It is so refreshing as an artist to see someone who can truly inspire you, delight you and lighten your heart. Ennio Marchetto is just such a pop sensation, who has captivated the modern scene by using so ingeniously simple things such as paper, velcro and playback so entertainingly. Tickets to see Ennio were a surprise gift to Christoph for our one-year anniversary. A 30-minute bike ride through the Tiergarten after Chris was finished with work put us smack dab in the middle of the Government Quarter, where a tent has been erected for summer performances. Behind us was the Chancellery and beside us the Reichstag. When we arrived, Chris finally learned of this closely guarded surprise, and I am happy to say that, for once, I was able to delight him.

I guess the whole bike-riding thing, the low population density, and the abundance of vegetation in a city this size are not the only reasons to love Berlin. For once, I am able to go and see things that I have wanted to see for a long time without huge amounts of effort. Ennio is just another reminder of why Chris was so smart to have wanted so badly to move us here. I trusted him, and that is paying off.

Here is a clip of Ennio. If he is near you, I very, very strongly suggest seeing him.

The Forgotten Obvious

Ok, people, I think we all can admit that the cruel shock that many of us have been experiencing at the loss of Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” has been duly sharpened by the strident, abrasive effects of watching his temporary successor Tom Brokaw feel blindly his way through the pitfalls of an hour-long news show which requires improvisation and REAL preparation. I am sorry to get the feathers of you Brokaw fans ruffled, but the man just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t know what disease he has, and I am bound to be putting my foot in mouth for saying this, but must he, seriously, rasp so as he inhales, clenching his jaw, forcing air through the corners of his mouth? And the phrase “who the heck does this guy think he is?” certainly comes to mind as he asks his questions so condescendingly from his ivory tower? (You know that there is nothing that an arrogant prick hates worse than being condescended to.) Greatest generation my ass. Even that as a title rubs me the wrong way.

I think it’s time for an open letter to NBC: replace Brokaw ASAP or lose me as a fan!

Watching Brokaw grill Obama for 50 minutes on the “Meet the Press” webcast reminded me that I meant to mention a point about Germany and the Germans’ seeming reluctance to participate in Afghanistan to the extent that the world community thinks that they “should”. It was interesting to see Brokaw mention the countries, who, again according to some unknown consensus, seem to be shouldering their portion of the burden there. Holland, Britain, Canada, and France seem all to be doing their part, unafraid to assume positions in provinces wrought with havoc and violence. The Germans, though, are unwilling to be redeployed away from the North, where they enjoy, or so it seems by both Brokaw’s and Obama’s descriptions, drinking Afghani equivalents of Pina Coladas whilst sitting under Afghani equivalent palm trees. They actually have palm tress there, I believe, but whatever.

I am a bit annoyed at the lack of pointing out the obvious on this point. These aforementioned countries all have professional armies just like our own in the US, where people volunteer to serve, knowing full well that they will be putting themselves, potentially, in harm’s way. Germany, however, is made up primarily of conscripted service. Every young man 18 years of age must make the difficult choice: either serve 9 months in the army, or do civil service. The vast majority of young German males opt for the civil service, which includes wiping elderly people’s asses, teaching bratty kindergarteners inane songs and the like.

Has anyone thought about the implications of making an army, made up by and large of youngsters who are there because the law says they must be, go into a suicidal war zone and lose their lives? Would America be comfortable letting THEIR young be drafted and sent into potentially hazardous situations, perhaps never to return? Well, if the world were truly at war and the public opinion were behind it, as in the Second World War, yes, I could see that America would be courageously willing, as it has been in the past, to heroically send its young into battle for the betterment of us all. But, can you honestly tell me that the draft would be accepted in an environment such as the one in America right now? I don’t think so, a point so well illustrated in the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” as Michael Moore basically chases senators around the capitol, unable to get any of them to volunteer the service of their own children into the military.

War is unpopular enough in Germany as it is. NATO should be happy that the Germans are serving there at all. Angela Merkel has just promised additions to the troop presence in Afghanistan from Germany. But, if the troops are repositioned, and the death toll begins to rise, you can bet that the public will begin protesting on the streets against sending their young, almost all of whom are there against their will, to their likely deaths.

