Unrequited Love: Explaining Germany's Infantile Crush on Obama

[sysop]

German schadenfreude knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the United States. The country loves to feel superior to a superpower like America. Yet Germany also harbors a childish infatuation with Obama -- one which has little political grounding. The reasons are psychological.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-866153.html

[SHBasse]

As Jan Fleischhauer correctly points out the US has been in decline for ages (actually since they started “internationalization” in the late 1960ties.
The same thing started to happen to the European countries about 20 years later. Although Germany is better off than most the German deficit is also alarmingly high!
Although I like Germany, its people and its culture, the main difference between Germany and other countries is that industry in Germany has been slower to outsource / export their production apparatus. The decline is there all right, but luckily it is slower than in most “old industrialized countries”.
The US speculates in the fact that their economy is so large that they can go on in spite of steep dollar depreciation, but when - not if - the dollar plunges the decline will accelerate.
Germany cannot act as the USA. Germany needs a larger “home market” (the EU), and that is the truth behind all the energy put down into rescuing the Euro.
No country has even considered measures that would stabilize and eventually turn the economic and production crisis – it is all about stop gap measures!
http://unifiedscience2.blogspot.com/...-downturn.html
USA has been dominating for so long that it is natural for us Europeans to react as described in the article.

Søren H. Basse
Bornholm
Denmark

Europeans in general have to some extent some unfounded and baseless snobbery. All of Northern Europe appears to think so highly of itself, even when many Northern Europeans are little better than aboriginals.

That being said, as an American, I have no sentimental attachment to the USA. I cant even understand the infatuation with Obama. He just looks like a tall thin Somalian without any weight or power. His bold countenance only appears comical to me.

A lot of the crap in the west has to do with the ability to feel emotions, experience nostalgia (often for a past that never existed), and to robotically be able to see other people's logic blindly, aided by caffeine, as if it were your own logic, and thus conform to a caffeinated uni-mind.

As far as these other concerns, I live in a blizzard ridden city with exposed phone and power lines, and have never experienced a black-out or loss of phone service as a result.

Someone told me the reason our phone lines are above ground, is because if we buried them, and the government didnt subsidize the burial, our phone-bills would sky-rocket. The cost of burial would be pushed onto the consumer, and many cant afford it.

[Akhenaten]

Rarely have I read an article so much off the mark describing German attitudes to America. I wonder where exactly the author lives. For a start 90% of Germans are not interested in the USA or any other country. They neither love nor hate the USA. They are just average Joes like in most other countries involved with their own life’s problems. Their views are based on what the see and hear in the media where reporting is not really anti-American on the regular TV and Radio channels. Just neutral and respectful and also commiserating with the situations often reported as a result of calamities.

The writer, therefore must be referring to the 10% or so with professional or private contacts to the USA where, indeed, criticism is often voiced by a minority of this group whilst the majority, the ones who have travelled the country and speak the language, will have a different, broader view, often admiring the feeling of freedom of this vast country, the impressive landmarks, the friendly welcome received by most Americans and accept the ignorance most Americans profess about Europe with good grace. Why should the average American bother too much about a Europe where most of the news reaching American shores only appears in two or three papers read by a minority of informed Americans.

And as to Obama? Four years ago it was “anything but Bush”. Obama comes across as a warm hearted, genial gentleman
and the fact that a black person could be elected President of the United States has been received with euphoria by most people except the few nutcases on the right fringe. So what is so special about this reaction?

Sorry, this article is not reflecting German attitudes in any way, only the preconceived ideas of a journalist who does not seem to know much about his own country, if in fact he lives in Germany.

