In the current issue of the popular German magazine, STERN, I read an interview with Kristen Stewart, on a brief visit to Hamburg accompanying Karl Lagerfeld, where she said, "I want to be remembered for being cool and honest". I like Stewart but I wondered whether she sees the counterpoint of the two descriptions.

What is coolness? If it's a generally definable term, isn't it defined by current trends (currently among people a lot younger than me)? So, what would honesty mean in that context? -- If it isn't generally definable, isn't it per se a subjective definition, differing from person to receiving person? Maybe that's what she meant, subjective honesty.

I currently receive the following as cool, sorted from least to most important (in my eýes):

• The new Star Wars movie - I liked it a lot more than many of my peers & apparently* some of the die-hard fans. I see in fact the movie turning around the reason Rose gives Finn for why she saves him from self-emolation - LOVE drives the Resistance. I.a. it's the reason Finn is still part of the current ensemble. Duh.

• I understand how the U.S. movement described by the picture got started, and I utterly agree that women need to be heard, and above all legally assisted/compensated, if blundering idiot/s go too far, or - macho bullies! - even threaten them. Having said that, I am unhappy about the way a colleague of the starter of this movement i.a. slandered Ben Affleck, and may have seriously damaged his acting career. She tried it, slightly milder, but still nasty, once more this week, with Meryl Streep - who turned out to be too powerful an icon. That Streep put a brake on well-intentioned slandering... I find cool! (Here's hoping social media hate posters, mostly male, now some female, learn a little from that.)

• That the by now Zulu-driven ANC managed to collect its wits, and vote Cyril Ramaphosa into its no. 1 spot within the party this week, is cool. The amount of damage Zuma - a Zulu - has managed to cause the party, as well as the country, has become overwhelming. Now, Ramaphosa - a Venda - one of the major movers toward the breakdown of Apartheid almost 3 decades ago, needs to take the next step, and throw out Zuma as president, and take up those reins! Amandla, Ramaphosa!!!

I am putting this as a question to myself - in just over one week, I'll have to decide, on paper in the election booth.

The "not" is in there because I know a lot of parties I won't be giving my vote in times of Trumpian "foreigner" bashing...

• The CDU/CSU ("Christian" parties), headed by our mostly spineless lady chancellor, have been making a lot of disconcerted moves in one direction or another, but almost always opportunistic & to benefit their economic clientele (currently esp. car makers are in the news - the C parties have been upping the maximum nitrates in the air spewed out by Diesel engines for years, totally uncaring about consequences for lung-challenged people like me). Her ladyship did something right for once when she showed a bit of humaneness to war refugees 2 years ago (cf. above photo, taken at that time) but is now constantly rolling back in fear of the far right noise, i.a. made by her supposed partners in the South (yeah, that's the Bavarian C offshoot with the S in the name - guys who are economically potent, but constantly flirting with the far right). Her current election posters are once again totally bland, minimally texted, as in many elections before; can't overwhelm the small German electorate mind with content now, can we?
• The SPD, a near miss for my cross in previous years, has been dithering about, and letting its partly good work in government be "owned" by the CDU. Until recently they had a pretty opportunistic party chief, who is now our foreign minister; this guy also took part in the Diesel scandal as economic minister for years (workers' votes are more important than general health). Because of their dithering on the "foreigner stampede" thing, they are massively losing votes as I write this. Mine, too...
• The FDP is coming back into parliament with a bang (the prognoses say), overtaking both remaining left parties in percentage points. But I see no difference to the old FDP, that got pushed out of parliament because of their all-too greedy posturing & client-serving. Instead of being a real liberal party in the mode of their great old boys & girl, like Baum, Hamm-Brücher & Dahrendorf. Now they've even jumped on the "foreigners leave!" bandwagon to fish for votes of Germans afraid of losing their status quo to those o so criminal "foreigners".
• The AfD, that far right demagogic bunch alluded to above, used to be a plain somewhat-conservative anti-Euro economic-"reform" party. But it was quickly taken over by extreme far-right populists, at least one of which is now implying to forcibly get rid of "non-Germanic" politicians in speeches, to make Germany grate again... But they will have one of the biggest parliamentary debuts in terms of votes in 8 days that the F.R.G. has ever seen.

