military… We had good times babe and we can do it again so…

Sings I… I’m so in love with you…

The song gradually fades out, with Obama talking over the outro.

Oh come on honey doll… Gimme one more chance… You really want to go with some rich white dude? Mitt Romney? (Laughs) I’ll get the economy going baby, you just wait and see… 5.4% baby… Don’t walk out on me baby… Vote for me baby… Just one more little vote…

Stay with me baby.
Photo Joe Crimmings/Creative Commons.

Apparently the campaign is now preparing a spot of Joe Biden singing The Communards’ 1986 hit ‘Don’t leave me this way’, for obvious reasons.

Thank you very much to Victoria Gosling, Exberliner and all the nice folks at The Reader for featuring my work.

I wonder if the Queen ever asks herself
If there should be queens,
Women who incorporate privilege
And live off ancestral gains.
I suspect the Queen has asked herself
And concluded there should be queens,
But if the Queen’s a republican
It’d be pleasing indeed.

Picture by Michael Gwyther-Jones used under Creative Commons licence

Many thanks to Kerri Mullen, satirical cartoonist and stir-fry cook extraordinnaire, for supplying this cartoon about Obama and Santorum and the linguistic distinctions between them. The team here at the Shoe Leather Express – me and Pedro, my retainer – hope she will be contributing regularly to our rag. Meanwhile, check out Kerri’s website here.

Photo by Jonathon Coleman

Barack Obama gave his State of the Union address yesterday and there was one particular passage which struck me.

America is back. Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. …(That’s) not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin, from Cape Town to Rio, where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years.

As a Berlin resident of eight years, I feel to a certain extent qualified to judge the Berlin part of how people feel. There is no doubt that the election of Barack Obama was a hopeful moment; perhaps the most hopeful political moment of my lifetime. Try getting Germany to elect a black man. Once in office, Obama has consistently handled himself with grace and aplomb.

But to answer the question of how Berlin feels about America, here are a few pen portraits of the kind Obama, speechifying, so likes to give.

In Louisiana, a 33-year woman named Christie Cheramie is sitting in jail, convicted for a crime she was arrested for age 16 and for which she retracted her confession in 2001. It seems possible her partner of the time committed said crime and his underage partner gave false testimony in a situation of stress.

As of time of writing, January 24th, 2012, there are 171 men at Guantánamo Bay, an illegal prison to Cuba’s southern tip, is still open. In that prison are likely people who are innocent, stuck in diplomatic limbo, as other men before them, since released and never charged.

In Preston Hollow Texas, there’s a 65-year old man living in great wealth and luxury who condoned the use of torture during his last job in direct violation of the Geneva convention. His fellow torturers have also continued most comfortable existences.

Obama cited what Berlin feels about the U.S. And here’s how my one tiny part of Berlin feels, in an obscure flat in Kreuzberg where the President’s mind would never go, living how it could never even imagine anyone could live, without a car, without a TV, and without the sense that the U.S is any better or worse than anywhere else in this world.

“The United States of America form the richest and most powerful country on earth. And if you as President of the U.S were to acknowledge that, saying something like, we’re like an elephant, it’s difficult for us not to do damage but we’re doing our best – then I, and I think Berlin too, could get with that. But to say that America is admired around the world again just because an executive order was signed to close Guantánamo – the prison remains open – just isn’t enough to bring back the ‘feel-good factor’ after Abu-Ghraib and Iraq, after urinating onto corpses.

What enrages Berlin so much is not that America does things wrong but that in public it pretends not to, and styles itself as possessed of some innate moral compass as a nation; the problem here, and a deeply shaming one for anyone who knows anything about politics, society and history, is the gap between reality and rhetoric, between Reagan’s ‘shining city on the hill’ and Guantánamo. The preposterous claims make the trespasses against them seem particularly lurid and derange those who seek justice for these latter.”

Sorry to be so negative, Mr. President, but you did ask. Or rather you didn’t. I suppose can always go talk to Tokyo.

Note. Those of who you follow this blog will remark that there has been a large gap since the last post. For me the problem doing this blog is the same problem with Obama’s statement. Dealing with the official American unreality is exhausting, and working on it too much sends you doolally. ‘You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there’ as William Empson once wrote. All these comments respect my fondness for my American friends and acquaintances and in part come from my concern for them.

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi under a Creative Commons license

Photo by Pete Souza under a Creative Commons license

Nobody could look at these two photographs and say ‘the man on the left is Barack Obama.’ For one thing, Barack Obama is black and Mitt Romney is white, a small but, even in post-racial America, significant detail which will surely remain true even until the general election. Only if Mitt Romney begins dressing as and/or impersonating Barack Obama will this brilliant tactic become confusing for the average voter. What would complicate matters still further is if before the election, Mitt Romney changed his name to ‘Barack Obama.’ Faced by two identical names on the ballot paper, even the most-hardened ‘Nobama’-sayer might struggle to figure out which meant the real Obama (the one he hated) and which the other (the Barack Obama formerly known as Mitt Romney). A numbering system or some kind of acronym could perhaps make this more clear.

 
However, Romney has to be careful this tactic does not backfire on him, as it is also undeniably true that the majority of Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination can also say, and say confidently, that they are not Barack Obama. For example, what if Newt Gingrich hits him with a campaign ad with the slogan ‘I Too Am Also Not Barack Obama’? And surely Michelle Bachmann, now out of the race, could also have claimed to be, by dint of her gender, even less like Obama than all the ageing white men who surrounded her. Furthermore even the radical fringe of American politics could appropriate the slogan: surely, for the Occupy Wall Street movement, even better than ‘We are the 99%’ is ‘We are not Barack Obama’,  true as it really is for all Americans – except one – rather than just 99% percent of them.

 
It’s time the non-Obama majority made their voices heard. Only in doing this can we achieve the solution to the ‘Cold Civil War’ now raging in America: all American citizens should run for office against Barack Obama, under the banner of what they each share, namely not being Barack Obama. Even though I myself am neither an American citizen, nor live in America, nor even know where America is, I can safely say that I am not, nor have ever been, Barack Obama.  Even to a displaced Anglo-German like me the slogan rings immediately true. I did not go to Harvard Law School, nor try to learn Spanish. And did the rest of the world? From the lowliest Chinese peasant farmer to the confused Welsh house-husband who has just lost all his worldly possessions in a fire, we can all unite as global citizens to say with great confidence: ‘We are not Barack Obama.’ Only one man is. Though some of us are slightly more like him than others.

No we're not! (Image xedos4/Free Digital Images)