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.

We went to see "Gypsy Caravan" and now I urge you to do the same. It's a concert tour movie, but it's also a lot more. And the music and the dancing are wonderful.

Something I found out: the song, "Djelem, djelem," which I had scooped up from somewhere long forgotten and put on my playlist and assumed was Middle Eastern or klezmer, turns out to be the Romani national anthem, and it's all about travelling long distances, having no money or food, and being taken in by your own people and fed: and persecution. it's a really moving song even when you don't know what it's about.

Something else: remember how I was once talking about Johann Trollmann? The Sinto (like a Gypsy) who was probably not related to the Trollmanns the nice fellow comes from? And the tantalizing detail of the Sinto Trollman having really similar features to the Trollman men I know?

Well, I kept seeing that Trollman mouth all over this movie. Now, I don't think this means a thing but that we're all very closely related and features like that can pop up all over. I don't think I'd have noticed it unless I'd read the Johann Trollmann story first. But I did notice it, and it's a thing I'm free to add meaning to, since I am a member of a species that does that. So there. (by the way, double-n Trollmann and single-n Trollman are historical and geographical distinctions)

Another thing: 2005-2015 is the decade of Roma inclusion.