Monday, May 25, 2009

Fun times in a liberal left household: Living in 1984

I found this childhood story about a liberal left household particularly amusing.

Here are a few excerpts...

How I became an accidental conservative:
In an excerpt from his new book, SPIEGEL editor Jan Fleischhauer describes his childhood in a typical West German liberal family, with parents who wouldn't let him eat oranges because they were grown in countries ruled by dictators, and his coming out as a late conservative.

I had a very sheltered childhood; it's just that I was sheltered by liberals. I saw my first Disney film together with my own children. When McDonald's opened a restaurant in our neighborhood, my father gave me a serious talk about the corruptive influence of American fast-food culture. The enjoyment of my first burger was an act of adolescent rebellion, and to this day, I still feel slightly guilty on my occasional visits to McDonald's.

I am part of a generation in Germany that knows no other reality than the dominance of the left. Everyone was a liberal where I grew up. My parents' friends -- and their friends, of course -- all voted for the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD), and later for the Green Party.

There is nothing wrong with growing up in a household in which the national origins of fast food are turned into a political issue, one that sheds light on correct awareness. From an early age, one is trained to be on the lookout for moral snares. In our family, as in all good leftist families, seemingly ordinary, everyday decisions were imbued with a momentousness difficult to comprehend for anyone but the politically initiated. Every item purchased at the supermarket was subjected to an assessment of not only its freshness and flavor, but also its moral quality. Organic oatmeal was clearly superior to industrial muesli, even if it tasted like bran, because we were always suspicious of major brands and supported small cooperatives.

Naturally, my mother was fundamentally opposed to buying Pepsi (because of its associations with the United States, big industry and Republicans) or Coca-Cola (USA, big industry, Democrats), except for children's birthday parties or when we were sick and nauseous. Then we were given small amounts of the ice-cold beverage, which is why I still associate Coca-Cola with sickness today. When the papers reported that children in Africa had died after consuming Nestlé powdered milk, Nesquik immediately disappeared from the breakfast table. When a friend told me that Smarties candies were also made by Nestlé, I prayed ardently that my mother would never find out.

I ate almost no oranges until I was 13, an experience I share with British journalist Nick Cohen, as I recently discovered to my surprise. It appears that all children of liberals throughout the West experienced certain deprivations.

Oranges were such a rare commodity for us because -- for a period that unfortunately coincided with our childhood -- the world's citrus fruit-producing countries had fallen into the hands of Latin American strongmen or otherwise questionable autocratic rulers. We couldn't buy Spanish oranges as long as General Francisco Franco was in power, because every purchase would have signified indirect support for his dictatorship. South Africa was out of the question, because of its apartheid regime, and Jaffa oranges from Israel seemed politically incorrect for as long as the Palestinians had to suffer. We still had oranges from Florida at first, but that ended when Richard Nixon was elected president. Franco's death in November 1975, at 82, was the only reason my brother and I did not succumb to scurvy.

To my chagrin, my mother had also developed a strong aversion to comics. They were trash, she concluded, and there would be no trash in our house. There was one exception: "Asterix." I owned every issue, from "Asterix the Gaul" to "Asterix in Corsica." Anything that came from France was considered culturally valuable and thus exempt from the taint of trashiness. There were also fine distinctions when it came to television. Hollywood was considered the worst of trash, unless the films were old and in black-and-white, or directed by German emigres like Billy Wilder or Ernst Lubitsch, in which case they were cultural artifacts and suitable for children. How my father managed to convince my mother that the Western series "Bonanza" was suitable family fare for Sunday viewing is still a mystery to me.

Read the rest here:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,626346,00.html


1 comment:

Jeremy N said...

"Every item purchased at the supermarket was subjected to an assessment of not only its freshness and flavor, but also its moral quality"

Nowadays, we just take for gospel whatever is forwarded around in emails....