I am. Perhaps my "politeness" is anchored by deep-seated apoplexy in the face of the strictures of everyday 21st century life? So much for blogging to become a better writer.

A teenage German permanent resident of Turkish origin, living in Bremen, visits Pakistan just after 9/11. On the road near the Afghan border, he is kidnapped by Pakistanis who then "sell" him to US forces. He is incarcerated in Pakistan, Afghanistan, finally in Guantanamo, where he vegetates without real cause for 4 years, often in solitary. Several times German military and State Information Service - the "BND", Germany's CIA - question him and "promise" release or transport to Turkey or even back to Germany. None of this ensues. A German lawyer and some US attorneys bring his case to the Supreme Court, which decides that the US must release material on the reasons for his detention. Bush & Co. simply ignore this for weeks on end; but in September, at the same time as a law passes Congress allowing the States to declare basically any foreigner, even if living legally on US soil, an enemy who no longer may apply for "habeas corpus", Bush releases the Bremen detainee as an act of mercy. The latter returns to Germany and tells of his ordeal, describes Guantanamo's tortureaucracy and in the process causes a special parliamentary committee to form - to look into the doings of German military in Iraq, and the BND. And the German foreign minister, who, when our previous chancellor's chief of staff, denied the Bremen man's extradition to Germany as offered to Germany by the US just after the man's arrival in Guantanamo. Are we not to think that both sides knew then he was - largely - innocent?

I don't know anything glib or rousing to say. I know I'm no longer listening to anything the US have to say about morals, democracy or the reasons for stationing troops in Japan, Korea, Germany, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. (List incomplete!) I want the German people responsible for ignoring this man's plight for years to step down now, move to Bremen and make it up personally to him. And I'm going to see if any of Berlin's old, mostly honourable tradition of anarchism is still alive; true anarchists never trust government, never practise force or violence except in self-defense. Perhaps I can learn something there, if anywhere.

Polite, that is. The West Wing - the first 2½ seasons, all I've seen so far - is infectious, intelligent, kitschy, touching, daring. Especially the latter. Picture it: We have a Democrat president, good-looking, Southern-twanged, not unintelligent - failing. So someone writes up a better president right then, in a movie, first somewhat non-descript as an interesting widower, with good dialogue and interesting supporting characters. And some time later the same man (WW's creator Sorkin) decides to show the US what a really good Democrat president could be like - in a hit TV series: Sheen's role as the nerdy, cool and inobviously handicapped president, who is discovered as chanceless candidate by a team of expert communicators/lawyers, who - surprise! - all believe in the social Democrat ethic to a tee. And wins. And becomes the focal point of the most powerful soap ever.

Sheen's president Bartlett, who to me looks somewhat like JFK might have at 60, captains a White magic House, that goes boldly through themes and events, and is powered by a lovable cast making even better dialogue, preferrably while on the move in long corridor walking marathons. These "drives" through the glassed-in freneticism of America's inner sanctum of power are cinematographic tours-de-force, that must be seen to be believed; files are constantly put down or picked up, conversants disappear to the left or to the right, only to be replaced by new ones continuing the talk if not the content, takes often taking up to half a minute or longer. The dialogue reminds me a lot of riveting Hawksian dialogues of earlier cinema, e.g. of His Girl Friday - quite astonishing, since that movie is as old as this president! Is the secret of WW's success this grand sense of "retro"? The States we could have had?

The most astonishing episode was the one done just after 9/11. It's a "what if" loop out of the sequence, and all main characters mirror the terrible event, commenting on it, on what's to be done, and - most importantly to me - how to see the perpetrators (paraphrased: the "KKK of Islam, not its mainstream"). I was blown away.

But in the end the series is too good - and naive, e.g. of the influence of the Pentagon in U.S. foreign policy - to be true. And it walks a dangereous path. It is like a far-removed spaceship with a sympathetic, but very powerful captain, who can save the world if he beats the odds again and again, who is kept on the true path by courageous "spin boys" and one girl, that aren't afraid to stand up to him when he gets too carried away. However, it plays in a world too similar to ours for us not to confuse the two, and wish we were in the TV, ever more since we see every day how far the real incumbent draws away from the fictitious one. Finally, in spite of good writing and interesting acting, it's a TV soap and follows the rules of soaps in this setting, inescapably trivialising it.

Absolute power portrayed as a TV series corrupts absolutely my power to not find the characters' behaviour supercilious, inhuman and, in the long run, well, trivial. The series takes itself seriously, in the majority of scenes, and that's my problem with it. My love and my hate of it.

I've managed to extricate myself after the first few episodes of the third season now. There are 4½ seasons to go; it just ended a few months ago. I'll have to think it through a bit, first. Or perhaps wait for another most powerful human on Earth more fitting to the TV role to be voted in before continuing, so as to prevent occasional attacks of nausea...

I am sitting in Berlin's central station, the new and so very improved "Hauptbahnhof" - which in itself is a sign of Germany reunited, since Berlin did not have such a thing for the last 50 years, due to the split into East & West. I like travelling by train, and no presumed terrorist leaving potentially explosive baggage somewhere on some train would stop me travelling this way. I think.

But I don't necessarily like the Bahn, the German state rail company. Actually, few Germans do; it's a modern tradition - present since the 2nd World War, which we started, in case you didn't know - to dislike state institutions. Even if one does follow even the tiniest edict with alacrity, all the while considering taking legal action against it; calls to our version of the Supreme Court are coming into fashion.

Anyway, the Bahn built this steel and concrete monster, glass-umbrella'd, which feels like a temple to gigantism with its 2- or 3-storey high levels of which there are at least 4, trains using the lowest and highest levels, with 2 shopping and service levels inbetween. There are several fast-food places, although they did think of a fruit-and-water stall, at least - somewhat expensive, though. There are several paperback sellers and news agents. There is little soul; somehow huge places always seem to stretch out soul between their distant outer walls too much - perhaps soul is a natural constant that is dealt out one per building, whatever its size?

I miss the old "central" station, the notorious, but much smaller Bahnhof Zoo, in the erstwhile isolated West side of the city, near the ruin of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (except that the man has been left out of its name since the War, so that nowadays it's sort of memorialising the War instead). For one thing you could wander in there and buy fruit and water provisions for about 3 Euro; at the stall in this new central station, mentioned above, you're bound to be paying about double, for less fruit. Also, Zoo station was in the centre of the West side, surrounding life honking and hooting away - literally, since it's right next to the city zoo; this new Station is in the area that used to be no-man's land between East & West Berlin - the only places it's really close to are further evidence of the renewed German mania with size, the chancellory with its huge concrete roundings and the new office block for members of parliament.

At least the Reichstag, where German parliament has been sitting again the last decade or so, in spite of its stateliness looking a little frail between its bloated grandchildren, is visible, too.

In the spirit of this journal, I will of course enter this new gleaming temple, sunk into the centre of old Berlin, with an open mind in future. I will try to revisit Bahnhof Zoo just to look at once a year or so. And as a good German, I will keep riding the state monopoly's trains; and shut up in its stations.