Tales from an upside-down land: the new Germany

Hoping to catch the first train of the morning, I made my way towards the nearest U-Bahn. The Berlin night air was cold and I was looking forward to my journey home in a warm subway car. Still, my head was heavy and my mind ached. Not only was it late, but over the course of the last few months, the things I had seen had become overwhelming.

On this particular night, I had caught sight of several young German girls trying out new rap dance moves in a McDonald's parking lot, jumping around in a multicultural crowd and vying for the attention of some gold chain-wearing, thugged-out non-native. This was precisely the kind of thing I had come to Germany to escape.

I detected the sound of an approaching subway train, telling me that I had reached my destination. But as I trudged down the empty concrete stairs into the U-Bahn station below, my tired eyes remained fixed downward. I was thinking about the current state of Germany and indeed my own future. I began to wonder if I would ever find the things I was searching for. Well, if I was searching for a young foreigner with a can of spray paint in his hand, standing inside the arriving train and vandalizing the interior of the subway car, I would have been in luck.

Yes, there he was tagging his "gangsta" shit on the wall when suddenly he realized that the train had come to a stop in the bright lights of the station. For a split second, he froze, but he soon collected himself, stepped off the train and started walking away as if nothing was wrong in the world. But there were plenty of things that were wrong, one of them being the state of affairs in the country I was in. I glared at the young immigrant until he disappeared in the distance. Surely, he was poised to continue being a degenerate vandal some other time.

Let's take a guess where he learned that graffiti was cool - maybe in the latest rap video on MTV Europe? Perhaps that is even the stimulus:



and this is merely the response:



But who knows.

What we do know is that every city across the West consists of nearly the same thing, and each is gradually starting to resemble the other:
  • hip-hop culture (poster above, to the left) ✔
  • anarchist-leftist politics (poster above, to the right) ✔
  • graffiti (everywhere) ✔
  • crime ✔
  • people rejecting the native population's native culture ✔