Lazy Summer Days

True, summer days are not that lazy in Germany, what with having to dash for cover when the rain starts pouring and all. But still, when the sun does shine, the picture-perfect puffy clouds are perfect hypnotizers to let your mind wander.

And when that happens, you suddenly begin to notice parallels and contradictions. Let’s start with the latter.

At the latest Munich Economic Summit, which had to do with innovation and European competitiveness, much was said about how intolerable it is that Google should have such a dominant position in Europe. It must be cut down to size. A handful of Googlets would be easier to manage. Or manhandle. And, of course, we MUST HAVE our own Google. A Euroogle.

You can only grin just thinking about what that would look like. First, the personnel, and the offices and labs and, of course, the profits, would naturally have to be proportionally allocated among the participating member countries. A plant in France? Well, put an equally grand one here in Germany, if you please. The boss? Well, let’s do it the time-honoured European way and let’s have two of them, one of yours and one of ours. The headquarters? In France, certainly. No? How about two headquarters, then? And so on. Airbus for geeks.

Forget for a while the fact that IT monopolies can die a quick death or see their power ebb (think MySpace or Microsoft), or that Google is actually a tool, that we all profit from its many free goodies such as Google maps or Google translate or Googlemail, not to mention its uncanny ability to deliver exactly what we in most primitive spelling asked it to find, and that we should just continue using it and hope that it gets even better, like a good Swiss knife. The hilarious thing is that the complaint about Google’s dominant position came in the same breath as a very proud declamation of how so many of Germany’s Mittlestand companies dominate up to 90% of many niches at a global scale. That’s what makes us great.

Really.

Meanwhile, a quickly swelling group of people coordinate themselves through Facebook to pitch stormproof Chinese tents in a field at the foot of the Alps, post selfies to the world wide web with their iPhones and other smartthings, fire up their indignation while they set up their own #hashtag to tell of their exploits through Twitter, grinning in between to the inevitable CNN crew giving them a global audience. And all this, to protest against... globalisation.

Go figure.

But parallels come to mind as well. The electronic gizmos of a car with which I have had a close relationship for several years suddenly blanked out, to the dread of my wallet. The repair-shop supremo just shook his head mournfully: this is gonna cost a bundle, sir. Since my wallet could not provide ELA credit, the problem was treated in the most sensible way: assume it is not there. Just keep driving. And then, out of the blue heavens and after many blanked-out days, it returned to normal. The problem disappeared completely, and I didn’t have to do anything at all.

Tsipras dream solution.

My three-year old daughter, in turn, caught gleefully digging her fingers into a freshly-baked cake, is reprimanded and told to mind her manners. She crosses her arms and frowns menacingly: “You are all mean! This is a provocation! I won’t play with you ever again!”

Putin, exactly.

Good that the rainclouds are closing in again.