Letter from Berlin: The Scary Season

BERLIN—This time of year is known in the journalism business as The Silly Season. According to the truisms of this hoary myth, nothing happens in summer except for the occasional curious incident of the dog in the night. Just the other week, the local Berlin cultural listings magazine, Zitty, having almost nothing to list since most venues shut down between mid-July and mid-August, wracked its birdbrains and came up with a cover story headlined: “Are Men Beautiful?: The Answer to an Eternal Question.”... 
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Letter from Berlin: The Most Boring Subject in Europe

BERLIN—I hope I don’t doze off before I finish writing this. You see, I’m writing about the most boring topic in Europe, a theme that makes Europeans’ eyes glaze over and causes them to quickly change the subject as they sit in their quaint cafes at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, drinking coffee and eating cake. And that subject is?, you will be almost too polite to ask. The subject is Europe. Yes, Europe is completely, totally and thoroughly uninterested in Europe. You wouldn’t think that would be... 
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Letter from Berlin: D-Day and Long After

BERLIN—Gee, I certainly didn’t intend to become a spy. Er, I mean, an operative in the international “intelligence community.” It happened last Sunday, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, a sunny, springtime noon-hour in Berlin. I was sitting at a shaded table at an outdoor café, just off the entrance to the Deutsche Theatre, waiting for Richard Clarke, the former U.S. presidential adviser on counter-terrorism, to turn up for an afternoon talk. Meanwhile, at the western edge of the continent, the politicians... 
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The Dooney’s Team Election Complete Guide to the 2004 Canada-Tobago Election

Gee, the campaign’s almost a week old and the Dooney’s vast Election Team/Team Election, the largest assemblage of pundits, reporters, dumpster divers, and chicken entrail readers in the website’s history, has yet to opine on the national decision-making process. True, we’ve just received word that the Dooney’s Election Team/Equipe Fratracide bus—every serious media or mafia outlet, I’m reliably informed, now has an independent campaign bus—is mired in the muskeg of Nunavit, but hey, it’s... 
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The Magic of the Morning Paper

Dec. 18, 2003—What I learned, by dawn’s early light, from this morning’s morning paper (I’m a Vancouver reader of The Globe and Mail) is 1) that 12-year-old girls think it fashionable to give blow-jobs to high school jocks, 2) more art from 30,000 years ago has been discovered, reminding me that human beings like me have been doing stuff like this for 30 millennia—think of it!, and 3) what various people had to say about the death of former conservative politician Bob Stanfield, which not only instantly... 
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Letter from Berlin: Generalizations about Germans

Usually, I scrupulously avoid making generalizations about Germans. That’s because the standard national stereotypes only distort our understanding of real people and, anyway, most of the Germans I’ve come to know in the decade or so that I’ve been living part-time in Berlin don’t really fit into the popular characterizations of Germans you see on old American TV sit-coms. All that "Achtung! Dat eez ferry inter-rezting" stuff just doesn’t cut it. Maybe that’s because... 
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Letter from Berlin: Onward, Christian Drunken Dads!

Exceptionally large herds of human beings were spotted roaming around Europe last weekend, and early this week, mostly in the name of God, governance, and globalization. The most prominent and intrepid clump of bipeds featured U.S. President George Bush and his armed entourage. In a lightning Grand Tour of Old and New Europe, the American leader first hit Warsaw, Poland where he buddied up to Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, one of the prominent "New Europe" members of the tiny "coalition... 
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Letter from Berlin: Old Europe

Last night, at Berlin’s Philharmonic Chamber Music Hall, the Alban Berg Quartet played Haydn, Beethoven, and Janacek. I guess that’s about as "Old Europe" as you can get. Every since I landed in springtime Berlin last week, I’ve been trying to figure out the meaning of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissal of what he dubbed "Old Europe." That was his term, you’ll recall, for France and Germany, who earned the American Empire’s sneer for... 
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On the Recent Punitive Expedition

While the guns of war are blasting away, the Muses, like reticent Canadians, tend to be discreetly silent. If only the army of commentators had followed their modest example. But that was too much to hope for. After all, CNN, Fox and the rest of the unleashed dogs of journalism had a lot of air time to fill while the rest of us were dutifully staring at the speckled-green-and-black, night-vision-provided, videophone-transmitted still lifes of Deserta Arabia. And thus for three weeks, the “All War, All the... 
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Drinking and Driving, Drinking and Governing, Drinking and Sleeping Around, Drinking and…

Vancouver–Here on the Left Coast, we’re temporarily inundated by a small tidal wave that washed in from Maui the other night. A tsunami of sanctimony, that is. Yes, we’re talking–as is everyone else within shouting and radiowave distance around here–about B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, his drunk driving arrest on a Hawaiian resort island over the weekend, his subsequent acts of press conference contrition, and the loud debate about whether or not he should resign from office. We... 
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