Funny spoof in The Onion about how tragic the fall of the Berlin Wall was.
…What? It’s not The Onion? Well, who else would say such a thing, then?
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November 8, 2009
Humor break…(The Sanity Inspector)
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Comment by happyfeet on 11/8 @ 11:30 am #
their moderator is very very busy censoring
Comment by Ric Locke on 11/8 @ 11:39 am #
Nothing to see here.
It’s the Guardian. The fall of the Soviet Union was, by their definition, the worst thing that ever happened, and they are continually looking for another one to latch on to along with explaining to everyone what a tragedy its demise was.
Regards,
Ric
Comment by Bob Reed on 11/8 @ 11:44 am #
Yeah, ‘cuz the freedom they attained was worth soooooooo much less than the quiet desperation they lived their lives in while under the boot of the Soviets…
Friggin’ sickening…
Comment by happyfeet on 11/8 @ 11:49 am #
They couldn’t even buy ranch style beans.
Comment by Ric Locke on 11/8 @ 12:00 pm #
Bob, that’s not the point as they see it.
I’m one of the few people you may know who has spent any time in the DDR — several trips there from ‘83 to the end. You know the old saw about “I started with nothing, and I still have most of it”? That’s closely related.
Nobody in the DDR was ever unemployed, and no job was very difficult; everybody was effectively a Government employee, although the actual system was a lot closer to Benito than Karl. In a way, they had a sort of pioneer spirit — for you and me, getting a new car (for instance) is a matter of surviving a couple of hours listening to some annoying salesman and filling out forms; for them, it was an adventure taking years, with occasional moments of jubilation and/or terror. The Stasi went along with the game so long as it stayed an internal game — people could pretend to elude them, and have a good time doing so; it was only if they succeeded that they were in trouble.
What appears to happen in a Socialist system that sort of works is that people devote the energy we used to pour into entrepreneurialism to beating the system, interpreted variously according to whether or not the particular individual had figured out E. F. Russel’s observation (”Turn the handle the way it goes, only more so”). It’s just as adventurous as anything we ever did, with the constant knowledge that nothing disastrous can every really happen, and as such is a wonderful environment for engineers, techs, and others who like to keep a low profile and “just do their jobs”.
Too bad it doesn’t create any wealth. Oh, well, can’t have everything.
Regards,
Ric
Pingback by Goddamned Liberty! [Darleen Click] on 11/8 @ 12:02 pm #
[...] to Protein Wisdom homepage « Humor break…(The Sanity Inspector) | Home | November 8, 2009 Goddamned Liberty! [Darleen [...]
Comment by Hvy Mtl Hntr on 11/8 @ 12:02 pm #
See- nothing to worry about; life under the Socialist boot was teh AWESOME!
Comment by B Moe on 11/8 @ 12:10 pm #
I was there for a few days in ‘96. Her notion that reunification was an economic boon to West Germany was not widely shared.
Comment by Bob Reed on 11/8 @ 12:14 pm #
My experiences in the east is limited to right after reunification. On a vacation there , I marveled at the signs in train stations-written in both Russian and German (in that order)-and just who dreary the cities seemed and how “third world” the rural areas were.
Surprisingly, in an article I saw a few months ago in Der Spiegal, While a large number of Germans don’t regret reunification, they do resent the enormous wealth transfer that it has required in order to modernize the former DDR’s infrastructure.
This is despite the fact that several large German companies have benefitted greatly from this gigantic public works project; but just as you said, the government doesn’t create wealth and prosperity, just redistribute that which already exists in situ. It’s amazing to me that Germans would recognize this more easily than many in America seem to about the Democrat’s agenda today.
Nice to hear from you again Ric,
I hope all is well with you and yours,
Comment by Silver Whistle on 11/8 @ 12:19 pm #
I was there in ‘71, and my abiding memory is of grey concrete, grey people, the smell of old cooked cabbage and uniforms. Like some big film set for 1984.
Comment by Robohobo on 11/8 @ 1:05 pm #
Ever think the wall was not to keep the Commies out as much as it was to keep them in?
Comment by Silver Whistle on 11/8 @ 1:08 pm #
¿Que?
Comment by Silver Whistle on 11/8 @ 1:12 pm #
Oh, I remember - you’re that dude that does parody. Nice one, Cyril.
