Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Author:Thomas Geoghegan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781595587893
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2011-09-20T10:00:00+00:00

5

Clash of Civilizations

Meanwhile, America had become dark. There was the nightmare of Bush v. Gore. We did not seem like a democracy. We had big tax cuts for the rich, and payday loans for the poor. Every day I went to Caffè Baci and read the Financial Times and would root for Germany and hope that, in terms of GDP, it would do a little better. Many a time, in the half hour for lunch, I would think: shouldn’t I be back over there pushing up GDP? I kept thinking, as I said, that in the 1930s people on the left went to die in Madrid. In the same way, it’s our duty to spend in Berlin. Yes, that’s how people like me could help European social democracy, by giving the GDP a little push, like the young woman on the swing in the painting by Fragonard. So I began to dream of going back to Berlin. Yes, it had to be Berlin. It’s not just because it’s the German town for Germans who can’t cut it in the rest of Germany. No, it had to be Berlin because it was the only place I’d ever been really idle, as idle as the man in the movie Claire’s Knee.

But it’s a lot of work to be completely idle; and when I say I wanted to be idle, I also wanted to have a job, something to do as a break. And it was in 2001 that a German friend said maybe I could come to Berlin to teach—for a month or two at least.

“What would I teach?” I said. “I don’t know anything.”

“You could teach American labor law.”

“Are you serious? I mean, I’d have to do it in English. I can’t imagine why a kid would want to take a course in American labor law—in English.”

“To the contrary,” he said, “the only reason for the kids to take it is that it would be in English.” They wanted to hear it in the mother tongue of Pearl Jam.

Ah, but I would have to prepare lectures, and it turned out that in some of these law classes, the professors lecture for three hours straight! I wanted a job: how else could I get any sense of routine life? But this would be a lot of work.

And who would take my class?

But it turns out that, in Europe, they also have courses like “Moby Dick, Lincoln, and the Beginning of Queer Fiction,” just as we do, so maybe I could get away with “American Labor Law: What a European Should Know.” No, it did not seem so odd. In the FT, the big German global companies, which hated “consensus,” were sending their young middle managers over to the U.S. so that, at a tender age, they would learn how to fire people. I could imagine myself telling the European left the way we do it in America, where we have a much meaner, Puritan view of human nature and think the poor

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