Saarbruecken is for Drunken Punks

One of GJ's roving correspondents writes from Saarbrücken:

Just back from a few days in Saarbrücken, which is a very strange mix of very posh and very run-down. Saw a shop with a handbag on sale for €1,000 near the main square...which was full of beggars (and, yes, sturdy beggars, as they used to be known in England..., though rather few of them in those days had orange hair). The Innenstadt is the sort of place where you're very likely to encounter any number of people wandering around drunk at 9:30am.

It's at moments like that that my inner CSU voter begins to stir.

Fortunately, after elevating its stiffly-coiffed blond head and muttering some indecipherable phrases about Armenhäuser, it then sinks back into the giant Maßkrug where it lives.

Comments

[AK]

More Hartz 4 for the poor naves and they shall become cultural heroes in the socialist nirvana of Honecker´s homeland in the Saarland.

[M. Möhling]

btw, oh Lords, please don't let me be misunderstood: I feel social democracy to be a (wonderful!) state of mind, not necessarily a distinct organisation. Whether it's Euroland's parties or its citizenry, they quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and why shouldn't they--it's a NY Saarbrücken state of mind, so to speak, composed by B. Joel the likes of Siggi "Pop" Gabriel; cool fuckers, y'know? No A funny future rulz ok, as Mr Rifkin will tell us anytime. Channel the spirit, Jeremy! take us away, ho ho, he he, ha ha, to the happy home with trees and flowers and chirping birds, where the bell curve doesn't chime, because we make it so. Or, as do we compassionate snobs, because we so chose to ignore it magnanimously. Because that's how we are.

[M. Möhling]

> it then sinks back into the giant
> Maßkrug where it lives

because, though we know Sozialtherapeutik and Sozialpädagogik to be a sham, it's still the commendable social democrat approach to espouse. If asked, that is, as we prefer not to commit ourselves overly, since we're social democrat as a matter of class (as silly as that might sound), but we have to snigger sometimes, thinking on what that actually means; those crazy, crazy social democrats... Nice folks, though, so we join the party--we're compassionate snobs, after all, and we don't really have to care. Plus, the subject matter is good for a healthy, inconsequential laugh.