The Toiler's Papers
Having taking some inspiration from Mistfink's piece regaling us with a week in the life of an American assistant in Austria I felt compelled to respond with a day in the life of an Englishman in Vienna. The following recounts the toils and tribulations of the said Englishman. Any comments would be greatly appreciated however cruel and critical they might be.
TPThe toilet roll in my bag as I pull out this notebook gives me something to write about at least as the tram slews round one curve, then another and a computerised voice is telling me to umsteigen. It is the voice of Stephen Hawking’s Austrian cousin so familiar to all of us now as the voice of faceless, soulless and perhaps powerless authority. We arrive at Oper, the sun no longer spreading itself across the pedestrianised pavement plain, the smell of Wiener Würstl and hunks of chicken sweating on a spit lingering in the air. The door closes. I am still on the tram…
…and the toilet roll is still in my bag, alongside 8 packets of Mayfair cigarettes; another tea-soaked Madeleine which draws my thoughts like goatskin on a drum across the cloud-scudded sky of day…
…I change trams, another whiff of kebab, the D to the 49, not that numbers matter, briefly checking the timetable. A blue uniform with an embossed hat and badge waits for the same tram – but no, my paranoia is unfounded, I’m not carrying anything and they wouldn’t check me anyway: aside from the jacket I look British not Slavic…
…I have decided to write only while the tram is moving: Robert Louis Stephenson said travelling is better than arriving; I say writing while travelling keeps the ink flowing thick and fast as my thoughts coagulate onto the page…
…I’ve missed my stop…
…And I’m waiting again, the jazz guitarist’s wry grin fading, the clarinet’s tones reverberating and I write as I step onto the 14A heading homewards now. I write to the lull and sway of the bus as it pulls in to stops, ticks over at traffic lights, accelerates out of junctions. A small girl, her large face nuzzling at a book, mp3 player blocking out the public around her, wants to get off the bus. I let her out and glance at the book wondering what the average Austrian is reading nowadays. It is still the fucking Da Vinci Code…
The day began with a coffee, naturally, no milk – we had run out – and bleary eyed I had drunk down the mud: surely my first act of exploitation of the day. Somebody somewhere was making me feel guilty about stimulating my central nervous system on a daily basis in this way so I added another sugar to get the bitter taste of having what many have not out of my mouth – sugar from the Caribbean no doubt – but it says Viennese Sugar on the bag and I think it probably originates from sugar beets grown in the subsidy rich EU. The guilt dissolves like the sugar into the mud of the modern metropolis.
The coffee has me in my usual jittery, tense state and I’m heading for my first ever video-conference. At TelekomAustria a bespectacled man awaits me, burly and stout. He warms to me when I tell him I am a video-conference virgin. ‘Your first time eh?’
I look at myself on the screen: this unsettling doppelganger effect, my pixellated image reflected back at me on the left, an artificial eye in the centre, a blank screen – the space reserved for my interviewers – on the right. I shuffle uneasily and tell my aide to have the camera focus on my upper body, not my hands: I fidget too much.
The job interview goes well and I stroll out of the 21st century working space, functional and plush, the industrial feel part style, part economy, a post-post modernism, no longer playful or Jencksian, merely vast loping spaces and beglassed surfaces like a well thought out hive of the Corporation of the Now, the coca-colonised world gone incredibly, unbearably sane and ordered. But I look at my environment and I realise that I could fit if I wanted to and it could fit to me. I do not swagger, but feel that if I did, I could pull it off. In the bowels of the Corporation – the cafeteria – I drink my special reduced rate but full flavour coffee and stare at the glass that houses the autonomous automaton. In all of this and more I am complicit, but I have my own problems.
The interview was for a job in Singapore. The problem of employment one we all hope to solve on our terms, not on the terms meted out to us by most employers. Singapore, an island state the size of Washington D.C. with a standard of living equal to what we have to come to expect in Western Europe. Dominated by shrewd, Chinese businessmen; this little nation was still going places. Voting was compulsory and capital and corporal punishments were accepted as necessary adjuncts to the rather extreme brand of democracy practised there. Providing one did not smuggle drugs it seemed like a nice place to build a future for the money was good and the climate always warm.
