My girlfriend was on the tram a couple of days ago, on her way to the university. In the tram were a couple of teenaged 'guest workers', Turks to be specific. One of them was screaming into his cell phone in that monotonous berber they call a language, to the consternation of the entire car. Assholish enough. After a few minutes of this, a portly old German lady started yelling at the teens to pipe down, you damn kanaken, you've taken everything we hold dear and pissed on it, our jobs, our schools, our dignity; at least let us have a little peace and quiet on the goddam train, this isn't Turkey, blah blah. I can appreciate the sentiment, indirectly. I take great pains, as an auslander, to avoid the stereotypes that foreigners hold about Americans: I speak the lingo, I try to avoid being loud and obnoxious, and I don't embarrass the locals by flaunting my legendary American sexual prowess in public. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, it's just that Rube's all about the decorum.

The lady on the tram was out of line. I wasn't there myself, but I doubt she tried first politely asking the young'uns if they'd maybe try to speak a little more quietly. She really just let herself get annoyed to the point that her prejudices came out in an ill-advised burst of emotion. To be sure, Turks are a pain in the ass, as far as being tolerant goes. Why the uptight Germans chose to import a bunch of screaming Islamic lunatics as guest workers, I'll never understand. You'd really have to search to find two more incompatible cultures. Whenever a Turkish team wins a soccer game, no matter how insignificant, the streets are jammed with Mercedes and BMWs, honking their horns up and down the ancient cobblestone thoroughfares, delirious Saracens hanging out the windows waving flags with the sickle and the star.

This is how they celebrate weddings, too. Every weekend the same parade, the cars full of flowers and unibrows, celebrating yet another arranged union between a man and a punching bag with a clipped clitoris. On Sundays, which Germany specifically sets aside as a day of peaceful reflection and family togetherness, it's a cacophonous reminder that the Islamic culture-within-the-culture shits upon the Germans, and everything they hold dear. These people are not compatible, and tolerate each other only through clenched teeth.

A strange synergy of bitchiness, to be sure. The American immigration problem is relatively harmless in comparison. I've heard a few rumblings about Mexicans coming in and taking advantage of the American welfare system or whatever. But it's working under the false assumption that the U.S. actually has a welfare system. Imagine, if you will, that every wetback in the U.S. got health insurance, university tuition, an apartment, a baby carriage, winter clothes, a sizable pension, outrageous unemployment benefits, along with subsidized access to mass transit and entertainment facilities. That's a huge financial burden, and Germans, being typically wary of other cultures, not to mention tight with the money, are not exactly amused. Add to that the cultural insensitivity of the immigrants themselves, and you've got a pretty explosive mixture.

But it's not like the Germans would actually do anything about it. They'll talk big about championing the poor, and preserving the dignity of man, and all the usual transcultural pablum you'd expect from a nation run, indeed populated, by leftist pussies. When the chips are down, they're absolutely worthless when it comes to championing true justice. Their culture is doomed, and they're afraid to save it, for fear of evoking the ghost of Hitler.

Maybe World War II was the death of the German culture after all. For 61 years, they've been dead folk walking.

Just in case you were wonderin':

Smorgasbord

Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What's wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There's a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we'd puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn't have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers' and, I believe, Davis Brothers' Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.

According to this (undoubtedly skewed) report, unemployment figures in Iraq are about the same as in eastern Germany. That Productivity Negation Field radiating out of Berlin really do pack a punch.

Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.