Character Revealed: Why Olaf Scholz Will Win

My respect for the man's public relations competence has been growing, combined with my sadness that Annalena Baerbock has so little chance that CNN doesn't bother mentioning her. Shame on CNN! She'd do something about climate change, but the unstated view here is, "Well, she has small children . . ." and then they shake their heads. Germans still employ an epithet for women who have children and careers: "Rabenmutter," the Duden 2020 dictionary will tell you, means "raven mother" denoting "a bad mother, who does not take sufficient care of her children, often because she is combining family with work. This derogatory term is used for a 'loveless, hard-hearted mother who neglects her children' or for an egoistic woman who refuses to have children due to economic or emotional circumstances." When a young German stockbroker told me nobody would vote for Baerbock because that's how people see her, I wondered how she saw herself--she with her several small children and her demanding job. What about New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, giving birth in office?

"Not in Germany," said the stockbroker.

That's where Olaf Scholz comes in. He's marketed himself perfectly as Angela Merkel's clone. It's just that he's male, but he's trying to make  that not count by having himself photographed doing Merkel's  trademark "triangle of power" hand gesture. His posters are all red-and-white-tried-and-true-been-here-since-the-Hanseatic-League-so-what-if they're-kind-of-like-CDU-colors. The message is what counts, and Scholz's messages have a brilliant simplicity:

(1) Kompetenz für Deutschland

(2) Kanzler für Deutschland

Competence defines chancellor--that's the message. You don't get one without the other. That logic appeals especially to a third of voters who are over sixty, and seem to think it's not quite right for a young woman to have such big ambitions, to say, "together we will change politics!" while she, they think, ought to spend more time with those babies because before you know it, they'll be grown. 

She's the real deal--she could walk in and Greta Thunberg the nation, but the folks my age won't give her a chance. Maybe she should have tried the hand gesture and the competence line. Instead, she said exactly what she thought. I like that. But  Oscar Wilde's observation about politics comes to mind: "a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician." The moral compass here turns to competence. You can innovate, experiment, even spontaneously speak, but you must first reveal your competence, which is both a character trait and a skill.

On Getting a Booster Shot when You're Sixty-Something and Sick in Deutschland

My Venus Fly Trap, Elizabite, was inert all summer. Her companion, another carnivorous plant whom I call "Sticky Fingers," traps tiny flies--and recently, a gigantic water-fly--with amazing regularity. If Sticky Fingers, with her long tendrils glistening with dewy, fatal, glue, is the Olympiad of fly-trapping, Elizabite is a lazybones--not a fly to her name (and all those lovely red interiors in her cozy-looking traps!)

When she finally trapped a fly, a big one, I felt astonished. And proud. I told her how very proud I was, and took her success as a sign that I should take my health in my hands and trap a booster. 

The attentive reader will see Elizabite's prey on the left. Worried by CDC reports and the earnest face of Anthony Fauci trying, as usual, to do the right thing, I considered my options. I could wait and follow the rules. I've never been particularly good at that, though I've usually done so. But now I felt my life was at stake. I could wait until mid-to-late October, in other words after I'm likely to face students who are probably but not one hundred percent safe, plus a co-worker who doesn't believe in vaccinations. I wandered over to the area known as Vaccination Street and cased the joint. Would they recognize me? What a paranoid thought. I lined up among those without appointments, requested a third shot, offering my history of metastatic cancer. I got the answer I expected. They're not giving third shots. No exceptions. I went back home, called my internist, my gynecologist, my oncologist again. They're also not giving third shots. I looked at myself in the mirror. Was I really going to do this? 

After waiting a few days, I pulled my hair into a pony tail, put on dark glasses, walked back to Vaccination Street and got in line. 

"Is this your first vaccination?" asked the yellow-jacketed guard.

