After a week of Angela Merkel screwing Greece again

and Michelle Bachmann,
the rest of us, it's
been a lot like Cabaret 
without Joel Grey.


I can understand turning one's back on the Weimar Republic. I cannot understand German amnesia.


      But after Bachmann, 
      I really need a douche.
      Her xenophobia betrays 
      a familiar, vicious lust.

¡ no pasarán !

To me, the West stands for a set of ideas and institutions, for a certain period of history, for the Enlightenment and for liberalism tout court. National Socialism had been the triumph of Germany's long partial war against the West. A diminished commitment to the West strikes me as dangerous.

To this reader, it has become incoherent and escapist to discuss the Tea Party movement in the United States except in terms of a rejectionism of the West, itself. That this monstrous movement is the legacy of Reaganism in a now hypercorporatised world, no one even troubles himself to deny. They got all the war and plunder they prayed for, and it isn't enough, because it never could be. No wonder they've discovered their country as their natural enemy. May it always be so.

Motto of the Spanish
anti-fascist resistance,
a banner this week in
Syntagma Square, lower
left in red and gold.








Fritz Stern
Five Germanys I Have Known
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006© 


Harold Brodkey
Sea Battles on Dry Land
  Notes on American Fascism
Henry Holt, 1999©