I am applying for a new passport as the old one will be no good if I get the job in Singapore so I go to a booth to get my pictures taken against a ‘white background.’
It takes me 45 minutes trapsing up and down the streets of Vienna to find a working booth that hasn’t been used as a public toilet. It is in Matzleinsdorferplatz – a 70s subway station of the future. Amongst the glazed beige brick walls echoing the hollow rattle of the trams I come across a booth and sit down inside it. Cigarette burns cover the operating board and screen but it still functions. The chair doesn’t swivel as it should so I have to stoop with my head to one side in order to fit my profile within the oval outline on the screen. The booth lacks a curtain to protect me from the scrutinising gazes of the commuters who pass me by, so I wear my privacy publicly. Humiliation: to cringingly smile, feigning the kind of bored contentment which would hopefully bypass comparisons of my image with mugshots of IRA paramilitaries or moors murderers, my dim-witted expression laid bare for all onlookers to see. I cannot look content: my face won’t allow itself to be portayed in such a way in such circumstances. ‘Your pictures will be ready in 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3...’ you get the idea.
I claim the photos and realise the white background is grey and the face is blurred. The top of my head is cut off. Dissappointing. I wait for my change but the booth is uncooperative – I become its next victim, its intermittent vibrating its victory lambada. It has robbed me of 1€ and probably also the 5€ I paid for these sloppy pixellated copies of myself.
I look at mediated images of myself for the second time today, my face a whore to the lens of circumspection, my public image a blurred, chopped, swarthy impression of my features obtained from a curtainless, fusty smelling but smarmy booth. The machine has won again. I walk, clutching the photos in my hand, dejected.
Somewhere, in another kind of booth, I drank coffee. Somewhere I slowed my stride to listen to street-jazz. Somewhere I rode the tram. Somewhere I missed my stop because somewhere I was writing. I continue writing now. I regret not giving money to the jazz musician who had coyly smiled at me as I unwound to the sound of a warbling clarinet in the city’s underground. Instead I gave money to an ungrateful grumpy machine that stole my soul and charged me for it and deep down inside somewhere it wrankles. It’s all wrong this way of living and I haven’t seen the sun in at least a week. Nowhere.
Everywhere I need to go in Vienna today, the tram goes – or the bus – so I’m back on the tram riding to the British embassy but the sun shining for the first time in a week makes me want to walk the last stretch. Enjoying the shadows makes me late: the embassy is only open two hours a day so I break into a run but I need to piss. No toilet to be seen anywhere.
I finally enter the embassy grounds, five minutes before closing, a nondescript concrete barrier – the kind one finds separating autobahn lanes – blocking my path.
‘No groups’ says a sign. I am addressed in German. I reply in English, pointing to the edifice in front of me, ‘This is open for passport renewal isn’t it?’
My bag is checked, I am frisked; my mobile phone must be switched off. I am guided through a metal detector. The guard is amiable, understanding, an ex-squaddie for sure but it doesn’t immediately show. His mousy red hair and freckles undermine his status as an authority figure.
I pass onto British soil and immediately the atmosphere changes, time seems to distort. Pamphlets are laid out neatly explaining various aspects of the British passport process, British nationals abroad, what your embassy can and can’t do, right of abode, FAQ’s, and everything seems spiffingly civil. I immediately feel that I should queue even though I am the only person here but I resolve never to use the phrase, ‘if it’s not too much trouble’ during my sojourn on British soil however many doors such a phrase might open. I am a British subject but I will not subordinate myself to the state to which I am an equal member. The class system – according to those in the know – the middle classes that is – has been abolished by new legislation introduced into the British educational system in 2002.
The pictures are no good. The background is apparently ‘off-white’ rather than white. I protest, ‘I paid 5€ for that – 6 actually.’ Deaf ears, ‘Look you can still tell it’s me,’ although she can read my lips. ‘Sorry, the machine won’t be able to read it.’
