The lunch-break is saved: A pretentious drugstore opens on Wall Street, where they know what brokers need and love – sushi, money and stock-quotes.

Opening day there featured the autograph-signing presence of no less than Darryl Strawberry (trust me: a gigantic NYC baseball celebrity), but it’s the unique amenities that are sure to keep the Financial District worker-bees devoting their lunch-hours here.

In fact, the traders and bankers can find in this Wall Street drugstore almost everything they need in their lives. He who has spent the morning pulling his hair out over falling prices can get it repaired at noon under chandeliers at the hairdresser’s there. Or he can sit on a wooden throne to get his leather shoes shined. There’s an internal manicure-salon, a skin-analysis center and an apothecary’s.

That’s not to mention the sushi bar, with NYSE stock-quotes displayed on an electronic ticker-screen behind it, nor the vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and even golden escalators (yes: güldene Rolltreppen) that mark the place’s layout.

Appropriately enough, this latest affiliate of the Duane Reade drugstore chain is housed in the Trump building and occupies the space formerly taken up by a branch of the Bank of Manhattan. The firm’s management is explicitly experimenting with this new wrinkle of a retail concept as a way to try to make up for the losses it suffered from its prior “Superstore” – not that that was a mistaken business approach, that store just happened to be located in one of the World Trade Center buildings in September, 2011.

                          

And rightly so, for now he is dead, and way too young . . . what’s that? No, I was never talking about Charlie Sheen, this is about the celebrity that was Knut the Polar Bear, whose adventures at the Berlin Zoo this weblog has occasionally covered over the years. Maybe to make myself clear I should have brought up Knut’s being featured on his own postage-stamp, or even the public calls in the past for his castration, but frankly, all of that and more seems well within the capability of the out-of-control 2 1/2 Men once-and-future star.

No, this is about Knut, and I guess I can take a sort of bittersweet pride in having realized, from the very beginning of my coverage, that “it is perhaps the life of a child movie star that provides an even more-exact template to what has been happening with Knut.” You’ll surely know by now that last Saturday, as he was lounging on an island in his Berlin Zoo enclosure (which he shared with the aforementioned three female polar bears – who somehow seemed to want little to do with him) the lumbering grayish bear suddenly stood up, spun around a couple of times, fell into the water and was gone. Well, at least you probably heard that he died; those additional details I got from having the fortune to hear an interview on the BBC World Service with the Berlin Zoo Bear Dept. Head Heiner Klös. The interviewer put Klös on the spot (as BBC interviewers are increasingly wont to do with their subjects in recent years), accusing him of feeding Knut too many of the infamous croissants he was mad about. Yes, OK, there were croissants, Klös stammered in his reply, but mostly the keepers made sure he received the sort of wholesome meat-and-vegetables diet a still-growing young polar bear requires.

Anyway, while Knut was never in what you could call polar bear athletic shape, it’s unlikely it was anything in his diet that caused his death at age 4 – untimely, as polar bears in captivity are routinely known to live forty years or more. Just what it was remains something of a mystery; it was not a tumor, for example, as Christina Hucklenbroich of the FAZ let us know in an article of yesterday, although it did seem to involve some disease in his brain. Nothing in the environment provided to him at the Berlin Zoo was at fault, either – despite calls from no less than the Financial Times Deutschland for polar-bear enclosures across Europe to be subject to “stress tests.” (For real – although I suspect the piece is written tongue-in-cheek.) Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of in-breeding – Knut’s mother was a full-blooded wild polar bear out of Canada, Zoo Director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz assured the assembled press hordes.

Of course, it was that very same mother-bear who started Knut off on his celebrity adventure in the first place by rejecting him and thus making it necessary that he be raised in a rather more public fashion by the zookeepers. And although that life is now at an end, the legend (and, possibly, the need for further coverage here – whatever the traffic will bear, you might say) will surely live on. They want to raise a statue to him; his fur is already in the hands of expert taxidermists at a museum; and, inevitably, you know there is going to be a movie. For – relative to his species, at least – Knut lived fast and he died young: may I suggest “Polar Without A Cause”?