Very Interesting Article

A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness

By John Pomfret
Sunday, July 27, 2008; Page B01

Nikita Khrushchev said the Soviet Union would bury us, but these days, everybody seems to think that China is the one wielding the shovel. The People's Republic is on the march -- economically, militarily, even ideologically. Economists expect its GDP to surpass America's by 2025; its submarine fleet is reportedly growing five times faster than Washington's; even its capitalist authoritarianism is called a real alternative to the West's liberal democracy. China, the drumbeat goes, is poised to become the 800-pound gorilla of the international system, ready to dominate the 21st century the way the United States dominated the 20th.

Except that it's not.

Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper's Beijing bureau chief, I've been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what's actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China's becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China's missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.

But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon.

Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

In the West, China is known as "the factory to the world," the land of unlimited labor where millions are eager to leave the hardscrabble countryside for a chance to tighten screws in microwaves or assemble Apple's latest gizmo. If the country is going to rise to superpowerdom, says conventional wisdom, it will do so on the back of its massive workforce.

But there's a hitch: China's demographics stink. No country is aging faster than the People's Republic, which is on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich. Because of the Communist Party's notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today -- below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable. Meanwhile, life expectancy has shot up, from just 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today. Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China's key competitive advantages.

Worse, Chinese demographers such as Li Jianmin of Nankai University now predict a crisis in dealing with China's elderly, a group that will balloon from 100 million people older than 60 today to 334 million by 2050, including a staggering 100 million age 80 or older. How will China care for them? With pensions? Fewer than 30 percent of China's urban dwellers have them, and none of the country's 700 million farmers do. And China's state-funded pension system makes Social Security look like Fort Knox. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and economist at the American Enterprise Institute, calls China's demographic time bomb "a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy in the making" that will "probably require a rewrite of the narrative of the rising China."

I count myself lucky to have witnessed China's economic rise first-hand and seen its successes etched on the bodies of my Chinese classmates. When I first met them in the early 1980s, my fellow students were hard and thin as rails; when I found them again almost 20 years later, they proudly sported what the Chinese call the "boss belly." They now golfed and lolled around in swanky saunas.

But in our exuberance over these incredible economic changes, we seem to have forgotten that past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Not a month goes by without some Washington think tank crowing that China's economy is overtaking America's. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is the latest, predicting earlier this month that the Chinese economy would be twice the size of ours by the middle of the century.

There are two problems with predictions like these. First, in the universe where these reports are generated, China's graphs always go up, never down. Second, while the documents may include some nuance, it vanishes when the studies are reported to the rest of us. One important nuance we keep forgetting is the sheer size of China's population: about 1.3 billion, more than four times that of the United States. China should have a big economy. But on a per capita basis, the country isn't a dragon; it's a medium-size lizard, sitting in 109th place on the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook Database, squarely between Swaziland and Morocco. China's economy is large, but its average living standard is low, and it will stay that way for a very long time, even assuming that the economy continues to grow at impressive rates.

The big number wheeled out to prove that China is eating our economic lunch is the U.S. trade deficit with China, which last year hit $256 billion. But again, where's the missing nuance? Nearly 60 percent of China's total exports are churned out by companies not owned by Chinese (including plenty of U.S. ones). When it comes to high-tech exports such as computers and electronic goods, 89 percent of China's exports come from non-Chinese-owned companies. China is part of the global system, but it's still the low-cost assembly and manufacturing part -- and foreign, not Chinese, firms are reaping the lion's share of the profits.

When my family and I left China in 2004, we moved to Los Angeles, the smog capital of the United States. No sooner had we set foot in southern California than my son's asthma attacks and chronic chest infections -- so worryingly frequent in Beijing -- stopped. When people asked me why we'd moved to L.A., I started joking, "For the air."

China's environmental woes are no joke. This year, China will surpass the United States as the world's No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases. It continues to be the largest depleter of the ozone layer. And it's the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean. But in the accepted China narrative, the country's environmental problems will merely mean a few breathing complications for the odd sprinter at the Beijing games. In fact, they could block the country's rise.

