EUROALPHAVILLEBADSTADT

WHEN THE CURIOUS LOOK BACK at important moments and movements in history they seem to find some solace in their own ability to establish patterns, sequences and, most importantly, dates. The latter are often considered to be of paramount significance to mark the beginning of the shifts and nuances that signal the great changes that are to come.

THUS EVENTS WITH FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCES are justified as depending on “key dates”, rather than really important matters such as the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte suffered from haemorrhoids and couldn’t bear to sit on his horse at Waterloo or the fact that Julius Caesar’s hard-on for Cleopatra led to the split in Rome that pointed to the end.

OF COURSE I AM BY NO MEANS SUGGESTING that bowel problems or other people’s erections may have any bearing on the policies followed by our good leader Angela Merkel as she guides the jolly ship of Europe onto the rocks or into the clear blue water of Euro-heaven.

BUT WHAT IS CLEAR IS THAT future nerdy historians will end up discovering that Thursday the 28th of June, 2012 was the date when the dream (or nightmare) of the European Union finally moved into fifth gear and made it impossible for any reverse shift.

EVER SINCE THE INCEPTION OF THIS HIDEOUS IDEA there has been the worry that at some time the European Union would take control of our banking system and would start to introduce taxation, “stealth” taxes at first, but in the end taxes removing power from the lesser, so-called “peripheral” countries, and putting it all in the hands of Germany.

TO BE HONEST, I AM NOT SURE whether, living in Portugal, I would rather be governed by Berlin. For the moment, despite all the warnings and lessons in the past, it seems safe to state that Angela Merkel, the ubiquitous, photogenic German Chancellor, does not present a danger to our freedom; yet to take a snippet of referential quotes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (above) and then from that by the marvellous The Monochrome Set, we might say “she’s a movie star, she’s a little bit touched; (Don’t look now) She’s so wünderbar, all gears and no clutch”. And so where is she taking us?