- Humor and it’s power to restore perspective, promote cultural understanding, and emotional balance: Did You Hear the One About the Suicide Bomber?
- Show Highlights ‘Outlaw Comic’ Bill Hicks
- The banality of the good:
-
In the Cafe Orange on the Oranienburgerstrasse, in the now trendy heart of what used to be East Berlin, I talk to a guy dressed in T-shirt, sandals and designer sunglasses. An old ’68er, he is sharply critical of the current policies of the Bush administration. At one point he leans forward and says, teasingly: “Don’t you think we need a new Boston tea party?” Surely, he jokes, the Boston tea party was good for relations between Britain and America – in the long term. When he gets up to leave, I notice that he puts on a black baseball cap advertising “American Eagle”. “Ja,” he says, “das habe ich in Boston gekauft.” (“I bought it in Boston.”)
Yes, there is some serious power politics, too. It is dangerous for the world to have only one hyperpower. It is dangerous for America itself to be that only hyperpower. As the guy in the Cafe Orange in Berlin argued, one reason European-American relations are so bad is that Europe is weak. The US needs a stronger partner, and Europe badly needs Britain in order to become that stronger partner. Dead right. And that’s what the real Europe can help us do.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention the name of the guy in the Cafe Orange. It was Joschka Fischer. Yes, that Joschka Fischer: the one who’s Germany’s Green foreign minister, and may soon be Europe’s first foreign minister.