Germany goes alone

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/18/10

You can now remove the buzz words “diversity and globalization” from the phrase book, just as James A. Baker banned the use of the phrase “leadership and excellence” when he took charge for George H.W. Bush. The age is over. We are going to need new buzz words. That is the message beneath the message of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had “utterly failed.” Two things are coming to clash here; the primal need for a uniform regional culture to connect the people to the earth, to the universe, to time past and the future – that is, the need for a soul – and the accommodation of the steel and glass zeitgeist that knew no boundaries which was the American spirit of capitalism in the post-war period.

Merkel has already been marked as a dangerous, rising Destructicon by President Obama’s key Transformer, Paul “Feel my wrath” Krugman, when she refused to follow orders on the global bailouts last year, citing Germany’s experience in the 1920s and 1930s. Remember that? The end of the world? Declaring in fact that she, Germany, would go alone.

And to paraphrase Lincoln Steffens, Merkel has seen the millennium, and it works. Today Germany and China are the creditor nations and America and England are the debtor nations. But how to get from here to the millennium is a different story.
As the AP’s Melissa Eddy reports, “Merkel acknowledged in her Saturday comments that then-West Germany in the 1960s opened its doors to Turkish laborers who helped the nation rebuild from the ruins of World War II. Yet German politicians believed those laborers would eventually return home. Instead, many have stayed and their children's children are now starting families here.”

As they should. They that build the nation will inherit the nation and this time around, the Turks built Germany. As it was here in New England when the Puritans took it from the Indians, then the Anglicans took it from the Puritans, then the Irish came and took it again from the Anglicans, each building a bigger church than the last. I’m sure we are all glad to be here now although some have moved to Texas, where I sense they are not really wanted.