Anti what?

It’s nothing new, like everything else in the world, only the rationale changes. Luigi Barzini takes everyone to task. Foreigners living in Italy, for example, who pathetically cling to the view of the sights they get if they crane their neck. The very same who will, sooner or later, have nothing to go home to, kick the bucket and be scurrilously ditched in the heretical corner of some churchyard (he himself is dead as a doornail…or ‘mouse dead’—as they say here). The odd thing is how he gathered so much information, not how he delivers it. He reminds me of some old, Baptist aunt, who coincidentally—by virtue of his wide-ranging knowledge of non-Italians in Italy—just happens to know a heck of a lot about homos. Love the 95¢ Bantam paperback too.

I read the Foreword while standing on a crowded German train filled with bicycles and Germans. He asks what is wrong with the Italians; how, despite undeniable advantages, they could make so many mistakes…and take so long to form a centralized (if frequently altered) government. It, of course, reminded me of Germany.

Still, it’s hard not to prefer George Orwell when it comes to cultural differences.

Benchmarks

Favorite form of interaction with Germans:
Buying used books from them.


Most existential government form response:
How long would you like to reside in the Federal Republic of Germany?
Forever.


Most challenging thing to date about residing in Germany:
"The German language, due to its verb-final nature, relatively free order of constituents and morphological Case system, poses challenges for models of human syntactic processing which have mainly been developed on the basis of head-initial languages with little or no morphological Case. The verb-final order means that the parser has to make predictions about the input before receiving the verb. What are these predictions? What happens when the predictions turn out to be wrong? Furthermore, the German morphological Case system contains ambiguities. How are these ambiguities resolved under the normal time pressure in comprehension? Based on theoretical as well as experimental work, the present monograph develops a detailed account of the processing steps that underly language comprehension. At its core is a model of linking noun phrases to arguments of the verb in the developing phrase structure and checking the result with respect to features such as person, number and Case. This volume contains detailed introductions to human syntactic processing as well as to German syntax which will be helpful especially for readers less familiar with psycholinguistics and with Germanic."

This actually makes sense if you are trying to learn German, verbs come at the end, cases are an incredible pain in the ass...not to mention, they've taken approximately four syllables and made about eight billion words out of them (which you would think would make things easier, but it doesn't somehow). It's also quite unfortunate that the 'the normal time pressure in comprehension' is well under ten seconds, as opposed to say, well over ten years...and the only one who understands has been dead for almost a century.


Best word to describe the above phenomenon:
Psycholinguistic.

Too Much Partying

Even the ancient Greeks, whom the Germans so admire, only had the traditional two choices. There is much to pick and choose from now, which begs the question, ‘Are we better off?’ Victory of a semi-rational party can be compromised by a (required) coalition with some nutjob party, or—much worse—a handful of nutjob parties can get together on their own and gain a majority.

They seem to stick by this ‘system’...all I know is, every time things go slightly awry, the media throws its hands up and screams “Kaos!”

“Chaos as Berlin hit by railway warning strike”

“Merkel risks 'chaos' as she fights for reforms”

“etc.”

This does not seem to bode well for any future crisis management, and in a country that urges its citizens to get out in the street and demonstrate to deal with problems the government cannot resolve, crises just may arise.

Things are always even more tenuous in the former communist east naturally, but ‘another 40 years’ to rebuild? It didn’t take that long to ruin it...and one has to assume that the reigning dictatorship made the process of decay as inefficient as everything else.