Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), German CDU heiress apparent to Angela Merkel, made a joke last Thursday that caused the usual suspects to clutch their pearls and call for the smelling salts. While the joke was lame, about “third gender bathrooms,” there was one good line. She refers to Berlin’s hipster community as the “latte macchiato faction.” She told the joke at a pre-Lent carnival event in Baden-Wurttemberg.
The very fact that the piously Catholic AKK (like AOC, the acronym is more succinct than the longer alternative) made the joke in the face of the expected response says something good about her. And hell, I know, after having lived in Baden-Wurttemberg for most of the 80s, that a German attempting a joke at all is a wondrous thing. Traditionally, the only jokes they had anything to do with were the French and Polish armies.
Even inside the nominally conservative CDU, though the party is quite conservative (given some of the German political alternatives) you have the PC crowd. One of them, the party’s LGBTQ (add more initials as appropriate. I think they’re up to about 159 more of them by now) shill called for an apology. The Left pounced with their standard humorless statements of victimization. A Green party pol called it “a cheap gag.” Well, he got that right in the comic sense. However, in a sense of anti-PC cultural rebellion it was excellent.
How does this impact U.S. national security? PC erodes national spirit and fiber, making victim status into a prize to be sought after. It degrades and weakens all it touches. As Germany, even the peeved with Trump-Merkel government, is a vital ally in Europe, we want them strong. Though…er…um…cough…not too strong.
Merkel’s likely successor AKK didn’t exactly rage against the PC machine. But she did send a signal that she won’t bow down to it either.
Not bad mein freund. Not bad at all.
