GUNTER GRASS STILL BEATS THE DRUM 60 YEARS LATER

Speaking of things German, like the Berlin Holocaust Memorial ... Nobel laureate Gunter Grass has much to say about democracy, freedom and capitalism in post-World War II Germany on the occasion of the "Reich's unconditional surrender" 60 years ago tomorrow:

[T]he ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests ... constricts and influences the Federal Parliament and its democratically elected members, placing them under pressure and forcing them into disharmony, even when framing and deciding the content of laws. Consequently, Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It is steered by the banks and multinational corporations -- which are not subject to any democratic control.

What's needed is a democratic desire to protect Parliament against the pressures of the lobbyists by making it inviolable. But are our Parliamentarians still sufficiently free to make a decision that would bring radical democratic constraint? Or is our freedom now no more than a stock market profit?

Sound familiar? Substitute "U.S. Congress" for "Federal Parliament," and "Congressmen and women" for "Parliamentarians," and you'd think Grass was writing about the United States. He's not of course. His essay mainly concerns the as yet unbridgeable divide that still exists between East and West Germans.

But when it comes to corporate influence, lobbyists and the corruption of democracy by unrestrained capitalism, Grass might as well be writing about us. The Web cover line for the essay, which appears on today's New York Times op-ed page, is: "After 60 years, Germans still haven't learned to be free." It's too bad the same may be said for Americans after more than 200 years.

May 7, 2005 1:05 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on May 7, 2005 1:05 AM.

BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL: NO BRATWURST, PLEASE was the previous entry in this blog.

FOR THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE is the next entry in this blog.

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