[thorpeman@sky.com]

The reason the Germans love Obama is Obamanomics make Euronomics seem plausible

[Evji108]

As an American who has lived in Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, it is always of interest to see the opinions of Europeans on the subject of the USA.
This and previous articles about the decline of the US, were, I felt, quite biased in a negative way, but they were also just the typical type of European attitudes being expressed towards us as a country. When I am in Europe it is normal to hear much criticism and negativity about my home country, much of it unfounded and mostly based on a popular negative view of the USA that assumes that the popular news reports about my country are all true and apply uniformly across the nation. Everyone is overweight, everyone eats Hamburgers at McDonalds all the time, the cities are all crime-ridden, everyone has guns, the infrastructure is collapsing, the economy is headed for destruction etc etc. All these statements are true and equally not-true. Often people are extremely rude to me as an American and make negative remarks to my face about Americans in general and my country. It always amazes me that Europeans, who claim high culture as their own, can be so incredibly narrow-minded and rude to a visitor. Few in Europe realize just how difficult it is to manage such a large country with so many differing ethnic and cultural and economic groups and with such a large land mass area. Other countries in the same situation such as China and Russia do so with a much more authoritarian government. Things here are a bit wilder, a bit more-free wheeling and because we are a democracy it is necessary to get many differing groups to agree, which can, at times be impossible.
Europe is safe, predictable, generally clean and often quite smug. Germans know how to do things efficiently and correctly, and am always struck when I am in Germany how there are rules for every detail of life and if one violates those written or unwritten rules one is strongly criticized, whether it is a loud horn honk from a big black Mercedes or a harangue on the sidewalk for parking too close to another car, or violating some other unwritten rule of German society. It has been a shameful pleasure to watch the Euro-crisis come over Europe in the last few years, if only to watch some of that smugness be smashed. No one country or culture has this big world of ours all figured out, no one has the ultimate solution and no one country, culture or region will be on top forever, because all nature and all economies run in cycles.
As for the USA, and it's future, it is too soon to see if we are a country in decline or not, because that is only truly evident in hindsight. Don't write us off quite yet, because there is an enormous reservoir of creativity and innovation here. Things can get very messy here in the creative process, which can be very uncomfortable for Germans, who like things to be orderly and predictable. Winston Churchill's quote says a lot:
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.”
It's somehow our process, it takes a long time, it can be disorderly, but in the end, it works.

[SHBasse]

Originally Posted by retarded-freak

Europeans in general have to some extent some unfounded and baseless snobbery. All of Northern Europe appears to think so highly of itself, even when many Northern Europeans are little better than aboriginals.

That being said, as an American, I have no sentimental attachment to the USA. I cant even understand the infatuation with Obama. He just looks like a tall thin Somalian without any weight or power. His bold countenance only appears comical to me.

A lot of the crap in the west has to do with the ability to feel emotions, experience nostalgia (often for a past that never existed), and to robotically be able to see other people's logic blindly, aided by caffeine, as if it were your own logic, and thus conform to a caffeinated uni-mind.

As far as these other concerns, I live in a blizzard ridden city with exposed phone and power lines, and have never experienced a black-out or loss of phone service as a result.

Someone told me the reason our phone lines are above ground, is because if we buried them, and the government didnt subsidize the burial, our phone-bills would sky-rocket. The cost of burial would be pushed onto the consumer, and many cant afford it.

The best I can do is tracing my ancestors back to 1720, at that time Denmark was already a rather crowded feudal society and there were regrettably no space for hunter gatheres!
As far as I have been informed aboriginals are far more plesant than both Europeans and US citizens so thank you for the compliment!

[hay7be@yahoo.com]