At some point you begin to wonder whether we are still controlling the machines or whether they are controlling us, running it all for us, but not for our benefit. The experience of being back on British soil, confronted with the same people, controlled only by more up-to-date machines – like seeing an image of myself talking into a video camera – is an uncanny one. The prickly authoritative air that this woman before me carries betrays a life of pent-up disappointment which seeks expression through the reinforced glass in the words,
‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come back tomorrow.’
But it’s my time and not hers: she gets paid to sit there and I and all other British subjects pay her to do it.
‘And be sure to have all the forms filled out correctly next time.’
Like I am wasting her time, keeping her from the next chapter of the Da Vinci Code. I tell her what she wants to hear:
‘Okay, okay, so if this is about you proving that you are better than me in every way, then I can tell you now; you’re better than me in every way. Satisfied? Now, can we continue with my application?’
She smiles, a cracked smile, sweet in its own way as if someone has just flicked a peanut at her clitoris.
‘Do you have the money?’
‘What money?’
‘I can’t process it without the 107€ handling fee.’
‘Don’t handle it then: I can give it to the machine – you don’t have to do anything.’
(In the end I go back the next day but I have given my landline number and not my mobile number on the application form and this proves another major stumbling block. She asks me for the number. I don’t know it. She looks at me incredulously and says she can’t believe I don’t know my own mobile number. I tell her that I don’t know about her but I am never so lonely that I need to call myself. So I am forced to go outside – as I can’t turn on my mobile phone on British soil – through the metal detector and into the carless street and I sit on the concrete barrier with a pen in one hand accessing my number while being watched by at least three surveillance cameras and thinking about why power feels it needs to protect itself so heavily with so many new-fangled devices and safety precautions because if power really were power then the protection wouldn’t be necessary. A power that is so paranoid is insecure and unstable and therefore maybe should not be in power at all, especially when that power seems to suspect every one of its citizens: citizens who gave that power permission to be in the first place. The security guard sees I am getting distressed and is apologetic, telling me, ‘rules are rules’…and death is death, ink is ink and democracy is words. I go back in with the number scrawled onto my palm but when I hand over the money – the ‘handling fee’ – I am told that I need to bring the correct amount – a 100€ and a 50€ note are too much. My mistake, I obviously did not read the small print carefully enough. Good ‘ol Britain – or was this a newer Britain? This was a Britain that wanted to chain you to the bed but punish you if you fell asleep. I return finally for a third day and her wry smile says it all – she has made her point, she and her government have won but I will, in at least four weeks, get a new passport with my own biometric information in it for every border guard to verify at his will.)
After the embassy my bladder is about to explode but with the high security I dare not go in a nearby bush or tree and so I walk through the faceless streets, the facades looming.
After half an hour walking, the sun is going down but there is a toilet. I pay the 50cents to the machine which guards the door grudgingly as my visit is brief. And so I pick up the toilet roll – if only to get my money’s worth – and now I sit on the 14A, my hand holding the pen that writes these words, my eye focussing, my mind absent, stunned, stymied.
I get off the 14a and tape the cigarette packets I had bought together into one bundle and place them in an A4 envelope. They are for my mother who is loathe to buy cigarettes in the U.K. especially when her son in Vienna can buy them for a third of the price and post them onto her every couple of weeks.
Irving, Pfarrad Get Their Wings Clipped
Freedom of expression in Osterreich was dealt two harsh blows in the past few days with the conviction of Holocaust denier and eyebrow farmer
David Irving and the blatant censorship of Pfarrad's latest posting on The Stusie. I will address the latter first, and admit culpability. It was indeed none other than der Staubsauger himself who swooped in (it was a slow swoop) and materially altered the graphic depiction that embodied Pfarrad's sacred right to make us nauseous. The timing was poor, because I was about to post about Herr Irving anyway and the aggregate of the two events is going to make me seem like a book-burning asshole. C'est La Vie.
