New buildings rarely raise my ire. What do I think of the Stadtschloss? Pfff. My opinion of Alexa? Very nice. Perhaps the secret of my apathy lies in the enormous stretches of time I spend wandering around the Neuköllner Arcaden like a homeless man. I love it there. I have actually begun to feel a real sense of community with the irritable booksellers in Hugendubel, the sprightly cashiers in Media Markt (perhaps they will never let me buy a DVD without ascertaining my postal code one more time), and the mad lady who sits in the ice-cafe all day and mutters Albanian curses.
I even like the Christmas decorations which, along with the candy floss machine and the policeman armed with a machine gun, have brought tidings that the advent season is upon us.
I also don’t mind either way whether Munich gets the Olympics. I do think that the IOC are a bunch of corrupt, unaccountable wankers and the Games have a historical knack for legitimizing fascist dictatorships, but whether or not the snowy Bavarian countryside is inflicted with this plague of money locusts in 2018 singularly fails to stir my outrage.
But the Green party cares about all these things, as do many Germans, and what does piss me off a bit is when Chancellor Angela Merkel and her flying grey monkeys have the nerve to attack the Greens as an “obstructionist” party in a Bundestag debate this week, simply for expressing this opposition, and thus representing these people in parliament. It is, one might say, sort of the fucking point of a parliament.
The government has decided to go after the newly popular Green party on the grounds that they’re just “against” too many things – trying to paint an image of them as sulky teenagers. It’s a depressingly dumb tactic that really annoys me more than any shiny underground railway station.
