Mandela’s release, the fall of the wall, the LA riots, the birth of my kid, the introduction of the euro,
the election of obama…i always seem to be in berlin when big things happen. and that makes sense
for berlin is the history channel…sure, a part of me wanted to be on flatbush ave celebrating…but it was just fine experiencing this huge explosion of endlessly reverberating change in the wee small quiet hours of the berlin morning on my little history channel street (Dietrich was born a few houses down)…Barack, to be frank, is not the guy i will remember most from this night – even though I’ll be seeing the footage of his speech no doubt for the rest of my life – no, the most memorable cats from that morning will be the pundits on the panels, the newsfolk who we so rarely see looking anything remotely like actual human beings suddenly becoming human beings before our eyes (this happened during katrina quite often, by the way. Barack being, of course, a positive Katrina.) Ok, not all of them became human — john bolton, a panel member, even on such an occasion as this, absolutely did not resemble a human being. No, he was the same frightening robot he’s always been – not unlike one of my daughter’s teacher’s the next day who refused to acknowledge the significance of what has just transpired the night before but went head on with his lesson plan. Anyway, my point was seeing newsbots actually smiling and agreeing and damn near high-fiving each other was rather special. There was a hilarious moment on BBC when Ted Koppell, another on the panel, in a clear attempt to grab attention by being contrary to the party vibe, delivered a laundry list of all the big problems Obama was going to have to deal with in this mono-tonal voice of doom and the BBC announcer just said something like “Look, dude, chill. History has been made tonight. Enjoy it.”
/s
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