Germans need to go vote just to reduce the last-named idiots' section in the Bundestag as much as possible.

But who should I vote for? Basically, of the parties that remain with a chance of getting into parliament (i.e. get more than 5% of the vote - an important German voting laws restriction to keep small extreme parties out of parliament), only the Greens & the "Left" (a more socialist splinter off the SPD after Germany reunited) remain.

I more or less hate the former, whom I voted for a lot in younger years, because they've turned out to be a lame, status-quo-keeping interest group for ex-"revolutionists" and '68ers; and of course they support the Climate Change hype (cf. some previous blog posts on that theme to know where I stand). But they are the only ones who are in line with my wishes for how to deal with "foreigners" in our country, having been an immigrant in another country myself for over a decade. One of their party chiefs is a pretty opportunistic guy who already stepped down once due to attempted embezzlement, it seems; I really don't like that guy.

The last party I mentioned, the "Linke" (= "Left") is okay, mostly, if always a little too heads-in-the-cloudish concerning how their many dreams for a better (socialist) world would be financed. When it comes down to it in the end, I only hate that they - and esp. their thorough-bred electioneer, a pretty lady called Wagenknecht - always give the impression they much prefer to be in the opposition than ever actually taking part in government; hey, it's so much easier when you don't have to follow through (incl. all the messy real-life consequences) on your special priorities - thus setting prerequisites too absolute for other parties to ever build a coalition with you. The latter has already made them steadily less electable for many still-wavering voters.

And one thing I do not want to do this election is throw away my main vote by giving it to a party that will have no chance to form a government. We need more civil common sense up there, NOW! We need enduring backbone to deal with old (Erdogan) & new (Trump) tyrants, and not just the temporary variant for not quite two years Merkel proved to have re war refugees. We also need backbone to sell the hard story to Germans in the near future that we can't keep living like royalty on the economic backs of others; i.e. living standards in Germany - & some other parts of the EU - need to generally start coming down nearer those of the rest of the world.

So, Greens or Lefties it will have to be, with set teeth & stiff upper AND lower lips... Damn!

A pretty mesmerising interview by the amazing Terry Gross today on Fresh Air i.a. told the story of beleaguered and betrayed Molly Kyle (pictured) of the Osage nation almost a century ago, in Oklahoma. Because the local tribe had been given a bit of land by edict of the then current U.S. president, only to find rich oil resources on Molly's part of the land - and surroundings - greedy & soulless white men moved in, married the women to get a legal title by marriage, and then proceeded to murder them - either quickly, e.g. by a gunshot to the back of the head, or slowly, by poisoning...

It's hard to grasp how bigotted these men - and U.S. society in general - were at that time, to have something like this happen over a relatively long time. How Osage natives were treated judicially as only partial citizens, as incapable of managing their own wealth, and finally as a bloody means to oil barony. At round about the time one of my favourite novels was being written: The Great Gatsby.

But then, only a decade later, my own nation was gearing up to give even greater & far more vicious murderers absolute power over millions of people, and killing many of them after stripping them and their kin of all means of earning income, then of all they owned, then of their lives!

So, as a German, a child of children who lived at that time, all I can really do - with singular vigour - is point out just how deadly hate & bigotry can become. We are living at a time, when we've been living a good life in the 1st World for several decades, on average... so now we look idly on, as every 5th or 4th person surrounding us - together with attention-greedy "big" politicians - is kick-starting the great & bloody hate machine again: In the United Kingdom break'xiting away; in the U.S.A. to help an old redneck surf a wave of whining hate into the vicinity of the nuclear football; in France in just a few days to decide on the fate of the EU.

We can. Or we can gear up - with thousandfold vigour - for another, more global "no hate" campaign!