The problem is huge: Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China, 70 percent of the country's lakes and rivers are polluted, and half the population lacks clean drinking water. The constant smoggy haze over northern China diminishes crop yields. By 2030, the nation will face a water shortage equal to the amount it consumes today; factories in the northwest have already been forced out of business because there just isn't any water. Even Chinese government economists estimate that environmental troubles shave 10 percent off the country's gross domestic product each year. Somehow, though, the effect this calamity is having on China's rise doesn't quite register in the West .

And then there's "Kung Fu Panda." That Hollywood movie embodies the final reason why China won't be a superpower: Beijing's animating ideas just aren't that animating.

In recent years, we've been bombarded with articles and books about China's rising global ideological influence. (One typical title: "Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World.") These works portray China's model -- a one-party state with a juggernaut economy -- as highly attractive to elites in many developing nations, although China's dreary current crop of acolytes (Zimbabwe, Burma and Sudan) don't amount to much of a threat.

But consider the case of the high-kicking panda who uses ancient Chinese teachings to turn himself into a kung fu warrior. That recent Hollywood smash broke Chinese box-office records -- and caused no end of hand-wringing among the country's glitterati. "The film's protagonist is China's national treasure, and all the elements are Chinese, but why didn't we make such a film?" Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company, told the official New China News Agency.

The content may be Chinese, but the irreverence and creativity of "Kung Fu Panda" are 100 percent American. That highlights another weakness in the argument about China's inevitable rise: The place remains an authoritarian state run by a party that limits the free flow of information, stifles ingenuity and doesn't understand how to self-correct. Blockbusters don't grow out of the barrel of a gun. Neither do superpowers in the age of globalization.

And yet we seem to revel in overestimating China. One recent evening, I was at a party where a senior aide to a Democratic senator was discussing the business deal earlier this year in which a Chinese state-owned investment company had bought a big chunk of the Blackstone Group, a U.S. investment firm. The Chinese company has lost more than $1 billion, but the aide wouldn't believe that it was just a bum investment. "It's got to be part of a broader plan," she insisted. "It's China."
I tried to convince her otherwise. I don't think I succeeded.

Obamania with Meat

The political fall-out post Barack’s Berlin speech has been interesting to watch. Almost as equally interesting, though, was the opportunity to watch the speech in perfect sound and comfort of my favorite chair on You Tube. I believe that the couch potato Obama experience was even more thrilling than actually having been there. This does mean, yes, that I am a boring sod.

The throngs (glancing back to be sure that I got an “r” there for the more persnickety among us) were mostly made up of energetic Berliners younger than myself. The sun beat down on us as we moved closer to the Siegesäule where Obama was to speak. I arrived later than I had planned, as I went with my friend Becca, who also has a fine blog (everydayberlin.blogspot.com) and her posse of German civil servants. The somewhat leisurely meanders having passed through the Brandenburg Gate and headed to the Säule, converged, slowly, then more slowly, the at a snail’s pace until we were so tightly squeezed together I almost expected a small Japanese guard to come and push all the air out of us so the doors of the Fujimoto Express could close and we could be on our way. That actually would have been preferable in some ways, in that Japanese trains, presumably, have air-conditioning as opposed to those steroidal Mississippi-size sunrays that beat down on my library tan for hours on end on Thursday. I was actually surprised that the throngs, young and German as they were, did not smell worse. I guess I can thank the Higher Power that I wasn’t coming to see Obama speak at the Champs-Elysées. ‘Stinky’ says my imagination.

Party-pooper as I am, although I was excited that we did actually get close enough to see the One, I just had to complain my ass off about the lack of technological foresight of those who put together the sound system. You could almost hear the speech one-mile behind you better than the speakers that were a few feet away. This caused the strangest echo-effect that made me think I was a fetus hearing our next president for the first time, but from the womb. I had serious trouble understanding the man because of this, and I am relatively sure that the majority of those around me, most of whom are not native speakers, understood little to nothing. Well, thanks technical crew; that certainly made the hours-long wait in the sweltering heat well worth it. Dumb asses.

