Peeking into the rock

I get news feeds from Reuters and BBC.  They like to repost certain stories over and over without much change in the content, I don't know why: maybe to keep them from falling off the front page.

This weekend they're all for giving free publicity to the latest venomous lies spewing from that heroine of free enterprise Angela Merkel.  Angela Merkel says "we've tried and tried and tried so hard and yet we are completely unable to recognize our fellow humans as humn, because they persist in being different from us.  The German multicultural society has failed."

This is so much bullshit on so many levels.  One: her ilk has not tried at all.  Her ilk is no more interested in multuiculturalism than they are interested in peace and justice.  For some years, back when capitalists still thought markets mattered -- before their weird embrace of a belief in some sort of economic singularity -- they did embrace a kind of shallow inclusivity, because look! cheap labor, and also more people to sell things to!

But some time in the last twenty-thirty years the idiots have decided they don't need workers or consumers anymore, and they can let them all go starve on the streets and they can systematically destroy infrastructure, manufacturing, even the service industries that twenty years ago they said were the next great thing -- hell, they can destrioy the physical world -- so now the only use they have for diversity is as a bogheyman to manipulate people with.  They get lots of benefits out of burgeoning racism.  The chief one is that they convince the most desperate to turn their attention from how we got into this mess and who got us here, to finding people in their neighborhood to hate on and struggle against.  

"Look over there!  Your pharmacist is brown and talks funny!  He is undermining your sacred national values!  Never mind that he was born here, and sponsors the local Little League team.  Down the street!  Thiose guys loitering on the corner by the lumber yard aren't just laborers looking for a day's work to support their families, they're aliens intent on swamping the welfare system (never mind that they don't receive anything like proportional benefits for the taxes they pay, and they do pay them).  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

Meanwhile, they'll give you brains of sawdust so you will find logic in anything Christine O'Donnel or Sharon Angle or Sarah Palin say: a heart a heart of unrecyclable styrofoam so it will repel the tears of the evicted, the fired, the murdered, and the abandoned: and courage made of the drugs we're supposedly having a war on, but we know how they got on to the street and where the Zetas really got their start.

Why does the BBC think there is merit in broadcasting this headline every couple of hours? From the tone of the article, they're doing what all the mainstream media have been doing lately (and by lately I mean the last decade).  They're not exposing this monster for what she is.  That would be journalism.  Instead, they're depicting her as the voice of a force of nature, a regretable but unstoppable trend which they will by turns admire and abhor as it gathers momentum and lights the world on fire again.

When Roma and Senegalese workers are murdered all over Europe by thugs with swastikas, neither Sarkozy or Merkel will take the blame.  Nor will the BBC.  You know who they'll blame? The Roma and the Senegalese. 

One last note: notice, please that Angela Merkel is saying this because she has to compete with Nicholas Sarkozy, but if the German government rounded up Roma and deported them the historical resonance would be too obvious for even the BBC to miss, and nobody would believe a word of the trumped-up excuses about housing being below code and unpermitted.

I didn't think I was jet lagged but I guess I am. Yesterday I was pretty efficient: today all I've done is eat and go through maybe half the pictures. (there are about 900 of them, many of which are duplicates because I didn't trust the first one or eleven or so).

Here's Frank demonstrating stroopwaffel (a kind of syrup-laden cookie) and Cuban rum to the dog, the night of our return:


Here's my whole family, astonished at the high quality of graffiti in Berlin (on the Museumsinsel):



Here's Emma partaking of a water fountain which runs perpetually in Vondelpark in Amsterdam, where there is water everywhere but mostly if you want to drink it you have to buy it in bottles from the French:




More later. Anyway, we had fun, and now I am back in my scruffy little real world.

Oh, the icon? It will only be default for a couple of days. It's more Berlin graffiti.

Yes, people use English a lot, especially in Amsterdam, but it doesn't seem so much like US-UK cultural imperialism as much as the way my kids watch anime and listen to Rammstein.

Tonmorrow we have to shift luggage six times at least. Again on Monday night and Tuesday.

Irina, according to the Museum fur Naturkunde, was right: the birds in Vondelpark were magpies. They are bigger and rounder than the magpies I am used to seeing in the Central Valley. We did see hooded crows all over Berlin.

I brought the wrong shoes and I am nearly crippled, but since Emma needs to rest a lot I'm not ruining things.

Frank has been discovering the disaffected club scene everywhere we go. I have been photographing graffiti, birds, and brickwork. A couple of blocks from the hostel there is an endless squat, not inside a building but in its former parking lot, many odd little dwellings made of abandoned bits like in a favela or something. Behind them is a huge brick building which was apparently burned at one time and whose broken edges have been decorated with political and esthetic graffiti. Then there is a huge yellow crane which is poised, I think, to bring the building down, right on top of the squat.

