Allons enfants des chauves-souris

The causes of WWI were many and complicated, but I think I am on safe ground in saying that WWI did not follow “from the inability of the French to harness German nationalism after the Franco-Prussian War” (whatever that might mean).

That's Daniel Larrison in response to Victorious McMansion's most recent night at the improv, which dances between accusing southern European nations of deadbeatism and worrying about a renewed German militarism, imagining, if I am reading correctly, Maastricht et al. as the new Versailles and Angela Merkel's potential SDP successor as either a Hitler or a Bismark--precisely which remains unclear.

The curious conviction that southern Europe is poor keeps recurring, and I suppose that poverty and indebtedness are in some sense linked, but it remains a palpable truth that countries like Italy and Spain and Greece and even little Portugal are by any historical and certainly by any contemporary standard extraordinarily rich--materially wealthy in a way rarely if ever seen before on earth, exceeded only by a very few other super-outlier nations.  France isn't really Southern Europe; I mean, Paris is as northerly as Munich, and regardless, Germany and France are the fourth and fifth largest economies in the world by GPD respectively, with the French output trailing the German output by approximately the same figure as Germany trails number three, Japan.  And among the real nations of Southern Europe: Italy is richer than India.  Spain is richer than South Korea.  Portugal, with just 10.5 million people, is wealthier than Egypt or the Philippines, with 90 million each.

You all know I don't put all that much stock in the validity of these sorts of measurements; I note them only to point out that even by the crackpot standards of our mad age, these countries are just fine.  The crisis is so concocted that even the empiricism of its own authors belies the conclusion that it exists.

Want Past Resolution's Power

I think that the twined larksongs of the crackpot Paulism (pawlism?) that constitutes American ecumenical Christianity--you know, the kind that holds its nose but doesn't necessarily crack the window when a Mormon boards the bus--and the post-liberation movement Human Rights Campaign (human rites campaign?) in Re: the matter of the gaze is the perfect harmony for our times.  Or, well, not harmony so much as our era's political cantus firmus, since our political polyphony is, to say the least, primitive.  On the one side, you have the last spar of the Good Ship Traditional Morality, a barge mistaken by its attending, uh, by its seamen for a battleship; its shallow draft mistaken for the bluewater.  On the other, that disappointing gay cruise that turned out to be full of lifelong pairbonds who swap baby pictures and refer to chocolate deserts as sinful with the total lack of irony that you'd otherwise expect in a midwestern administrative assistant at a Cheesecake Factory lunch on Secretary Appreciation Day.  It is a lesson about the temptations of the institutions of iniquity; the power to grant access is society's great bribe.  Lemme put it to you this way--when the President of the United States begins championing your cause, ask yourself for whose benefit, and why, and why now?