                          

Typically, though, most news outlets fail to carry the story through to its deeper layer of meaning, in this case the fact that such a slowing of economic growth is actually a good thing and precisely what the Chinese authorities hope to achieve. For a more profound level of sophistication such as that one has to resort to publications such as the New York Times to read how, in fact, Beijing is concerned about runaway inflation and maybe even a property-price crash, so that if anything they were disappointed not in the slackening of third-quarter growth but rather the smallish magnitude of that slackening, and in fact recently went so far as to raise interest rates to gain more of precisely that result. (For the ultimate in detailed analysis of this predicament, from a Chinese professor at Peking [sic] University no less, the blog Naked Capitalism graciously provides us with this.)

Then there is an even deeper treatment of the phenomenon, brought to us today in the FT Deutschland: The Chinese cannot grab hold of their happiness. Sure, for decades now the Chinese economy has consistently shown explosive growth, is this piece’s message (written – note well! – by a journalist named Luo Xu), but it seems clear that this has failed to make the Chinese any happier.

Since he writes for the FTD, Luo is naturally far too intelligent to base such a contention merely upon any set of anecdotal impressions – from a population in excess of 1.3 billion! – that he and his acquaintances may foster. No, he has academic reports to cite:

• The Erasmus University study, using a “People’s Happiness Index” on a 1 (most unhappy) to 10 (most happy) scale, that returns 6.64 in 1990, 7.08 in 1995, but then 6.60 in 2001. (Nothing more recent mentioned);
  
• The University of Michigan study of 2009, which doesn’t provide numbers but merely concludes that yes, the Chinese are on the whole unhappier now (i.e. 2009) than they were ten years before;
  
• The study published just last August at the Conference for Positive Psychology that took place in China, according to which 90% of respondents to a survey described themselves as lonely, 46.9% were dissatisfied with their lives and 19.1% were very dissatisfied.

It seems, then, that the Chinese have finally bumped up against the folk-wisdom that money does not (always) make you happy. But why exactly is that? And what, if anything, can be done about it? Remember, though, that this is but an article in a business newspaper and not the detailed psychological study – or, better, Nobel Prize-winning novel – that would be a more-appropriate means for addressing this dilemma. Mr. Luo is game to do the best he can to explain, though, and that turns out to be the following summary of seven factors behind this mysterious society-wide gloom, as compiled from the studies already-cited and others:

• Competition: The old, familiar comparative motive: you might be sitting happy, but that can swiftly change once your neighbor buys a fancy car which you don’t have.
  
• Lack of ideals: That is, when people discover that money is not enough to give life a true purpose.
  
• Negative thinking: Looking on the cloudy side, not the sunny side, of life.
  
• Fading altruism: Apparently, helping other people is one key to happiness, but modern Chinese society is steadily forgetting this.
  
• Dissatisfaction: With what one already has, that is. Luo cites a Chinese proverb – “The satisfied man is usually happy” – and observes that there are ever-fewer truly satisfied Chinese left, because of what they see is available if they just had more money, because of what they see their neighbors have, etc.
  
• Distrust: People are increasingly estranged from each other.
  
• Worry: Also known as stress, resulting from a host of new concerns originating from work, children, old-age provision, and the like.
  

                          

Naturally, now that previously-shut airports throughout the continent are gradually starting to resume operations, the sentiment of “Never again!” is taking hold as eyes are cast about in the search of people to blame. In such situations, the temptation becomes overwhelming to avoid having to point fingers by simply blaming a machine, in this case the computer simulation that supposedly was the sole basis for shutting down flight operations once the volcano-ash started to spread. Various aircraft that the European airlines sent up to test actual conditions – including one reportedly dispatched by British Airways with CEO Willie Walsh, a trained pilot himself, aboard – encountered no problems or damage, so that has to constitute conclusive evidence that the flight-bans were panicked overreactions.

Unfortunately, the situation is probably not so simple as that. The assessment of the safety of flights of gigantic airliners with hundreds of passengers aboard one can assume has to be done on the basis of rather broader margins-for-error. I think it’s the editorial-writers at Financial Times Deutschland who have a better view of what went wrong, as expressed in their recent editorial Air traffic: Chaos announced. That title alludes to the FTD’s assertion that, because volcanic ash respects no borders, the various national authorities should have realized long ago that much closer international coordination was necessary in order to deal adequately with whatever sort of phenomena that could come along to threaten it.

