On most issues, Die Zeit runs insightful, context-rich articles that are, on average, five times longer, and ten times more informative, than the longest articles you might find in the NYT, and I have oft admired their commitment to the highest-quality journalism. But lately, whenever they have to deal with Schroeder, they can't seem to see the forest for the Big Businesses that have chopped down the trees.

I suspect they literally cannot afford to accept the fact Schroeder is in bed with owners & management and NOT, as a good SPDer should be, with the workers and the trade unions. (Fuck the Lumpen, of course, nobody cares about them except people like Schill. That solid twenty percent is going to reek havoc in the upcoming elections --mark my words.) I suspect this might be an instance of the demonism of Gemütlichkeit getting the better of otherwise good journalists. I certainly do not know where the truly thoughtful people in Germany yesterday were at, if not out at those protests. I do not count Schroeder among the truly thoughtful, but among the truly opportunistic, he certainly belongs.

The so-called truly thoughtful middle in Germany disgust me. One moment they're talking about importing breeder-fuck foreigners to bouy the sinking German fertility rate, -- but they don't want them breeding merely for the sake of having children, oh no!, they want the fecund ova of auslander as spawn for the next generation of pension payers. The public rhetoric on this issue has been absolutely sickening. And every so-called truly thoughtful politician has had some debauched, demeaned trope to add to it.

The next moment these truly thoughtful people are talking about fingerprinting all foreigners in Germany and then stumping for government programs to create jobs for GERMANS, a group they never clearly define. They rant & rave about America as a post-modern Sodom & Gomorra one day, getting the masses all worked up and scared about an all-out land invasion of Wal-Mart & McDonalds and Hollywood produced Steinhausers, and the next day, they're getting teary-eyed about the good-old-days of the Berlin airlifts. Then they wheel & deal in the backrooms with the CEOs of the very corporations they've just cast as pillars of salt. And, to win kudos with those still clinging to the Golden Mean and to tolerance and to other retrograde liberal ideals they point their fingers at the so-called populists and holler "Neo-nazis!" And they point with the other hand at the far left and holler "vandals!". They wax critical about the dangers of genetically modified food-crops in public before GM-wary audiences (85% of the German masses do NOT want GM food ANYwhere in Germany.) and then these thoughtful politicians who don't know Crick from Watson from Mary Stephenson turn right around and approve human stem-cell research and genome-type projects in private. No appeal to demotic is made. And none of these thoughtful people is willing to allocate more tax funds for education; instead, they're blowing larger and larger wads on the high-tech weapons industry.

But it must be admitted that some of the Truly Thoughtful are beginning to talk about really clever things: reinstating the death penalty, building more prisons and privatizing them, giving drug addicts (not the pushers, the street addicts) prison terms instead of clinical help. (One German politician has met with Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin to learn how to make the German social system turn a profit.) They're even talking about privatizing the autobahn!

They've already sold the post office, which is currently dumping the German market to focus on China. Oh, then there's all this so-called reform of the Health Care System and of Health Insurance Regulations, which, surprise, surprise, turn out to be greatly advantageous to the pharmaceutical companies, who, just by chance, want to eliminate Homeopathy and other preventative health care. Just say no! to Viagra!

Truly thoughtful? Truly hypocritical! Truly Machiavellian! Truly confused!

This autumn, Stoiber is going to cash in on Schroeder's two-timing: the working-class feel that Schroeder has fed them to the corporate sharks, whereas Stoiber's blue-eyed rhetoric leaves them feeling warm & fuzzy about being German and reassured that he's not going to allow foreign interests to take over Germany nor eliminate German jobs. The masses would do well to look at the steaming pile of unemployment Siemens has dropped in Stoiber' own backyard. The truly thoughtful respectable Left (the SPD and the compromising Greens) in Germany have -- by embracing U.-Chicago-hatched, pseudo-Hayekian neo-liberalism -- paved the way for Stoiber, just as the post-Scholseneysten Left in France have done the same for Chirac and LePen. But NOBODY is talking about the crucial problem of the lack of political representation for foreign workers, whose numbers are increasing.

It would make a great deal of sense to me for an editor from Die Zeit to say something truly thoughtful about how to tell the difference these days between a populist & a leftist. Between the SPD and the CDU, between the FDP and the SPD. Between the Globally Critical who want to, as DeLillo puts it, "be a moderating influence, to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future," and the Uncritical Reactionary likely to vote for the German version of LePen. I suspect the crucial difference is this: the Globally Critical (the so-called Far Left) believe in and advocate for Universal Citizenship (and however that concept might be made politically meaningful throughout the EU) whereas the Uncritical Reactionary believe in and advocate for Local Citizenship (and however that concept can be protected from meaning too much for too many both politically and culturally.)

Things got rowdy in Berlin yesterday. But I doubt Bush knows it. He's being thickly cloaked in shadows & fog as he travels through, excuse me, under, the city.