Monthly Archives: September 2007

The USA’s attractiveness today

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I proudly claim three German godsons, the older two (twins) taken to Canada years ago when their parents, at whose wedding I had the honor to serve as Best Man, settled in Alberta, both of them now with large Canadian families of their own.  My youngest godson, whose parents I also knew here in Germany well before their marriage, today lives in Hannover with his beautiful, gracefully willowy wife (in her younger years a dancer) and their three refreshingly impish children and practises in nearby Hameln as a plastic surgeon, for which he got part of his medical training at Boston’s top-notch Massachusetts General Hospital.  Since he wrote me his reaction to my posting yesterday about the Sen. Craig mess in German, I take the liberty here of relaying it in the original, with my impromptu, deliberately pedantic translation appended:

Lieber Paule, hast Du eigentlich die Hexenjagd um “Deinen ehemaligen” (zweifach in Gänsefüsschen – Du bist nun Deutscher und der Senator ist gar nicht mehr) Senator aus Idaho verfolgt? Deine ehemaligen Landsleute sind ja in vielerlei Hinsicht bemerkenswert.  Das führt mittlerweile dazu, dass ich meinen alten Traum, die Kinder irgendwann mal für ein Jahr in die USA zu schicken, eingetauscht habe gegen ein Jahr England.  Hauptsache, Du bleibst bei uns!

Herzlichst

Dein Sixtus

Dear Paule [he uses Berlin's proletarian dialect form Paule - long since my all-time favorite nickname], have you actually followed the witch-hunt against “your former” (twice in quotation marks [literally geese-feet] – you’re now a German and the Senator no longer even is) Senator from Idaho?  Your erstwhile fellow-citizens are in many regards remarkable.  That leads meanwhile to the fact that I have exchanged my old dream of one day sending the children to spend a year in the USA for a year in England.  The main thing is that you stay with us!

Most heartily

Your Sixtus

 

Decline and Fall of one "anti-gay" Idaho Senator

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As a knee-jerk journalist of the compulsive-communicator type, I’ve automatically followed this tragi-farce closely, and thus done a lot of your homework for you.  Offhand I can’t recall any recent scandal, political or otherwise, that’s provided the American media with such tasty fodder for  a comparable feeding frenzy.  This morning’s Sunday edition of The New York Times, for instance, carries not one, not two, but three separate articles about this grubby case, all three of which, in my great-hearted way, I provide for you here.

But by far the fairest, most elegant, journalistically most admirable wrap-up I’ve found has appeared in that superior London weekly newspaper The Observer – and since that publication (which has no American equivalent except possibly The New York Times [Sunday] Magazine) has virtually no circulation in the USA, I’ve done you lucky, lucky people the favor of making that journalistically brilliant article available right here, for you to read and admire with your very own eyes.

And as long as I’m up, I’ll also toss in a poignant peripheral story from the stalwart wife, now ex-wife, of not a Senator but of Governor James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, who continued to stand by the husband she loved even as he finally, cornered under irresistible pressure from the pitiless media, proclaimed: “I am a gay American.”

Hot news about Idaho’s hypocritical Sen. Craig

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Mike Rogers of BlogActive, the blogger who originally last October outed Sen. Larry Craig as a closeted homosexual, has updated his own story in a telephone interview on Ed Schultz’s television program.  Rogers plugs a previous story in The Idaho Statesman on August 28th for which Dan Pokey interviewed more than 300 people – and which the mainstream media seem to have simply overlooked or deliberately ignored. 

On August 29th C-Span telecast that Ed Schultz interview with Mike Rogers, who said: “I feel completely vindicated,” and added: “I don’t go after elected officials because they decide to have sex with men.  I go after elected officials because, like you, I’m so frustrated with the hypocrisy” of their publicly opposing such issues as gay marriage.  According to Rogers, the Craig story “has just been sitting out there in the state of Idaho for many, many, many years.”

In response to Schultz’s question about Craig’s seeking sexual encounters in public men’s rooms, Rogers had this to say: “What I think it points to in the case of someone like Senator Craig is the torment of the closet that, frankly, politicians in his position help to foster.  So this behavior is normal among men who are psychologically in the position of being forced into the closet, to have this kind of self-hatred thing going on.”

Rogers concluded his remarks by saying he hopes Larry Craig will run for reëlection and will continue to serve as “an openly gay senator.”