Market day in a small German town. What's the topic of every discussion? We are. [View all]

My wife did the Saturday shopping at the farmers' market today. It's three times a week in the town square, and Saturday is the biggest. She took a quick break at a café on the square for cappuccino to wake her up. The day's newspapers lie on big tables for everyone to read (or not, as they see fit). They run the gamut from conservative (not Republican crazy style, but truly conservative) to left-leaning (not necessarily "liberal" as defined in the English language). She was there for a few minutes (I'll get to that later)*, and perused the headlines to see if there was any variation. Trump at the UN was front page news everywhere, and sub-themes were mostly concerning his new obsession to get every Democrat indicted who ever did or said anything in opposition to him. In other words, the word "dictatorship" reared its ugly head. Every European who hasn't grown up in Iceland or Switzerland lives in a land that has known some form of that within the last 3 centuries.

One problem that frustrates me to no end is that the US-based of the European news media completely ignore our opposition. Their audience knows who Trump is, but they have never heard of Governors Pritzker, Newsom, Mills, Hobbs, Senators Schiff, Whitehouse, Coons or Murphy, Reps. Crockett, Swalwell, Ocasio-Cortez, etc. They know more about Colbert and Kimmel because they are in the same line of work. One thing I hear from my European friends that pisses me off is "why don't the Democrats do or say anything?" We do plenty (Kimmel IS back on the air, isn't he?), and we have plenty to say. We can't force European news correspondents to get up on Sunday morning in time to see our people rant on the Sunday talk shows, but they do show up, and they DO have plenty to say. We write articles and bring lawsuits, but our judicial system is different, and so is our form of government. They should take a course before hopping a plane and deciding that we're doing nothing. It's good that they report on Trump being a disaster, but that isn't telling their audience something they don't know already. I sometimes feel like the European print news media is akin to a New York Times correspondent in Berlin in 1938 writing an article explaining that the Nazis don't like Jews, and expecting it to be breaking news back home, whereas any American who could read had known that for five years already.

*My wife took a few minutes at the café because one of the women at my travel agency across the square had seen her and brought over two train tickets I had ordered earlier this morning on the phone. Since we travel a lot, we are well known at the local travel agency. Still, my wife appreciated the gesture, so in turn, she ordered eight mini amaretto pastries from the café and brought them over to the travel agency. We're a small town in central Europe, so we still do that kind of thing here.