Comment by happyfeet on 11/8 @ 1:55 pm #
Dirty socialist NBC whorebag Tom Brokaw mourns the passing of communism as well.
Comment by Silver Whistle on 11/8 @ 1:58 pm #
Happy, that was hysterical. Prime Minister Harold Brown indeed - if only we had one.
Comment by Jeffersonian on 11/8 @ 2:14 pm #
I never was in the DDR, but I saw the border near Fulda in 1986. It was surreal to realize that the people in the town just the other side of the guard-tower-dotted fence couldn’t walk the 200 yards to where I was. It was all anyone needed to know about communism.
There are still a few pathetic communist regimes around, I say we urge those pining for their shackles to emigrate to them.
Comment by Ric Locke on 11/8 @ 2:38 pm #
The first time I was in the DDR was in 1973. Like Silver Whistle, I remember gray concrete and the smell of old cooked cabbage, but I remember kohlrauch much more strongly — they did most of their heating with soft coal that had been run through a system that discarded most of the dirt and compressed the remainder into pellets that looked a bit like triple-thickness hockey pucks. They also had no pollution controls whatever… the other smell was of two-stroke engines. The Trabant ran on a 20:1 fuel:oil mixture. Our two-strokes, even then, were mostly 40:1 (and nowadays 50:1) because of better materials science.
Uniforms, not so much. I speak no German, but I rented a car (a Lada, which was a ’60s Fiat built to be Russian-proof) and when I got back to the hotel I got braced by the local police. It seems a headlight was out, and the cop disgustedly repeated himself until I managed to comprehend “…und Morgen, repairiert!” He was one of two in separate patrol cars who had pulled into the University parking lot for a smoke&joke session. It was the first thing that really made me homesick.
That trip I stayed at the Interhotel, which was slipcast concrete with 2×3 meter rooms, windows just too wide to be effective arrow slits, and toilets (and bathrooms) down the hall. Soviet architecture at its finest, IOW.
The last time I went was in December of ‘88, just before the Wall came down. I missed my train back to Frankfurt, and ended up standing on an open platform at 0200 waiting for the next one while Russian soldiers partied in the street below. AFAIK I’m still there, officially — they never pulled my visa on the way out. Which is fine, since I was over it already.
Good times, actually. “Easties” didn’t see many Americans, and I was an interesting curiosity wherever I went. An astonishing number of them spoke English and were anxious to practice on a native, and I dined out on that a lot. But overall, the best adjective was/is “dreary”.
Regards,
Ric
Comment by Ric Locke on 11/8 @ 2:40 pm #
Woops, typo above, I was first in the DDR in 1983.
Regards,
Ric
Comment by Vinny Vidivici on 11/8 @ 3:12 pm #
” . . . the country I lived in and helped shape.”
Translation/shorter version of this tear-jerker: Former member of New Class misses perquisites of dysfunctional police state; resents exposure of her mediocrity.
As noted in the comments following the article — only in the Guardian.
Comment by Mr. B on 11/8 @ 3:23 pm #
Lets just say that with the present administration and zeitgeist, it’s getting safe to drop the totalitarian mask and let your inner fascist show through.
Comment by Silver Whistle on 11/8 @ 3:29 pm #
Ric,
The interesting counterpoint to my trip was provided by a week in West Berlin - it was everything the DDR wasn’t. Bright, lively, full of happy people doing normal western things. It was like an oasis in a desert.
Comment by B Moe on 11/8 @ 5:47 pm #
Funny take down of the NYT.
Comment by fnord on 11/9 @ 12:14 am #
Ric,
Would it be accurate then to say that Communism was able to make Prussian society lazy, dirty, and inefficient?
Pingback by Surely-This-Must-Be-Irony | Nolanimrod on 11/10 @ 2:58 am #
[...] You be the judge. [...]
Comment by Swen Swenson on 11/10 @ 8:50 pm #
Poor Ms. Motte, you can see where she’s coming from. If everyone in the DDR was essentially a government employee then she and her friends were fairly high-ranking government employees who enjoyed positions of privilege under the old regime. Then she lost her cushy job.
She reminds me a lot of all the whiney ex-government employees in this country who lost their jobs when the Republicans shut down all those useless bureaucracies under the Contract With America.
…
Oh, wait..