"Mmmm-hmm!" I squeaked. As usual, I expected to be sent home at every step of the way. When I showed my ID card. When I "forgot" my vaccination book. When I filled out the form wrong. When the doctor, needle poised over my arm, told me to expect a hematoma and I said, "Oh, I know--I mean, my friend told me that's what would happen!" I even expected, as I sat among the vaccinated for the required fifteen-minute wait, either to plotz on the floor for my sins--Zeus would zap me with a thunderbolt--or be arrested. The police would march in and announce: "You Did Not Follow The Procedures Or The Rules." 

I swung my arm around vigorously right after the shot. I'm told the notion that this helps with pain is an urban legend, but this time around I did not wake up moaning in pain when I turned over on my vaccinated arm. I pressed it, as the doctor told me to do, and I put on an ice pack as soon as I got home. Body aches and chills came; my temperature rose to 37.1 and 37.3. I lay in bed, took paracetamol, ate ice cream and read Peter Pan.

I recovered.

The German Elections: Business as Usual

Posters are everywhere--in front of my building there's one my teenager and I longed to rip down from the "Basis" party--the anti-maskers who think their civil rights are being trampled upon. They'd love Marjorie Taylor Greene. We restrained ourselves.

Germany has seven main political parties--there are creepy racist fringe ones like the AfD, the so-called "alternative" for Germany, the one that doesn't like migrants or non-cisgender persons or basically anyone of a non-Aryan appearance, and there's "Die Partei," the joke party that wasn't such a joke when one of its leaders decided to vote randomly yes to one vote and no to the next, alternatively, and ended up giving a yes vote to an AfD proposal. Then there are versions of Right, Center-Right, Left, and Center-Left. It's all very complicated. A mirror of the German mind.

I admire Annalena Baerbock, the Green party candidate, for her efforts to protect the climate, but I can see that Olaf Scholz, whom I initially dismissed as a Peter Principle type, will win. He knows his audience. He never says a word unless it's absolutely necessary to do so, and he avoids controversy with a deftness bordering on the acrobatic. Then there's his campaign slogan: "Kompetenz für Deutschland." He's offering Germans their very favorite thing: competence. To be fair, you can translate "Kompetenz" as "expertise," but what's the diff? To keep order, to follow the rules, is to be competent, in fact, an expert! I can just see him placing his competent head on the pillow, holding hands with his wife, smiling a "yes," when she asks if he had a competent day, and then, as he turns out the competent light, reaches competently for her and offers a competent act, God is in his German Competence, and all's right with the world. Meanwhile, fossils fuels are burning. Does he secretly know he can competently halt climate crisis even better than the feisty Madame Baerbock? I wish I knew. I have to admit, the man's eyes reveal the wheels turning behind them. He can't always suppress a slight rise of an eyebrow. I withdraw the Peter Principle theory and hope he has some genuine expertise with which to tackle the climate emergency and the migrant crisis. I hope he's Herr Very, Very Shrewdly Gets Things Done, not just Herr Competent.

The Courage of Peter Boghossian

Peter Boghossian is one of my heroes. The brilliant philosopher, whose teaching and scholarship range far beyond ivory towers and woke factories, tendered his resignation from Portland State University. His letter may be read in full on Bari Weiss's substack, Common Sense. Over the last few years, I have enjoyed watching him combat what I first thought of as the excesses of academe--the pomposity, the jargon, the language circling gracefully around some obscure point but rarely with clarity.  

That language has taken a more sinister turn, becoming a series of ideologies, especially about race and gender, that are harmful, especially in the form of critical race theory as it currently appears in many American classrooms--from kindergartens to doctoral programs.  Boghossian is hardly the first to resign, but he's one of the most prominent.  American education, especially in the most expensive private schools and universities, is in a crisis at a time when the country needs to train future leaders the most. I hope Bogossian's statement will be taken seriously by other institutions. I hope that freedom of speech and a commitment to teaching how--rather than what-- to think will return. 

Here is Bogossian in 2018 with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose during a moment of triumph, when the three exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of several prominent academic journals: