The Starship EUterprise navigation system is faulty
We’re inundated with flies and bluebottles here as this extraordinary heatwave continues. I was watching the bluebottles in particular earlier this afternoon (life gets slow here at times). I’ve been fascinated all my life with the way they don’t just try to exit the room they flew into so unwisely; they positively throw themselves at walls, windows, doors – in fact any upright surface…a sort of cross between kamikaze pilots and amphetamine-fuelled pinballs. There is indeed something genuinely suicidal about the way, when a wall heads towards them (and even a bluebottle must know the speed thing is down to them, not the wall) they accelerate.
“Wall approaching dead ahead,” says Captain James T. Bluebottle on the bridge, “Warp factor nine Scottie!”
“I’m givin’ her all she’s gowt!” yells Scottibottle, “She canny take much moorah Cappan!”
It’s the same with the European Union, I find.
Hour after hour one hears the zap-zap-zap as they careen around from chair leg to picture via radiator and curtain rail. The one thing all these obstacles have in common is unyielding hardness, but that’s never been known to deter a bluebottle: their motto must be the harder they come the harder they fall, and if so it enjoys the status of being a cliché without being a truism. Bluebottles are unique in both being and having a permanent headache.
It’s the same with Sigmar Gabriel, I find.
Gabbers is another member of the Herrenvolk’s Juggernaut tendency. Addicted to steroids from an early age, Sigmar shares the ability of Wolfie Foible to offer the same response whether the event might be a gas leak or the Earth wobbling out of its orbit: “Zere iss nussink new in ziss! Waiter – where iss my better menu? I haff for three months patiently vaiting here been”.
So nobody gasped in shock as Herr Gabriel said this afternoon – after an OXI had routed his JA – “Greece must present a new offer that goes beyond its previous proposals if it wants to remain in the euro”. They may well have variously gasped in frustration, disbelief and ennuie, but the predictability of Sigmar’s brainlessly hurled brick evoked rolling eyes more than anything else. The fact that Gabriel is chucking his brick at an empty jeweller’s shop window is what aligns him closely as a species with the bluebottle.
“Achtung!” yells Herr Kapitanleutnant Sigmar T. Blaubottle, “Prepare to launch Brick 1 Warp Factor 11 at ze vindow!”
“Sie gebt alles she has gegotten!” screams Hauptmann Scottische, ” but ze shop iss leer Dummkopf!”
Here is a shot of Sigmar Gabriel’s open-mindedness on the subject of Greek debt:
Siggy Braindust’s two-fingers strategy in dealing with this subject has in turn a dual purpose: for not only do the digits stop new information from going in, they also arrest the constant escape of data going out.
“The Greeks are in arrears!” bellows Chrissie Lagarde.
“Yes you are right,” Gabriel replies, “my fingers are in my ears. I prefer it zat vay”.
Leading as she now does a Grand Coalition of dingbats in all the sizes and all the colours, I have to say that the German Führerin – a woman with whom I rarely sympathise, let alone socialise – deserves at the very least our understanding. For where even Sigmar fears to tread, there are many Bundestagers who would happily do a Tennessee stomp with moon boots on 24/7.
Leading the charge of that leaden Schützstaffel is our old friend Martin Bormann Schulz. Formerly the leader of the Progressive Socialist Alliance in the European Parliament, Herr Schulz is one of the world’s leading experts on Götterdämmerung, and I’m not talking Wagnerian opera here. While it may well be that Martin has a wife called Brunhilde who regularly sports the tin-hat-with-horns form of headgear, his intellect is more Val Doonican than Valkyrie: certainly, if Schulz has a feminine side, then it is well-disguised behind a beard and his eccentrically wide parting.
Two days ago, Schulz called for the elected Syriza government to be replaced by “technocrat” rule until stability is restored, which was – let’s not beat about the bush – hugely progressive and Socialist of him. He demanded this suspension of Greek democracy because without such a solution, Greece would “spin out of control” and there would be “a collapse of the medical system, power black-outs, and an import blockade”.
Something of an out-of-control spinner himself, Martin omitted to mention that the gargoyles he is supposed to control (as the head of the elected EU body) would be working hard to fulfill his prophecy of the very threat he feared. But in the wacky world of Eurosoap, this is the way things work.
“Armageddon dead ahead!” exclaimed Überstürmbannführer James T. Schulzbottle, “Altered futures to Bullshit Factor 17 Schottlander!”
“I’m giving Greece one up the arse for all I’ve got,” Schottie shouted, “but she can’t take any more!”
This is the least unpleasant shot I could find of Martin Schulz:
As you can see, whereas Gabriel has mastered the finger-ear liaison as a means of approaching the alternative point of view, Martin has adopted a different MO, that of picking his nose while pretending that the bogey-seeking digitorum might at one and the same time control his facial orifice or gob.
Research shows, I’m afraid, that not even the toughest German-made steel zip can silence the gobbiness of the Gabby one.
According to Deutsche Welle broadcasting this morning, Martin Schultz made new comments about Greece during an interview he gave to the German newspaper Passauer Neue Presse. Commenting on the fact that Greek PM Alexis Tsipras firmly rejected the proposal put on the table by the Institutions – along with 61.3% of the citizens he represents – the President of the European Parliament said that the Syriza leader “is playing political games delaying the procedures” regarding a potential Greek solution.
You see, the CEO of GabSig Bollocks GmBh equates democracy with delay. And in that sense, he is slap-bang down the middle of the fairway when it comes to Germany’s tradition of delayed gratification….he doesn’t have one.
There is a phrase in German, “alles Klar”. It means ‘everything is ready’. German politicians exist in a state of permanent readiness. It may be for Operation Barbarossa or the federalisation of the EU, but the one thing this alles Klar shtick lacks is what the legals call aforethought. Nine times out of ten, German preparation is a model of efficiency with no malice intended at all. But 10% is all it takes to deliver misery unto the rest of us.
It is time – well into serious injury time, in fact – that German politicians should shut TFU and accept that we don’t all want to be like them. Their ideas wiped out two-thirds of my immediate ancestors, murdered six million Jews, and starved the Greeks twice in seventy years.
Enough is enough. This house believes that the power of the Chancellery has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished. And you would be amazed how many of my German friends agree with me.
Earlier at The Slog: Time for the one-eyed woman to take control
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