Whether it is really reasonable to expect such coordination to have been in place before the Eyjafjallajökull volcano blew its top a week ago, it is clear that the sort of coordination needed was certainly not in place to deal with that. National authorities closed their country’s airspace or limited the operation of their airports in a piecemeal fashion, without consulting their colleagues in other countries. EU transport ministers only got around to conferring – by video-conference, naturally – at the beginning of this week. And it’s not even the EU that is in the best position to take the lead in these matters: you would think that would rather be Eurocontrol (long name: the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation), headquartered in Brussels, and despite that with no explicit organizational connection with the EU, but, with 38 member-states, encompassing most European nations whether they are members of the EU or not.

That’s fine; but clearly neither Eurocontrol nor the EU was up to fulfilling the coordination function that was required to ensure that assessments of the best experts in vulcanology and flight-safety were made widely available and acted upon in a harmonized manner, to ensure that the skies were shut down when the risk of flying was really too great, but that they were also opened up again once the danger had passed. Now we get to see whether these transport ministers have learned any lesson from this experience; after all, Europe has plenty of volcanos on its periphery – not only in Iceland but also in Italy, for example – that could cause all of this mess to happen again.

                          

And so since late last October we have had Guido Westerwelle, leader of the Free Democrats (FDP), as German Foreign Minister. Just four months – and he already is not having an easy time of it. Indeed, I’ve already had the occasion twice to write about him in this space, once just in passing as I explored the larger question of the new and awkward relation of top German officials with the English language, but also in a more focused way here where, during the time when the current ruling coalition was being formed after the last national election, I discussed an article in Die Welt that examined Westerwelle’s past and psychological formation to question whether he really had the right temperament to serve as his country’s top diplomat.

In that light, the latest Westerwelle flap is rather interesting: In the future Westerwelle wants to travel in peace. (The report is carried all over the German on-line press in the form of one ūber-article, compiled from new agencies’ reports, that I found in five different publications. That surprised and dismayed me: this one-press-report-for-all approach I normally only see in the Dutch and Danish newspapers! The link I provide back there happens to go to Die Zeit, as a mark of respect.) Why can’t Guido travel in peace now, as Foreign Minister? Because people don’t like his choice of traveling companions, and have publicly made that known, even as he was recently overseas for a whole week trying to represent his country in South America in meetings with heads-of-state and various other high officials. In fact, they don’t like them for at least two reasons:

1. They don’t like the businessmen that were in Westerwelle’s entourage. Apparently, there are too many suspicious connections between the particular businessmen he invited to travel along with him and either companies that are known to be too friendly to FDP interests in general, or else with Westerwelle’s relatives, specifically his brother. (German has an interesting word for this sort of schmoozing with your self-chosen in-crowd, Mauschelei, although I found that elsewhere than in this article.)
   
2. They don’t like that Westerwelle’s “life companion” (Lebensgefährte, i.e. his homosexual “significant other”) was also along on the trip. But no, it’s not what you may think: no one has any problem with the Foreign Minister traveling to visit foreign lands and cultures with his homosexual partner. (Even though they’re not even married! – but of course Germany does not have – yet – same-sex marriage.) Rather, the critics also suspect that that partner, Michael Mronz, also to be using the trip to advance his own interests, not those of Germany.

Thinking about this dispute, it’s easy to come down in Westerwelle’s side. Why can’t the man assume that he need not worry about figurative daggers such as these being stuck in his back by domestic critics when he is overseas trying to advance Germany’s political and commercial interests. Indeed, when it comes to his life-companion, it seems that not only did he strictly observe the prohibition about taking part in any political discussion, but Michael Mronz also paid for the travel and lodgings out of his own pocket. (The latter you also won’t find in the article: I heard it this morning on a Deutschlandfunk newscast.)

Pro-Guido/Anti-Guido

Then again, you could also conclude that such criticism is part of the deal of being a high-ranking, high-profile, political figure, that Westerwelle should learn either just to take it and/or to take pre-emptive steps to head it off – indeed, that once more Guido Westerwell is being rather more huffy (“That simply will not do”) than you would hope a German Foreign Minister would be. It was after all this “huffyness” that my first blogpost about him from last September (Guido Westerwelle: Small-Minded?) was all about.

But don’t take my word for it that impartial, judicious observers can reasonably come down on either the “Pro-Guido” or “Anti-Guido” side. Among its many other excellent services, the Financial Times Deutschland occasionally likes to compile press-review articles that survey opinion from various of Germany’s small newspapers about leading issues of the day. Here is its recent piece: Voices from the press: “What do we do with Westerwelle?”

• From the Landeszeitung in Lüneburg (just south of Hamburg, and a particularly important city these days, since it’s where a high-profile FDP conference just took place): the local FDP head Phlipp Rösler is “the better Westerwelle” since he doesn’t “polarize” people.
  
• From the Sächsische Zeitung in Dresden: There was never anything to the critics’ charges against Westerwelle, it was shameful how they aggressively attacked him while he was traveling for his country. (But remember that in Dresden they are only 20 years removed from the DDR, they probably are more inclined to respect existing authority there.)
  
• From the Badische Neueste Nachrichten in Baden: Westerwelle has crossed the line between what he is allowed to do because he is Foreign Minister and what he should prudently limit himself to doing as a matter of good official behavior.
  

                          

Except that it simply isn’t possible, from a mathematic point-of-view, for everyone to weaken their currencies at the same time. Someone’s money – preferably some country with a huge presence in international trade – has to go up in value, relatively. And this gets back to recent Chinese economic performance: China seems to be doing rather well, but it is also suffering from a notable bout of price-inflation. Furthermore, the Middle Kingdom’s currency, the Renminbi, is clearly undervalued – infamously so, even, due to the Chinese government’s explicit policy to protect it with various currency restrictions to be sure to keep it that way. So wouldn’t we find some nice economic solution for everyone by heeding the calls that have been issuing from US officials for some time now and convincing the Chinese government to cut that stuff out and allow the Renminbi to appreciate in value?

Not according to Tobias Bayer, in his opinion piece for the Financial Times Deutschland (Exchange rate policy: Dangerous game with the Renminbi). As his main piece of evidence, Bayer points out how similar the current situation seems to be to back in the early 1990s, when Japan occupied the position that China has today: trade surpluses that got everyone sore, an under-valued currency, internal inflation. So, in his telling, the US managed to get Japan to embrace the policy prescription of letting the yen appreciate – to disastrous effect. Not only did the big Japanese trade surpluses not abate – actually, they only got larger in succeding years – but the downward pressure on prices that the stronger yen produced actually resulted in a damaging deflationary spiral for that country’s already-weak domestic economy.

By this logic, then, current pressures on China to allow a similar development for the Renminbi are misguided, Bayer claims. For one thing, the Renminbi today is far from a direct analog to the yen of the early 1990s: again, it is a heavily-controlled currency which therefore is hardly used as a unit-of-account (Abrechnungswährung) or reserve currency anywhere outside of China itself, so we’ve got to be careful about any attempts to change it, they may blow up in our face. Furthermore, any releasing of the value of the Renminbi upwards could set off a speculative wave based on the assumption that its value will go further upwards still, thus flooding the country with “hot money” and increasing its economic instability and inflation problem.

No, better to take a more cautious and cooperative approach to this currency problem, in particular one involving China’s biggest trading-partner, the US. First of all, Bayer claims, “[p]rotectionism helps no one” (officials at America’s AFL-CIO, among others, may disagree), so it’s time to cut back on that, from both the American and Chinese sides. Further, the reason there’s so little import demand from the Chinese is that they leave little from their paychecks for purchasing things, since they have to rely on themselves to cover for old age and misfortunes like medical emergencies. China needs to further develop its systems of national social welfare to change that situation, and so coax out greater consumer demand, for goods and services both foreign and domestic. Finally, US experts need to come over to make Chinese financial markets more sophisticated; it’s the absence of certain markets important elsewhere (e.g. for bonds) and the inability of Chinese businessmen to hedge certain financial risks that makes their reliance on a continued undervalued currency so brittle.

Much of this sounds to my ear – especially the prescription of bringing more social insurance to China – as economic policy prescriptions from out of a classical Western European perspective, which I suppose does not invalidate it per se. Then again, I also have to think that a lowering of prices brought about by an upward revaluation of the Renminbi would hardly be as damaging to China as it allegedly was to Japan in the early 90s – the Chinese economy is surely much more robust presently than the Japanese economy was then.

UPDATE: For his part, Paul Krugman is of quite the opposite opinion to Bayer.

                          

Prompted by these concerns – and, to be honest, also by my essential indifference to the pure sport element of the events now happening in and around Vancouver anyway – I’d like to highlight for your consideration this interesting piece covering one mass outdoor sporting activity in which the FTD does boast extensive experience: scrimmages between demonstrators and riot police. A further consideration prompting me to do this is the concern that coverage of such ugly scenes on the Games’ periphery will be downplayed or even omitted entirely by the media (especially TV) that my readers might rely on for their “mainstream” news coverage.

So yes, from this FTD report it does seem that we’ve reached the remarkable point where the Olympic Games have now attained the same sort of infamy in the eyes of the world’s disaffected as other events like meetings of the G8 or G20, which prompts these inveterate protestors to make the pilgrimage to rail against the Capitalist System and the like at the spot to which the world’s news cameras are all temporarily aimed. Let me give you the lede here, a minor masterpiece of succinct summary (although not particularly alliterative in and of itself):

Eye-witnesses speak of “rather drastic scenes”: Right on the first day of competition it came to violent demonstrations in the Olympic-city. Glass store-fronts were shattered, autos and buses demolished and spray-painted. The police intervened in combat-gear.

And make no mistake, this was happening right downtown in Vancouver, with the mob of masked, black-clothed rioters numbering up to 200.

Who are these people specifically? They are youngsters for the most part, calling themselves the “Olympics Resistance Network.” They parade as their immediate complaint the high cost to Canadian taxpayers of staging these games – and they may very well have a legitimate grievance there – but out on the streets their rhetoric soon takes up the usual anti-capitalist tone. The Vancouver police chief is quoted as estimating that at least half of them are the usual-suspect anarchist groups (“traveling criminals”) that turn up regularly to riot at any event commanding world-attention, at least within the Western Hemisphere.

Ski Abu Dhabi!

Want another article about the Olympics that studiously avoids anything actually having to do with winter sports? How about one on the weather? As Michael Eder points out writing in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Where to, Winter?) weather questions have unfortunately been anything but routine. While the American Northeast is still digging out from record (and repeated) snowfalls and Northern Europe also can’t seem to get rid of the stuff, Eder points out that at Vancouver it’s been nothing but rain – for weeks now, virtually uninterrupted!

But that’s OK: the ice-related events take place inside vast, dedicated halls anyway, so it’s just neighboring Cypress and Whistler Mountains where snow is needed for the downhill events – snow, that is, or else some reasonable facsimile thereof. What they get is the latter, of course: white, icy stuff hurled on the slopes where it is needed by massive “snow cannons,” which is then preserved from unseemly premature melting by the application of dry-ice.

This may make winter sport purists unhappy, but the Olympic show must go on no matter what hand the weather-gods are willing to deal out to the host city when the time comes. What about Sochi, Russia, the resort-city on the Black Sea where the next Winter Olympics are scheduled to be held in 2014? Is there snow there now? Eder poses the question, but does not even bother to go find out the answer, because his point is that that answer is irrelevant in the face of modern snow cannon/dry-ice technology. So why even continue to restrict Winter Olympics candidates of the future to those cities in indisputable cold-weather zones? Technology clearly matters now more than mere weather; why not England, why not the Netherlands? Indeed, why not Abu Dhabi, where the oil-sheikhs have in fact already built indoor skiing and skating facilities and would surely be delighted to build more, this time to Olympic standard, should they be chosen to host the Games. Mountains, you say? Yes, there are mountains available in that area, namely along the United Arab Emirates’ border with Oman. And, as we have seen, snow for selected slopes on those mountains can now be made-to-order as well.

                          

The dominant EU country within the governing structures of the EU and the European Central Bank is of course Germany, which is also the main economy in an opposite fiscal situation to that of the PIIGS states and so theoretically able financially to provide much of the aid that Greece needs. That is why it has been interesting to read coverage of this problem in Die Welt, the mainstream German paper not quite as authoritative as Die Zeit (and the latter is more of a pure opinion-publication anyway), but still with a respected reputation as a daily that is distributed nationwide.

Given that, it surely must be of particular note to see a commentary piece there, by Jörg Eigendorf, explicitly calling for Greece simply to leave the Eurozone. He dismisses the Growth and Stability Pact which was supposed to undergird the euro (by requiring budget deficits of no more than 3% of GDP, total government debt of no more than 60%) as a “paper tiger,” which it indeed showed itself to be as early as eight years or so ago, when both Germany and France violated that 3% limit an encountered no punishment at all. Anyway, given that the Greek budget deficit now is to the north of 10% of GDP, getting that down to anything close to 3% in any short time-frame is clearly unrealistic without revolution in Greek streets. So it’s time for the Greek government to reintroduce the drachma, i.e. to leave the euro, in order to achieve the currency devaluation that the country needs to get its economy back on track. The only alternative, Eigendorf writes, is “to make the entire Eurozone step-by-step a weak currency area, that imposes the burden of the irresponsible policies of individual states on all its taxpayers.”

That’s clearly an argument for simply letting Greece suffer. And Eigendorf’s judgment is echoed in the reporting in another Die Welt article, by Christoph B. Schiltz: Finland demands harder punishments for euro-sinners. The Finnish finance minister, Jyrki Katainen, also takes a hard line: “It would make sense to reform the Stability Pact so that countries are severely punished when they report their debt-status falsely, for example by high fines which would have a deterrent effect.” Katainen also rules out any intervention by the International Monetary Fund, adding “The Greeks now have no other choice: they must help themselves by paying off debts and financing state expenditures. I exclude categorically any help for Greece from the other countries of the Eurozone.”

And yet . . . another article has popped up on the Die Welt site that Germany, at least, is prepared to take measures to assist Greece financially after all. This one is actually a derivative piece, pointing to a recent article (with an “Exclusive” tag) to be found in the Financial Times Deutschland (Help for EU-Land: Berlin wants to save Greece). Calling the development a “spectacular turn-about,” a trio of FTD journalists (from the paper’s Berlin and Brussels offices) report from sources within the German government how “both bilateral help [i.e. direct German-to Greek] as well as an internationally-agreed procedure at the EU level are under discussion.” Further details are to be worked out on Wednesday, meaning within the German government, but it’s interesting that language in this article compares (and thereby justifies) helping the Greek government out with the bail-out the German government felt it had to do last year with the struggling Munich bank Hypo Real Estate. Then, on Thursday, the Germans will present their proposals at the EU summit, and we go on from there. This article reports that the price of the euro has already rebounded sharply on the news.

                          

But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.)

Alright. But we still have that Munich Conference; maybe the world leaders and experts there can take note of this dangerous new situation and start thinking about how to deal with it. Instead, the Conference seems to be the target of some sort of Iranian charm offensive, according to an account in the Financial Times Deutschland (Security conference: Iran causes turmoil in Munich). You see, we first had at the beginning of this week the surprise mention by Iranian President Ahmadi-nejad in an interview that it should be OK to actually take the West up on its standing offer to take Iranian uranium and process it on the Iranians’ behalf, but only to purity-levels consistent with power-generation and not weaponry, before returning it. Now the Munich Conference has received the pleasant surprise of an announced intention to attend it from Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. (Apparently it has been difficult for quite a while to get any Iranian foreign minister to show up, or in fact even to decline the invitation without adding some gratuitous comment casting doubt on the Holocaust.)

This is important. Mere declarations from Ahmadi-nejad in some interview have long since lost their ability to inspire confidence in other world capitals, but now the officials attending the Munich conference (including many foreign ministers and even some heads of state, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel) will have a chance to collar Mottaki (in a nice, diplomatic way, of course) to see whether Iran really means what its President just said. Mottaki has already declared that it does – sort of, in that he does intend to negotiate for higher levels of enrichment for that Iranian uranium than what was envisioned in the original Western offer. In any case, all this conveniently can occur just as the UN Security Council is preparing a new resolution imposing tougher economic sanctions on Iran, and also as public statements from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicate that Russia is even ready to change its previous position and support the resolution. (Lavrov made these en route to Munich; also attending will be Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, although there’s no indication from him or any other Chinese official that they are likewise willing to reverse their previous position and accept such sanctions, and that’s a problem.)

In the meantime, away from Munich, the US Department of State announced today a conference-call, initiated by Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, the Department’s #3 official, between officials at analogous level to Secretary Burns at the other countries of the “Group of Six” presenting a common front against Iran (namely the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China). This is reported in France’s Nouvel Observateur (The Group of Six discussed a nuclear Iran). Naturally, this event was likely prompted, not by the Munich conference, but at least by the sanctions resolution coming near completion in the Security Council, and probably also by a combination of Ahmadi-nejad’s pronouncement and the far more ominous news, uncovered by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of Iran’s nuclear weapons progress. Again, the key country to bring around is China, which could simply veto the Security Council resolution, and the Nouvel Observateur reports that, this time, the Chinese at least did make available for this conference-call the counterpart in their Foreign Ministry to Secretary Burns. The last time there was a “Group of Six” meeting – last month in New York – they had only a lower-ranking official attend. (Those readers really on-the-ball will recall that this “send a lower-ranking guy to show disrespect” tactic was also one they used at various occasions during the COP15 climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December.) Such is progress.

                          

The hat-tip for the one noticing this first must go to Jillian Rayfield, affiliated with Talking Points Memo, and then just yesterday David Kurtz from the same site posted a slide-show on the subject. But I soon found my way to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the German- and English-language website belonging to the musical itself. Check it out: there’s some good information there, even if the English version is written by someone not in complete control of that language and with a fondness for the phrase inter alia (actually a Latin expression, for all you non-lawyers out there, meaning “among others”). The songs that make up the show will surely become hits, it says there, for “[e]xperts of the German music scene” are sure they have that “Earth Wind and Fire [sic] quality”! Even more intriguingly, we learn that “Hope” is the first “interactive musical,” during which most of the audience will sit on cubes (called “percussion chairs”) that double as instruments and so will be encouraged to drum (and even get up off those chairs to dance) along with the performers! Wow!

Right, so how have the reviews been so far? Of the two I can find, the one from the home-town paper the Frankfurter Rundschau (Border of Gaiety) cannot truly be regarded as independent, since the musical’s producers announce right on their site’s “News” page that the FR is a “mediapartner.” Yes, Barack Obama’s story (and a parallel plot-line about the troubles of a South Chicago community) does turn out to be a suitable subject for a musical, opines reviewer Judith von Sternburg, even though back in the real world, after a whole year in office, ugly Reality has already caught up with the President. Von Sternburg is independent-minded enough to label Hillary Clinton’s portrayal (performed by American actress and “Evita” veteran Tracy Plester, who needs only a quick wardrobe-and-wig-change to render Sarah Palin as well) as “a caricature.” Van Sternburg also manages to pick up on, and mention in her piece, the line spoken by the actor representing a son fighting in Iraq, who comes back home just as Obama is elected and declares that surely the war will soon be over now – something the stage-side English-to-German translator at the premier performance skips.

The other review is from the Financial Times Deutschland (Out of Office: Obama Mia!), by Willy Theobald, who it emerges did not attend the actual premier but rather a previous dress-rehearsal. At least that enabled him also to grab an interview with the show’s producer and director, Roberto Emmanuele, who declares to him “Musicals I generally find boring” – as indeed does Herr Theobald – but “I want to make a musical that is fresher [knackiger] and more innovative than all the others.” He goes on: “Our music has quite a lot of hit-potential,” and Theobald does admit that he finds many of the songs “rather infectious” (richtig mitreißend). In the end, the FTD reviewer gives those behind “Hope” a lot of credit, although he can’t resist wondering whether the work will soon need to add another act at the end – one about Yemen.

The verdicts so far out of Germany, then – as few as they are – seem largely positive. Is it perhaps time to go on-line to order your tickets as well as a round-trip flight to Frankfurt-am-Main? Here’s a final YouTube tidbit to help you make your decision: