I know that modesty should stop me from mentioning this, and I know it’s really self-indulgent, but hell, I can’t help it. I need to share this happiness. I have a fan. An actual fan. In other words, someone who reads these articles all the way through. He’s called Ron and he keeps writing about me. At first, when you read Ron’s latest commentary on my scribbling, it looks a bit like a stream of abuse that ends with a drawing of a grotesquely large frog standing on its hind legs sucking a man off. This, the caption explains, is a metaphor for my English. You might think you’re a bad writer, but has your command of the written word ever been compared to amphibian fellatio? No, I don’t think it has.
But then Ron offers a real insight. For years I’ve been struggling to name the thing that’s been missing in these commentaries. I used to lie awake at night, my tormented sweat-soaked sheets twisting up around me, trying to grasp that fleeting, unknowable thing that would make my work whole, and then along comes good old Ron and sums it up in one effortless line: “Werner lacks this thing called ‘Teutonic vision.’” That’s it. I just don’t “see” like the Teutons – the Germanic tribe that harried the Roman Republic in the first and second centuries BCE, and whose vision has been passed down genetically to all German people today. Ron suggests my lack of “this thing called Teutonic vision” is the reason why I never noticed that all the old Kaisers were paedophiles, (or something, didn’t really get that bit), but there must be so many other things that I’m blind to as well. What other depraved things do Germans do beyond this non-Teutonic fog before my eyes? My poor genetically-handicapped mind strains itself to imagine these despicable acts. I mean, what’s the use of reading German newspapers and talking to German people and being in Germany if you don’t have Teutonic vision?
And I wonder who does have Teutonic vision? The Christian Social Union have a bit presumably. You need some kind of tribal perspective to be able to tell all the Bulgarians apart, and indeed the Austrians and Hessians and Baden-Württembergers and Berliners, so you know who is allowed to vote for you and who isn’t.
The CSU has been doing its thing again this week: openly opposing its coalition partners the CDU and the SPD by deciding that actually no, it doesn’t agree with the pension plan that was in the coalition contract and which its leader signed just last month. Once again, with a municipal election coming up and the Alternative für Deutschland sharpening their looney minds, the CSU is consciously positioning itself slightly but distinctly to the right of Merkel. Last week I pointed out, in my sorry froggy-blowjob style, that it was a bit undemocratic that a regional party should wield national influence. But now I think of it, it’s hardly fair on the Bavarians either – effectively, no one in Bavaria can ever vote for Angela Merkel and the CDU, seeing as she never fields any candidates there. So when the municipal elections come up in March, not a single Municher or Augsburger or Nuremberger can say, “No, I’m just normal right-wing (Merkel), and not I’ve-got-Teutonic-vision-and-I-hate-Bulgarians right-wing (Seehofer).” That can’t be right, surely? There must be some Bavarians who like Merkel and would like someone from her party – someone mainly normal – running their local councils? But hey, what do I know? I’m just a sexually depraved frog.