So Irving got the book thrown at him yesterday, not the whole book mind you, but a good few chapters - he got three years for a speech he gave back in '89 in which he argued that the Nazi's hadn't, actually, killed millions of Jews during WWII and that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were completely fictional. Now, as most of us know, there are laws against such speech in eleven countries including Austria. Mr. Irving was not unaware of these laws, he simply chose to disobey them. At his trial he argued that his views have changed since then, and he no longer denies that many Jews died at the hands of the Nazis or that there were gas chambers, but since he was arrested while in the country to speak to a right-wing conservative fraternity, he can't have changed his stripes too much.
The big question behind all of this then, is whether freedom of speech/expression exists in Europe in the way it supposedly exists in the U.S. The answer, at least with regard to reactionary perspectives, is no, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's difficult to argue that it's okay to curtail basic freedoms with respect to certain topics while still opposing censorship and oppression, but I'm going to try. There are several important differences between say, the Bush administration throwing out the right to privacy in favor of unauthorized wiretapping and the Austrian statute that makes Holocaust denial a crime. First and foremost, the Austrian statute is legal, by which I mean it was
proposed and adopted as legislation through the usual process, and the citizens affected are under fair notice of what the law means for them. By contrast, the NSA wiretapping has been conducted clandestinely, and although the administration defends them as being constitutional under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), when the record is more closely examined, as it has been by
Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law, it can be seen that this is certainly not the case, and in fact they are clearly unconstitutional when considered in the light of the Foreign Intelligence surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
Second, the Austrian statutory prohibition on Holocaust denial is a small exception to an otherwise free society based on the cultural scars of recent history. It is possible that such laws will, as Irving himself contends, fade away in the future, although I don't see it happening any time soon, especially in light of his conviction. In contrast, the NSA wiretapping program has been forced upon an unsuspecting American public based on classified intelligence that cannot be shared for risk of compromising it. That's all well and good, but wasn't it exactly this type of secret intelligence that this administration asked us to "just trust them" on when we began our WMD Easter egg hunt that transformed Iraq from a clusterfuck to a clusterfuck that we're responsible for.
In summary, Irving bad, Austria good, Bush bad, Professor Tribe good, tubgirl bad, Pfarrad good.
The Fury of Democracy
Yes…well…there is a point to the picture above, trust me…its about freedom of opinion you see. I am simply exercising my right to publish whatever the fuck I like and tough shit if any of you out there have a problem with it. Not my problem. Well, apparently, the image above is not as outrageous as the images created by some ‘zany’ Danish cartoonists, pictures which I will discuss presently.
If you want to see the offending images, check out wikipedia. In my opinion the images are crass insults masquerading as 'satire' - the one with Mohammed carrying a bomb in his turban beggars belief. Yeh, why not insult all muslims for the sins of a handful of ‘freedom fighters’. (I am sick and tired of the word terrorist being directed at people who are fighting – rightly or wrongly – for what they believe in and the loaded connotations behind that word suggest these people are evil incarnate thus preventing us seeing the motives for their crimes as anything more than the promotion of ‘terror’ itself. Lest we forget, the infidels – the Americans – are still occupying (and collaborating with) the most fundamental of all Muslim nation states: Saudi Arabia. This is a country where there is no hint of a democratic process and women are not allowed to drive (ok…well…maybe not such a bad idea after all) and moreover, a country which funds many of the
medhersas (Koranic schools) in other more moderate Islamic countries which promote their extreme brand of Islam known as
wahhabism. Imagine that, the USA allied to the most extremist muslim country in the world, while at the same time seeking through its administration and media to create a paradigm which has the West at war with this religion? Yet there has never been any talk of why these terrorists do what they do – such as in order to drive the infidels out of the holy land once and for all. Thus throughout this blog I will use the contentious term ‘freedom fighter’ interchangeably with the equally contentious term ‘terrorist’ as it is not the author’s intention to display bias on such a controversial topic.)
