Little Changes

I first went to Germany in the early 1990s. I’d been to Switzerland with a history tour group, but this was my first time more or less on my own in a foreign country. It is amazing how quickly your language skills improve when you are trying to sort out if the meat-in-a-can is something like stew or hash, or if it is a version of Alpo dog food. You also learn which bakeries are open when, and which ones have the really, really good stuff.

I only had class four days a week, so one day I’d train hop (ah, the student rail pass, how I loved you) and go exploring. I had a great deal of fun, learned a lot more than I did in class, and became fond of German humor, including tee shirts. Helmut Kohl was Chancellor at the time, and not entirely popular. There were shirts that showed him ironing his trousers. The phone was ringing, and he had the iron to his ear saying, “Hello? Kohl here. Hello?” Or the Chancellor with a cabbage for a head. Another that tickled my funny bone wasn’t political. Mandatory recycling had just started, and one of the shorts had the “green dot” symbol in the middle and said, “Ich glaub an Recycling. Ich war einmal ein Pfand.” I believe in recycling. I was once a deposit bottle. There were others from the famous Loriot cartoon collections, more obscure political jokes, and so on. You could find these all over the place.

The past few years, I’ve not seen nearly as many of the funny shirts. The ones I did see were all regional humor, like sailing jokes up on the North Sea (I got a coffee mug, should have gotten the one about taxes), or “The Black Forest at Night” sort of thing. No political jokes. No one makes fun of Angela Merkel or the head of the EU on tee-shirts.

I suspect part of it is the rise of the Internet and memes. Why pay twenty dollars for a tee-shirt when you can post a meme?

Part of the lack stems from having politicians who cannot laugh at themselves. Ross Perot joked that he’d be a good president, “Because I’m all ears.” Regan teased that “I won’t hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him” when debating Walter Mondale. I have never read or seen Angela Merkel, Pres. Obama, Jeremy Corbin (Labour UK) and others joke at their own expense.

I also have a feeling that the political climate has gotten too serious to risk wearing something that broadcasts your opinions, especially if those opinions differ from the official government policies. We see it in the US as well, where certain kinds of ball caps or tee-shirts get people threatened or assaulted. I can just imagine what might happen if someone went walking down a street in, oh, parts of Berlin with the Chancellorin in a hijib and “Mutti Multikulti” on a shirt.

If we can’t laugh at politics and at differences, what comes next? Well, I suspect most of us have an unhappy suspicion of what comes next. Life has become deadly serious for too many people. “[Person] is literally [evil]” or “[Person] will destroy our freedoms and wants to turn the country into [bad thing/place]!”

We find humor in other people and in the foibles of life. If we can’t see the humanity in people we disagree with, how long until we stop seeing them as people? I’m not talking the denigrating, insulting “humor” that all too often passes as comedy today. I’m thinking about shared experiences, seeing the follies in everyone’s lives.

Like one of my favorite Loriot Zodiac cartoons. Two mice and a cat are at a cocktail party, and the cat sniffs and says, “I’m not a crab [Kreb {Cancer}], I’m a lobster.” One of the mice whispers, “Social climber.”