Those of you who know me will not be surprised that the event that stuck in my mind was not the words of the Redeemer, but, rather, the event that followed--getting the chance to eat at the Döner (Gyro) stand that is rated in Lonely Planet as Berlin’s best. It was gooooooooood. My black friends would describe it as being “so good, it’ll make you slap your momma’”. That’s good all right. The Döner is the Berliner’s preferred fast-food. It is said that Germany has more Döner stands than McDondalds. I believe this is true. Normally, one only gets one good element of the three necessary for a Döner: the pita, the meat or the sauce (the vegetables are all about the same.) Usually it’s a good pita, but the meat sucks, or the meat and pita are good, but the sauce was made by someone without taste buds. Rarely, you get the chance to have a Döner that has all 3 elements in harmony with one another. This was one of those times, and I mark it as THE BEST DÖNER YET CONSUMED.



Today, Chris took us to a little art fair where there is a man who makes business cards as you wait. We need them especially fast as we are going to a social event tomorrow and want to make some “connections” if we can. This guy was so cool. He had a little printing press there and did all the typesetting himself. The cards look really embossed, like they were made earlier in the twentieth century. That may be because all of his materials were actually from that time period. ☺ A bit disconcerting was that the typeface was made out of lead. I asked him if this presented any health problems or risks. ‘Not if I wash my hands regularly and don’t smoke while printing.’ Well, that’s certainly comforting, considering he had just put out a cig before saying that. It’s just cool having something that was made right in front of you, by hand. Don’t ask me why. It just is.

Watch NBC

I just learned that the NBC Nightly News will be hosted from Berlin this evening for al you stateside. Look closely into the crowds at the Obama rally. Maybe you’ll see me! ☺

Registered "Ein Berliner" Before Obama's Speech

Yes, I will brave the throngs tomorrow to see our next president in person. (Some estimates in the press, unknown to be reliable or the contrary, are estimating an attendance of one million.) Hmmm. This seems very unlikely, but we shall see. If tomorrow is anything like it was pushing my way through the interested German Obama fans at the “Democrats Abroad” stand at the embassy opening, this should prove to be quite an adventure. Is it me and my sense of entitlement that spurns on this idea in my mind that people who can actually vote for this fella should be ushered to the front? Or, should it be the opposite, since this IS kraut country. Moral dilemmas abound. I will definitely be taking my passport, just in case it may help. I wanted to print out an extremely large sign with something ridiculous like “Opera Singers for Obama” or “Angst-ridden Existentialists 100% for Barrack”, but, unfortunately, no signs are allowed. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Where have I been? I have been on a European vacation with my sister for the last two weeks. It was a whirlwind of craziness, and I will need a couple of days to recover. As my sister so lovingly pointed out, I am a man who needs a lot of time by himself, and 2 weeks of 24/7 with a sibling was definitely a sharp contrast to my semi-hermit cave dwelling tendencies. We both got through it unscathed, though, and she has a lot of memories and photos to show for it.

Really, I consider this to be the real start of my move to Berlin. Now I am able to devote much of my time without hesitation to my future endeavors. And, we kicked off the start of this period with a trip to the government office in our neighborhood to register. This need to be officially registered in the city where you live was one aspect of Germany that really freaked me out at first. I felt it was some sort of infringement on my freedom. It was a little too East German, my movements being monitored by the civil servants of an overly bureaucratic society. I got over it once I realized the benefits of registering. In a lot of ways, it makes for a more trusting society, in that so few people can simply escape debts or crimes by moving from one place to another unnoticed. But I know better than to digress into another social analysis. The time is just not right.

One quick anecdote, though... When we went to be registered, the civil servant needed to see our proof of marriage (we both thought it was cool that she didn’t even bat an eye at this.) When looking at our marriage certificate, she became puzzled when she could not find a number she was looking for. After all of us joining in, looking for the number which listed our marriage, we realized that the number was “1”. She was so delightfully surprised at this, the way that only someone who pushes papers all day could only be. I guess she had never seen a marriage numbered “1” before. She leaned over to show her unbelieving pencil pushing compatriot. But, we were the first civil union in Chris’ little town, and, therefore, get to be Civil Union Number 1. I thought that was kind of neat. At any rate, we are registered now, and I am officially a Berliner.