One commentator described these caricatures as the ‘Life of Brian’ for Islam. That may be so, with one fundamental (loaded word) difference: Life of Brian was funny. And this isn’t about
Meinungsfreiheit either as you don’t get people publishing pictures of tubgirl in their newspapers and then afterwards stating ‘we’re only expressing our freedom of opinion.’ There are some standards of decency which are unspoken but adhered to nevertheless. I wouldn’t portray Jesus in the way Mohammed was portrayed even though in Christianity we are allowed to depict our prophet – a fundamental (that word again) difference between our two religions.
Governments, furthermore, have a responsibility to their citizens to maintain the peace and I don’t see this being done when a Danish newspaper is allowed to republish their caricatures in a country of 200,000 muslims. This smacks of racism in a country which until recently had a radio station, supported by government subsidies, that declared itself as ‘national socialist’. Well, the Jews are gone from Europe so no-one can say Hitler wasn’t successful in this respect, the problem now though, is that they’ve been replaced with muslims.
The right-wing government in Denmark clearly should shoulder some of the blame for the present outrage in Islamic countries although we should also bear in mind, that the countries where the most outrage has been ‘reported’ (how many people did you count taking part in these riots? One thousand?) have a vested interest in turning the rage of its populace outwards towards the West (much as the US is doing in reverse with its own population). Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten therefore – as well as other newspapers around Europe including a few here in Austria – are helping to create this polarisation between East and West, all in the name of ‘freedom of opinion.’ Authoritarian regimes all need to give their populace a way to vent their anger: I vent mine by publishing a picture of tubgirl. Enjoy.
Don't Be A Dick.
Word to the Mistfink. The best part of
Mr. Cheney's day out in my opinion however, is that Dick et al. were hunting quail whose wings had been clipped beforehand. Not only is that cowardly, unsporting bullshit and probably not much fun, but these birds can't fly more than about three feet off the ground, yet Dick shot his elderly hunting partner IN THE FACE. Unless this geriatric lawyer is also a midget, it's time for Dick to start answering some serious questions.
This particular scandal IS more entertaining than most, but given that (as Ariana Huffington recently pointed out) it was only a few days ago we learned that Cheney might have authorized his former aide Scooter Libby to leak classified information to reporters, it's shameful that that story didn't generate a tiny fraction of the coverage.
As NYT's Maureen Dowd put it:
"With American soldiers dying in Iraq, Five-Deferment Dick 'I Had Other Priorities in the 60s Than Military Service' Cheney gets his macho kicks gunning down little birds and the occasional old man while W rides his bike, blissfully oblivious to any collateral damage."
If this is what it takes to get the voters of this country to sit up and take notice of the atrocities being perpetrated by this administration, we're in a sad state of affairs indeed.
By my count this administration has brought us: unilateral war, military detainees, shitty intelligence, intelligence leaks, illegal wiretaps, no healthcare, no social safety net, no surplus, a nice fat deficit, a Katrina response that borders on criminal negligence and a Vice President who shoots old people. Anyone ever heard of accountability?
Mistfink in da U.S.A.
Well, twenty-four hours, two snowstorms and one miserably subpar dinner of ravioli later, I've made it back to the land of SUVs, GOPs, and McD's. After nearly being stranded in the Ennstal due to the latest blizzard in a winter that has dropped more than 3 meters in many parts of the valley, I caught the very last connecting flight departing from Philadelphia during one of the worst snowstorms in recent New England history. All the worrying and uncertainty was worth it, though, because I got to eat a bar burger, play pool, and drink multiple cocktails with brand name booze, all on my first night.
I also should have known that my return would be marked by a timely scandal of sorts w/r/t our esteemed regime. What I probably shouldn't have guessed was that it would be even more ridiculous and entertaining than scandals past. With all respect to the octogenarian victim, it would have been even more funny had our VP been the second high-ranking US official in history to ice a fellow American and keep his job. Perhaps the funniest thing, however, is that Dick thought he could cover up his little mishap. Too bad he chose such a fragile person to "spray". Damn lawyer couldn't keep his mild heart attack to himself.
That said, it's always amazing to me how quickly one reverts back to old routines, even after months away. Minus the warm weather and peddling of chinese food, I pretty much feel like I never left. I'm happy to be able to be a proud American routing against my surrigate country in alpine skiing, though, and I'm looking forward to doing a little of the ol' face to face with many of you Stusiers that have only existed in blogger-space for me in the last four Monaten. Cheers.
