Chronic Overexcitement

Sure, we’re a little worked up these days, too. About Putin, about the striking railroad engineers and about the Borussia Dortmund soccer team. But in the main, the pulse rate here in Merkel-land is downright peaceful. Verrry slooow, and that’s a good thing, especially if you take a look at what’s going on across the Atlantic in that model democracy founded in 1787. We didn’t even know what democracy was back in those days.

Now? Well, we’re still learning. But those folks across the water are going nuts. Our role model. The nation that left its economic and cultural imprint so clearly upon us while liberating us from fascism. If societies have a collective psyche, that one is damned close to a nervous breakdown.

Let’s take a step back. Political engagement is a good thing. It involves taking passionate stands. It sometimes involves getting upset about those mainstream dummies. Those hidebound Germans dedicated to prudent saving and fretting about overindebtedness. Disastrous for Europe. Or that super-silly Christian Social Union party in Bavaria that wants to stick us with such outrageous things as financial assistance for families, tolls for autobahn use by foreign vehicles, automatic deportation for immigrants trying to scam the system, etc., much of which is senseless if not actually destructive and is still proudly — if self-serving politically — trumpeted by the CSU in the darkest corners of Bavaria.

America isn’t just deeply divided politically, as people have been pointing out for years; it also suffers from being chronically overwrought and terribly angry. It suffers from a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome brought on by all its recent wars abroad and inflammatory rhetoric at home. Its traditional optimism and idealism can’t be revived without administering tons of anti-depressants. It is in danger of suffocating on its own American dream because the social contrasts become greater and more blatant by the day. It sometimes seems as if capitalism is at war with itself there.

But the noise and confusion are completely planned and intentional. They are stoked by the likes of media giant Rupert Murdoch, the war-mongering, asocial economic reactionary who has had a horrifying effect for decades from Australia to Great Britain and on to the United States. It defines what passes as Anglo-Saxon these days. Murdoch’s Fox News delivers a fresh load of fear and anger every day.

Noise and confusion also generate billions of dollars in political donations and that’s the way the U.S. Supreme Court wants it. The court has been clearing the way for big money in politics, the exact cause of dissatisfaction with government in America, despite every attempt at reform since Watergate. The rest is discontent, hysteria and fear; fear of terrorism, Ebola, illegal aliens, the Chinese and World War Three. One Senator from South Carolina shouts that the president has to finally act before “we all get killed back here at home.”

It almost seems immaterial whether the Republicans conquer both houses of Congress on Tuesday or not. Disappointment and impotence in the American government are too deeply rooted and because Obama, the last totally overburdened hero figure, was able to change neither the tone nor the Washington power structures.

In comparison, it seems to me that Germany is quiet, tame and even delightfully boring. Sure, big money is at work in German politics as well but the debate is pleasantly civil. And Frau Merkel, despite not having many details nailed down, is stylistically a blessing.

Better bloodless than bloodthirsty.