Before I begin, I should probably put out there that a few of the ideas in this post come dangerously close to being political opinions. If you’re allergic to them, then I advise you to evacuate this blog as soon as you can. Alternatively, you can express any dissatisfaction you experience to ohgodforgivemeryan@gmail.com. My people are working on a vaccine against opinions and might be able to help.
Remember when I said that level A German doesn’t prepare a person to speak about politics? Well, week 1 of level B does. Chapter 28 of our book is entitled “die Geschichte,” which literally means “History” and roughly means “holy shit it’s about to get all UN up in here.” So this is probably the best chapter in all of Deutsch lernen.
First, I need to describe my new German teacher.
He’s old in the absolute best way possible. He arrives in his chair at exactly 9am, immediately closing the door behind him to maximize the awkwardness of late arrivals. When you do arrive late, he ignores your tardiness for about 3-4 minutes while he continues with the early exercises he planned for us. At the 3-4 minute mark, he suddenly stops the lesson and peers at you over his glasses, across the table, through your eyes and into the brain of your soul. Then, he says something like “one should always be punctual. When one arrives late, it disrupts the flow of the lesson, and your classmates cannot learn. I cannot say more–you are in Germany, the land of punctuality.” That’s what he actually said the first time someone was late. Well, he said it in German, so it’s very nearly what he actually said.
He is literally tied with one other person for “the greatest teacher I have ever had.” I enrolled in all three of the other guy’s classes in college.
Additionally, I wouldn’t call what he does “teaching.” Rather, he forces knowledge directly into your brain. Looking over the top of his glasses, he starts with a seemingly innocent question. Seemingly. In reality, he carefully crafted it using as many as possible of the parts of grammar we’ve learned so far.
“Ryan, ask Carolina what she discusses with her friends when she meets with them.”
Then I have to make a question out of that. “Carolina, what do you discuss with your friends when you meet with them?” That particular question is actually insane when all you know is A-level German.
And then “Fernando, what did Ryan just ask Carolina?”
Fernando then has to say “Ryan asked Carolina, ‘What do you discuss with your friends when you meet with them?'” And that sentence just destroyed Fernando’s brain, because it requires a very non-intuitive change to the “What do you discuss…” part.
And then “Stephano, say what Fernando just said in the past tense.”
And it proceeds until we’ve exhausted every tense and every construction of that original sentence we know.
His name’s Valentin, and he’s come to teach you some goddam Deutsch.
So here’s the part about Obamacare.
We’ve hit some heavy subjects in the “Geschichte” chapter. We’ve celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany about a billion times (Der Tag der Deutschen Einheit was yesterday, as a matter of fact). We’ve admired George senior for flying a plane against the Nazis in WWII, and we’ve even discussed the motivation behind Hitler’s “final solution” (“nobody really knows” is among the million or so theories we discussed for that last one).
Today’s discussion falls in the middle of the intellectual-weight continuum described above, closer to “Berlin Wall” than to “Final Solution.”
During a listening exercise, we were supposed to select from a long list of key phrases the ones discussed during a set of interviews. One phrase was “eigene Kultur” (“unique culture”). The interview that brought it up did so in order to say that Europe’s culture is amazing; it’s just kind of a shame that so much has been Americanized over the recent years.
Afterward, Valentin took a break to open up a discussion. He said that the statement in the interview, while just for educational purposes, did have some interesting relevance to it. He said that American movies and music, especially, seem to be preferred in public settings over their European counterparts. Since entertainment is a vehicle for culture, it makes sense that a trend like that would inject American culture into Europe. He said that some countries are even taking steps to ward it off. France, for example, requires that 50% of music played on the radio is of European (possibly even just French?) origin. I don’t know if that’s law or just social, or if it’s even all of France–he didn’t go into too much detail about it.
Next, he expressed a little disappointment that entertainment might inspire Europeans to emulate Americans, when that would be a fallacy in judgment. Europe is not America, after all. He then put an idea in our heads for us to consider–perhaps Europe shouldn’t look to America as a role model in light of the congressional impasse that disabled government spending on Tuesday. “Does anyone know about that?” he asked. “Ryan?”
“Yeah, the government isn’t working since Tuesday.” (Ja. Die Regierung funktioniert seit Dienstag nicht.).
“Yes! That’s it. And the center of it all is Obamacare, yes? Democrats want to fund it and Republicans do not.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” (Genau).
His eyes began ascending the lenses of his glasses. Soon, they were out in the open and pointed directly at the innards of my soul. “And what do you think about Obamacare? Is it necessary? Good or bad?” He was smiling. I should really mention that, because he’s incredibly good-natured for all his sternness.
All 22 other faces in the class pointed themselves at mine.
!Political opinion requested! Here, discussions of politics and religion are mostly no big deal at all–every teacher I’ve had has brought them up, and they come up at dinner quite often as well. The American in me had a pulse of about a million beats per minute, though. Ok, Ryan, here goes. Just say something. Opinions don’t always start screaming matches and fist fights, here.
“Well, that’s a really difficult question,” I said. I wasn’t even being a non-committal wimp about that–I was dead serious. “For me, what’s important isn’t whether or not the government should provide healthcare to its citizens. What’s important to me is what the opportunity cost of Obamacare is. If the government funds healthcare (and maybe the medical industry infrastructure to support more patients?), then what can’t it do as a result? Knowing that is how I would decide whether or not it’s ‘good.'”
“Ah, yes, I understand what you mean” replied Valentin. “But the government should be able to provide for its citizens, no?” “What do the other students think?” (Worth noting is that Valentin is native to a country that found a way to enact a 40%+ income tax without a single government building burning down).
The next 2 or so minutes were a calamity of agreeable mumbling, head shaking, and short bursts of contrary opinion. Most of our Japanese-Italian-Bulgarian-Spanish-Argentinian-American-Ukrainian class straight-up said “healthcare should absolutely be public,” while a few were in the pragmatic camp.
If you have a bunch of American Facebook friends and you read your feed the week of September 30, 2013, then you know exactly what the room sounded like.