Worst Joke Ever...
We've all been totally bombarded with non-stop coverage of the now-infamous Danish Muhammad cartoons. I've given it a solid ten days now, and the story just won't go away, so I'm going to throw in my two cents. In fairness, I haven't
personally seen these cartoons, but by all accounts they are in bad taste. Anyone in their right mind understands that tension is high between the Muslim world and the West. This should not be news, it has been that way for at least half a decade. Publishing these cartoons was a bad idea. But that was last September. Republishing them since then in six or more newspapers around the world was a monfuckingstrosity of a bad idea. The
latest republishing occurring, of
course, in France, a country with a sizeable Muslim population, and as recently as February 1. It boggles the mind to imagine what the editors of these publications were thinking.
Having said all that, THEY'RE CARTOONS. Scandinavians everywhere have managed to avoid shitting themselves with anger and indignation through 20 years of Haggar the Horrible (and he is horrible, in fact most of the cartoons in your average amerikanische Zeitung are pretty damn insulting - I'm looking in your direction Family Circus). For crying out loud, talk about not being able to take a joke, this is off the charts.
Demonstrations, protests, rallies, riots,
flag burning,
embassy burning, trampling, police-clashes,
tear gas, death. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the people involved in these cultural uprisings all over the Muslim world have never seen these cartoons either. A relatively small group has seized this opportunity to incite hatred among populations that are ripe for rebellion. The scale of what has ensued bears no relation to the supposedly triggering event.
Eine Woche als Englischassistent: Teil 1; Das Wochenende
In response to a request from a fellow blogger who has only appeared to us very occasionally in the comment section of the blog (I won't name names, Colby) I've decided to document my activities (or non-activities) for the week, not to annoy or make jealous those who have 9 to 5 jobs or those who leaf through the legislative
Kram of the US justice system, but simply to give all y'all a glimpse into life in Irdning, life in Austria, life in a particularly sparesly populated valley in the middle of Europe. Ich hoffe, dass es wenigstens halbwegs interessant ist...also, fang' ma' an...
Das WochenendeFreitag, 3. Februar:Before I begin with the events of Friday, a note about my weekly schedule. I am contracted to work 12 hours per week at two different schools, one in Stainach (a gymnasium) and one in Liezen (a school for future kindergarten teachers...about 350 girls and a guy). Friday is a wild card day. If I have nothing going on, I offer to come in for an hour, but if I request a day off, I can count on it being granted. So this Friday was one of those free Fridays, because I was going to krieg Besuch. Dirk von Schneidemesser was en route from Freiburg, where he is suffering through his own hectic schedule.
06.15 -- A typical time for me to wake up. It's dark, it's cold, and there's no bus to the train station (a total of about 4 buses run from Irdning to Stainach train station during the course of the whole day). I lace up the boots and trudge out into fog you can taste. It's like walking through really cold jello. It's about a 45 minute walk, and by the time I reach the station, my beard, coat, face, headphones, u.s.w. are covered in ice from the moisture in the air. Dirk arrives, and we eat an unhealthy breakfast. One of the four buses takes us home to Irdning.
11.45 -- We sleep, eat lunch, then board the Gratis Bus to the Planneralm. Strahlende Sonnenschein greet us, but new powder fehlt. I'm skiing injured, and apparently am incapable of taking it easy and proceed to take a wicked digger, re-wrenching my back as Dirk laughs.
17.00 -- The plan is eisstockschießen (curling without the broom) and rodeln (basically sledding on EPO or Andro or whatever). You take the skilift up the hill and scream down a 7 km long trail on an old fashioned sled with metal runners. 8B, the matura class from Stainach, would be the company. I drive the A3 with authority to Schladming with Ms. Stocker, Dirk, and Jen (Kajenje Ubija), where we sup and consume a bottle of wine.
19.30 -- Eisstockschießen. Glühwein.