In Amsterdam the rentable computers had the kind of keyboard I am used to. Here the keyboard is odd. The Z is in the top row, and the Y is in the bottom row, and there are umlauted O and A keys (which is understandable), and no double apostrophe for quotes, and some other characters which I think one must use the control key to get.

Have to sign off now -- used up my time.

I've been looking for information about what I've figured out is the Deltawerken: I want to see this grand engineering to keep the water out. I'm learning things, but how to see things is not one of the things I've learned, yet.

But. Seriously -- the Pacific Islands. What are we going to do? The sea will rise under every scenario that we can imagine. It's only a question of how far and how fast. Many of the islands become really uninhabotable with quite modest rises.

For purposes of manufacturing labels and passports, a surprising number of these islands belong to the United States, though they get no representation in Congress (do the people there pay federal taxes?) and apparently federal work safety and wage laws do not apply. For purposes of disaster relief and relocation, do these islands belong to the US? Are their inhabitants guaranteed any attention from Washington at all?

Seriously, again, I can't see dikes and waterworks being built for all these little islands. Where will the people go?

I think if I were a Pacific Islander, I'd be leaving now, so my children and grandchildren would not be refugees.

What kinds of clothes do you take to Europe in late August? Or more to the point, what do you take for an extended trip? I'm doing experiments with my clothes to see if they drip dry because Zac says that laundromats tend to be inconvenient. But clothes don't say "drip dry" on them anymore, they have all this bs, fussy directions for taking care of them I guess so theycan't be caught on a false promise.

It says here it rains 60-70 mm in August for both Amsterdam and Berlin. What does that mean? One or two big downpours, or a little drizzle everyday, or what?

Emma's going to have whopping big bottles of pain relievers and muscle relaxants. What kind of documentation does she need for the snoopers at the airports? Does she need a letter from the surgeon? Or just the prescription things? I'm going to have whopping numbers of non-scheduled prescription drugs, and I don't want to take all the bottles with me -- I just want to take the little boxes with the days marked out. If I have the prescription receipt things I get at the drugstore, will that be enough documentation?

And why is modern luggage so ridiculously heavy? I understand about the wheels, but what about stairs? I need to be able to lift the thing easily.

We have a couple of duffels, and that's what I mainly want to use. They're easy to carry and easy to stow. We might even be able to get all our stuff into carry-ons.

I may have succeeded in buying plane tickets, although I did not succeed in paying for them. I used AAA. They had some kind of problem with my credit card, which is actually a debit card, and which has been stocked with more money than we need to do the adventure. So I don't know what the problem is: they've promised to call me soon and work out the payment.

I ended up putting the flight to the 17th instead of the 16th (which is what I accidentally wrote here anyway) because the flights on the 16th were basically used up by the time I succeeded in buying tickets. Also, the tickets I finally succeeded in buying are a few dollars less than the last batch I failed to buy.

on another front -- that pirate fantasy story? I'm pretty sure it involves a boat full of Solomon Islanders out on a kula trading voyage encountering the Flying Dutchman, or something like the Flying Dutchman that's pirates, I haven't decided. It's unlikely to be real pirates, because pirates would starve if they hung out in those waters at that time. Anyway, the point is to put the Encounter with the Other on its head, and to let the Other be the white guys. Also, the kula ring is so cool I just can't sit still.

(also posted in rasfc)

We seem to be arriving Amsterdam on the 18th of August.

We seem to be taking the train from there to Berlin on the 21st.

We seem to be taking the train from Berlin to a convenient place in Denmark on the 25th (from whence we go to the inlaws on their island).

We seem to be leaving Copenhagen or some other convenient place in Denmark on the 28th to go back to Amsterdam and return to California on the 28th.

Since I'm still juggling things and the tickets won't be bought till tonight, there are still possibilities that things may change, though I have no intention of changing them. The uncertainties about Denmark are due to the fact that I have not been able to find an online repository of precise information about trains or buses that go and leave there. I do gather from the vague sources of information that Denmark is indeed served by international transportation, so I'm not actually worried about it. Not exactly.

We seem to have lucked into the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth. Rembrandt was one of my mother's favorite artists, so I think it's only fitting that we take advantage of the festivities. We also have to show the kids the Van Goghs and the Vermeers (the old folks got to see some of these when they were in travelling exhibits to the De Young museum in SF years ago). We missed Hans Christian ANderson's 200th birthday last year, but I think we'll be okay.

We'll be adoring the Ishtar Gate in Berlin, and I also have a desire to pay homage to Bertolt Brecht.

Also, at some point we want to look at European wildlife and of course we have to wander on the streets. However, Emma will only be seven weeks out from spine surgery and will need to take it somewhat easy (she can't carry anything and her legs will only support her for brief periods, though she's not allowed to sit down or lie down for long either).

And also, of course, I want to meet whoever I can. My family is nice people and can hold up their end of a conversation.