There are some valid and important truths in his comments but also come infantile views.
He still operates on the invalid basis of GDP and national income accounting compliments of Simon Kuznets work of the thirties and forties. Those are totally invalid measurements.
He practices the typical American historical habit of conflating vast natural resources and much space and its positive impact on the economy to be the result of the productivity of the U.S. economy---a constant ongoing error.
Immigrants from abroad are often misled to come by Hollwood's image sent abroad and the intense propaganda which America has historically foisted on foreign countries.
The fact remains lots of European economies have done a lot with few resources in overcrowded conditions while America has done far less with lots of gift of nature. Check the exponentially growing number of Americans condemned to living in crummy and marginal mobile homes from coast to coast and the number of slumhouses which one does not see to any degree in resource poor Europe. Pittsburgh, a city of 305,000 has about 65 percent of its people living in substandard slum or semi-slum housing which would not even be allowed in most European nations. Check the infrastructure and the technologically backward railroad and public transportation system and the relative difficulty of upward mobility for the poor which studies have proven to be far more difficult in the U.S. than in most EU economies.
He is also wrong when he believes the U.S. won the Cold War. Everyone lost during the Cold War and both Super Powers were Stupid Powers which burdened their people with unnecessary wars and horrible military spending. The Soviet Union was not defeated by the U.S. but by its own internal corruption and military spending and malinvestment much like the U.S. corruption on Wall Street and military cost and malinvestments, etc. has caused slumerica.

[linggy101]

I wholeheartedly agree with the comment from columnist Jacob Augstein a few days ago titled Destroyed by Capitalism.
The country is in free fall and at the same time seems to have hung on by a thread for a long, long time. For me the arrogance of the U.S. is unsurpassed in the world. Most Americans automatically believe the U.S. the "the best country in the world" in just about everything. Growing up there, I only could figure out how much the educational system, the news media propaganda machine, and Hollywood had brainwashed me,until after I had lived in Germany for a few years.
Sadly, there seems to be no way to change the direction the country.
With a one party, two wing dictatorship, there is nobody worth voting for. Both the Democrats and the Republicans offer us the same worn ideas, the same rich ripping off the poor, the same perpetual war syndrome. We are
going down. It's just a matter of time. My greatest fear is that the U.S. will start a world war when that happens.
Joe Amaral

[democratsramshield]

As an American expat living in Germany, I completely disagree with the premise of this article, which seems to embody many of the talking points of the GOP, and is therefore honestly at variance with reality itself. I have written a large number of articles which exposes the truth, and is in agreement with previous articles written at the Spiegel, and that is if it weren't for foreign born graduate students, likely many parts of the American economy would completely collapse due to failures in the American education system.

This and America's ability to sell its debt to foreign govts are too primary factors that have nothing to do with the wonders of the American exceptionalism touted by this out of touch article. The brutal reality of the myth of American exceptionalism is it's left 59 million people in the US without medical insurance; 45 million people on food stamps; 132 million people without dental insurance. America has 4% of the world's population and 25% population of the world's inmate population. America is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't offer job protected paid maternity leave by right of law. In the US there is no legal requirement for an employer to provide any paid sick leave either or any paid annual leave for that matter.

A third of all homes in America are in underwater mortgages today, wherein the young people have moved into the basements of these underwater homes to live with their parents, where they are quietly being drowned in one billion dollars in student loan debts. The reality is a rather inconvenient truth, therefore this article completely and I would suggest quite shamefully ignores the reality described by a recent Harvard study which cites the fact that 45,000 Americans die annually, needlessly only because they don't have access to medical insurance and are therefore denied life saving medical treatment.

Of course there are an entire litany of other things such as the fact that while Kindergarden is a word the Americans understand, Kindergeld is a word that is not even in the American lexicon, because the American government's support of family values means they support America's ultra rich disproportionately at the expense of the poor and America's working class. But then how could we expect otherwise, when fully over half of all members of the US House of Representatives are millionaires, who are out of touch with working class values, as if they came from Mars or some other planet far, far away.

Let me invite you to read an article that I published at Alternet entitled Why the Germans think we're insane,
which contains over 600 comments.

http://www.alternet.org/story/149324...%27re_in sane

At a smaller blogger's community I just published a modest article on the issue of the death of the American dream quoting recent Spiegel articles.

http://www.eurotrib.com/section/Diary


Additionally as a blogger having written about this subject matter as an American expat living in Germany I have received untold hundreds of emails and posts on my blogs from Americans, who have told me they would love to live in Germany under the humane policies of a social safety net, that supports real family values. The German model is something that America must learn from before it is too late.