22.00 -- Arrival at Hochwurzen, the ski hill. We proceed to get raped at the Liftkasse. One trip up costs € 12. Fucking profiteers I tell you. Kajenje U. shows signs of brain decay on the way up by rythmically rocking her head (or maybe she's just scared out of her wits, but I'm banking on the former). We proceed to skull about a half dozen Halben and a round or two of Schnapps, play some Austrian card games on cards where there's seasons instead of suits, and the barkeep begins to look pissed. It's almost twelve, and their hours state that they're open till 23.00. Eins geht sich noch aus, gel'?
24.10 -- Abfahrt. Floodlights guide the way down. 7 km to go. Drunken highjinks ensue. Kanjenje and Dirk have some beginner's luck on the Rodel.
00.17 -- Lights out. Midway down the Strecke the flood lights fail, and we drunk drive the sleds 3.5 km to the valley and only lose two members of the group, who ended up going down the wrong run and ended up at a different Talstation.
00.45 -- The party rolls on. Teachers and students drunk alike. Drunken kegeln. 'We will Rock You' is the highlight of the evening. Austrian's love Queen.
03.30 -- Lights out at Vera's apartment.
Saturday, 4. Februar:09.00 -- I, the early riser, walk into town to retrieve the car that was grudgingly left at the bar for obvious safety reasons.11.15 -- Departure in the A3 for Graz
14.30 -- Treffpunkt with Morsch in the Hauptplatz in Graz after a debacle of aimless wandering looking for Vera's apartment and Dirk dropping a nasty one on the shelf and making the already pungeant apartment smell even worse, which has been put at our disposal for the weekend. Morsch looks comically European in his green trench and ear-flapped cap waiting outside the Rathaus.
14.35 -- Döner and pizza
15.30 -- Billiard spielen. Sloppy as all hell. 3 games take an hour and a half.
21.00 -- More boozin' with other assistants
03.00 -- Lights out in the smelly apartment near the Graz prison.
Sunday, 5. Februar:11.00 -- We wake and stuff ourselves silly with Chinese food and debate a Döner after that, but Morsch needs to catch the train.15.30 -- Arrival back in the Ennstal after another great cruise in the A3. S, S, and S for me, then a nap. Dirk leaves at 20.30, after yet another Döner and Pizza. I need to nehm ab solely because of this weekend.
Monday, 6. Februar:07.30 -- Lion Cereal and die Presse greets me at the kitchen table, then I drive (still in the A3) to school.08.50 - 12.00 -- Work (?!). Three hours of Unterricht, one about past tense, one where I did absolutely nothing, and another where I watched the kids do a role play.
13.30 -- Back home. Lunch. Book. Sleep. Jog.
20.15 -- Die Millionenshow with Armin Assinger, followed by CSI Miami (seriously, what am I doing with my life?).
21.30 -- Sweet Schlaf
A waste of time?...
Before I delve back into more relevant subject matter, I wanted to make a confession and say that Sudoku is not only the best, but also the most dangerous waste of time ever. I, the crossword fanatic, have also been wrapped in the tantalizing web of numbers that is a sudoku board, and I'm not proud of it. I condemn you, Herr Vacuum Cleaner, for putting that little link on the right side of the screen. It beckoned, and I clicked; my fricken eyes are crossed from staring at the screen, I'm not all that convinced they're back to normal yet, and I'm still fucking below average. Either I'm stupid or there's people out there with even more time to waste than me...depressing in more ways than one. At least I can say I've gained something from those 16 minutes of sudokuing...Number one, I learned that there are other ways to damage the retina other than staring at the sun, and two, I now have an increasing sense of Minderwertigkeit. Shit. I'm sticking with minesweeper and my crosswords.
Now, you may say after a senseless outburst like that and a clumsy segue like this: 'Mistfink, I'm done taking you seriously because I think those two years 'working' in Austria has had an unmistakeable and negative effect on your cognitive functions.' Well, while I may still be on the wrong thin end of the bell curve, at least I don't eat people, so that's something, right? So, read on, brother (or sister). You might learn something...
