Will Oremus on slate.com wrote:Fox News Claims Solar Won't Work in America
Because It's Not Sunny Like Germany
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It's always sunny in Germany!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... video.html
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SERIOUSLY?!?!
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No, can't be, not even Fox could make such outlandish claims.
They actually say it. It's at 2:50.
I would have expected they accused us of having some sort of command economy. Perhaps even insinuating, which in their case means stating it clearly and repeatedly for at least an hour, that we like following orders because we don't like freedom, so we do what the government tells us, being all disciplined and stuff. They could, perhaps, have accused us of our wicked European socialism.
BUT SUNNY WEATHER??
I get that the average Fox News viewer now pictures Germany as the land of milk and honey and endless hours of blazing sunshine, I get that they can get away with something like that.
But how low have standards sunk that they wouldn't even bother to come up with a better bullshit explanation?
I've lived in Germany all my live, and in 32 years, I have heard Germany being accused of many things, I have myself been accused of many things because I'm German.
But, truly, I assure you, this is the first time, in ever, that anyone has accused us jerries of having sunny weather. Seriously, I've never heard a visiting foreigner or immigrant mention how nice the weather is. Not even people from Russia, compared to where this is almost the Riviera.
Xenophobia, anti-semitism, racism, misogyny, fascism, capitalism, socialism, near-communism, actual communism, secularism, religious dogmatism, all of these I've heard on many occasions.
But nice weather, no, never.
The article mentions statistics that we are about as dark here as Alaska. But if that means little to you: Statistically speaking, we have more rainy days than the Brits. The Brits!
And we don't get a few hours or even a day of rain and then nice weather again like they do, oh no. When it rains here, it rains. For days on end, from regular "rain" rain, to rain that is really just increased humidity but is doubly annoying since it's still getting you wet. But during such stretches, clear skies? No. And that's the summer!
I've heard a girl from Africa complain that, where she came from, the rain would fall like the fist of an angry god, with rivers overflowing and all of that, but once that stops, the sun comes out and the weather is nice again. Here? About the same amount of rain, but stretched out over days and weeks instead of a few hours, and always with the gray sky, not a ray of sunshine sometimes for weeks.
Similar sentiments I heard expressed by students from Brazil and Mexico. Once, I think, from a Russian.
You talk to Italians, Turks, Spanish, Portuguese or Greek people, people old enough to remember the days before cheap air travel. They'll tell you about miles and miles and miles of convoys of German cars streaming in each summer, effectively locking whole sections of the country in a three month long traffic jam, and the crazy jerries then doing nothing but sitting in the sun all day. That's the definition of a vacation over here, sitting in the sun all day, in a place where they actually have sun all day for a whole season or so. That was literally the first thing the first middle class jerries did with the first VW beetles they bought and the first vacay time they got after the war, go some place sunny. And then sit in the sun all day for a week or two. Before the wars, when we grabbed what is now Namibia, and Tsingtao and the Bismark archipelago, we did that because we wanted "our place in the sun". That was literally the official motto for our colonial expansion - because, while we had a lot, sun was not among those things. And still isn't! I mean it, when they divied up Africa at the Berlin conference, and when we marched into neutral Belgium, the official reason for all of that was "We want our place in the sun!".
I get that, to Americans, and to Fox News viewers in particular, Germany must be a weird, exotic place of strange and bewildering culture and customs, where the moon is taken down off of it's hook for a good cleaning every other week, cars drive on the left side of the Rhine and coffee goes into the machine liquid but comes out a powder. BUT SUNSHINE? That's just ridiculous.
This is, in fact, so ridiculous, it isn't even surreal anymore. It's downright absurd. Makes The Magic Christian look like a somber, fact-laden PBS documentary.