The master planners at the European Union seem to not only be masters of über-complicated bureaucracies, but also masters of conjuring up the turning point. The much-anticipated Austrian presidency of the EU has arrived, and after the recent turning point regarding Poland, Romania and co. and the even more recent crossroads w/r/t Turkey and Croatia, ÖVP member Wolfgang Schüssel (Österreichischer Kanzler) and friends must now determine the fate of the Union. Will the EU continue to grow? Will there be a constitution? The problems of such a multi-faceted conglomeration are gathering like moss on a non-rolling stone, and growing impatience among the population has put the future of the EU into pretty serious question. As always, I'm also a pessimist...
Before we get into problems, though, let's talk about reasons why the EU should fight hard for survival. Whether they admit it or not, from the beginning the EU has looked to the United States as an example of a tightly united federation of states who maintain some level of autonomy while cooperating and sharing resources to the advantage of everyone. Now, its obvious that the US is not compareable with the EU in terms of diversity, but that is exactly why the EU is such an extraordinary and important venture: it is, with the exception of the UN (which is fading into redundancy anyway), the first example of a genuinely wide variety of peoples agreeing to come together, share resources, and collectively embrace a peaceful and neutral political philosophy. If we look at things like social and environmental policy, the EU is decades ahead of the US, which is still too full of itself and too old fashioned to recognize how backward some of its policies are. In short, the EU - at least in its ideal form - is the result of centuries of development. Europe has been in the grips of conflict, war, political blackmail, and destruction for scores of centuries (see 'Dark Ages'), and though more than one of these things remain today, one cannot disagree with the fact that the current peaceful situation (and the fact that a big brother EU is probably the only thing holding the Balkans together) is an extraordinary thing. We can only hope that it will continue...
But...
As I said before, the ideal of the EU is all well and good, but as we all know, ideals are ideals, and reality is something completely different (see 'Marx and Communism'). As the EU has grown and evolved, it has become more and more clear what the EU is really about, and it isn't all that different from what the US is about...neo-capitalism and money. The best example of this is the Eastward expansion. The optimist would say, well, Bulgaria and Romania are part of the continent; however, in reality the overwhelming motivation for including such undeveloped and instable countries and economies into the club is that the only way sagging economies in Western Europe can become 'erect' again is by taking their business elsewhere, so to speak. In the US, outsourcing took production and jobs to Asia. The EU has found this opportunity right in its backyard. By the dozen, Polish, Slovakian, even Russian banks are being swallowed by German, Austrian, and French juggernauts. This sort of international expansion has a perfect counterpart in the American multinationals that have essentially driven the world into a clusterfuck of an unequal global market. Europe is looking to follow the trend lest they become a collection of aging, obsolete crackers bragging about their windmills and biofuel.
Which brings me to my next point. The forward-thinking environmental policies that defined the EU at its outset are beginning to fall victim to the forces of capitalism and necessity. England (in many ways the black sheep of the EU) is constructing dozens of new nuclear power plants, genetic farming is making inroads all over Europe, and tight transportation controls are being loosened under the banner of 'the free movement of goods' (ex: Austria is no longer allowed to limit the number of LKWs on their freeways because Italian and German trucks have the right to travel freely through the centrally located Austria). All of this adds up to a phrase that defines the US economy and global capitalism in general: more is better, and to hell with the consequences. This is not the European Union I was hoping for.
Needless to say there are many more problems with regards to bure
aucracy and agreement between EU and National legislation, but we only have to look to the masses to see that there are more problems than benefits. If I walked across Europe asking people if they approved of the EU as it is now being run, I can guarentee clear negative results. Herr Schüssel has promised to bring the EU 'closer to the people', but this just sounds like another dose of out-of-the-cornhole rhetoric than realpolitik. The EU and the Austrian presidency under Schüssel need to decide whether its purpose is simply to compete with the US and China in the current system, or whether there really are some novel and nobel ideals behind Europe that will maybe even provide a model for humanity in the future. There's no question in my mind that the current direction of the EU is not a very good waste of time.
