My dad’s death & the end of America

One brilliant person in a small town in Germany and the richest country in the world both died in early 2025

Although it has never been as obvious as now, the USA has been on a downward trajectory for a long time. The moment when it all started going wrong can be pinpointed to Reagan’s idiotic presidency, at least from a societal and economical point of view. (Not that there weren’t terrible mistakes before.)

The entire Western world was fed the lie (and most believed it) that if the richest got richer and richer, everyone benefitted. Wealth would “trickle down” and the richest would pull everyone else up.
The damage this evil fairytale has caused is immeasurable.

Had the USA – instead of turning into hyper-capitalist oligarchy – constructed a strong social security net, introduced affordable universal healthcare, reformed its election finance system, kept the free market in check and made sure billionaires and corporations paid their fair share of tax, Trump would have never happened.
It’s those that feel left behind and cheated by the system that have voted for him, not understanding that his policies will make their lives even worse and that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them.

Had it done the right thing, 90% of the population would be better off (1% would be worse off, meaning some people would have $1 billion instead of $100 billion) and society wouldn’t be as divided, prone to conspiracy theories and so full of hatred and anger.
And democracy, individual freedom, basic human rights and the rule of law wouldn’t be hanging by a thread.

Admiration for the USA

My dad’s views of the world and the US as greatest country on Earth have always been intertwined concepts. I can’t think about my dad and remember him without thinking of America.
Now in hindsight it has become clear that my dad’s lifelong admiration and awe (which I adopted) for the USA has bordered on delusional and lacked questioning.
It’s therefore some sort of strange irony of fate that the very moment there was at last no way this delusion could be kept alive anymore – when we all realised the USA never actually was what we thought it was – my dad died.

Chocolate and the Marshal Plan

My dad was born in 1942 during the Second World War. Bombs were showering down as his mother was pushing his pram through the streets of Singen, an industrial city in the south of Germany. They previously had to flee the east and were pushed around all over war-torn Germany before settling there.
His dad died in the war and he only met him once when he was two years old.

Singen was almost entirely destroyed by Allied bombers and my dad grew up in poorest conditions being raised alone by his mom.
The first and only time he was able to eat chocolate was from US care packages. This moment was when his love and admiration were deeply imprinted forever.

Without the Marshal Plan, a defeated West Germany in ruins could have never recovered so quickly to become the largest economy in Europe and a country with one the highest living standards in the world.
Admiration and gratitude were understandable and many shared it. There was an almost religious obsession of seeing everything that came from the US as awesome, cool and better – whether it was Hollywood films, TV series (Knight Rider!), music, toys (He-Man!), electronics, clothing or food – which was shared by many Germans.

David Hasselhoff sang “Looking for Freedom” as the Berlin wall fell and everyone thought he was greatest guy on the planet with his leather jacket and his awesome hair. When I was around 6 or 7 I walked into to the hairdresser’s and said: “I want the David Hasselhoff haircut.”

Maple Hill Community, NH

“If you study at Harvard or Yale, there is no question that I will put that money on the table!”I remember my dad saying.
In fact, there was no way that I was ever going to be admitted to an Ivy League college, because I was lazy in school and – let’s face it – maybe not quite as intelligent as my dad would have wanted me to be.
The only reason I finished high school with decent grades and a History prize was because I didn’t want to lose a  bet with two friends over 400 litres of beer.

Harvard was not to be, nor was an exchange with a US high school my dad had planned. My dad was a teacher and in the late 80s went to an educational exchange to visit two high schools, one in Rhode Island, the other in Wyoming.
He kept saying how much better the US educational system was, despite the fact that they were consistently quite low in high school international rankings, and that German education was completely free, whereas in the US you’d end up riddled in debt.

What did happen, though, was a year in Temple, New Hampshire, for my civil service after high school. I was helping in a community based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner – a very small farm really – to care for two disabled men.
This could have been one of the greatest years of learning and shaping my world views, but unfortunately, I wasn’t ready.
At 18 or 19 I was a confused, immature idiot harbouring a mixture of utter arrogance and an enormous inferiority complex.

I remember walking through Boston with my friend Christian who also worked at Maple Hill, walking past the homeless.
He made a comment along the lines of, “this is what you get in a country as unequal as the US”, and – I swear to god – remember thinking “it’s their own fault because they are lazy and dumb. Helping them is rewarding laziness.”
This was the extent to which I had swallowed the neoliberal free market bullshit pill.  In fact it was I who was lazy, yet I was nevertheless in no doubt that I’d be a famous and rich Hollywood director by the time I was 28.

None of that was grounded in reality, I had a massive self-esteem issue, was nowhere determined enough and would not become a Hollywood director. I was living in a fantasy land, that I would firmly reside in for the next 20 years, with life and real connections to others and myself passing me by.

The disastrous Iraq war

I was fully in support, of course. To cut me some slack, many were at the time.
It’s amazing how the world changes in 20 years.
Guess who else was in favour?

The cracks were beginning to show

Slowly, over the past few years I’ve been starting to wake up from my narcissistic slumber.
After a life of addictions (binge eating, exercise, alcohol, legal and illegal highs), anxiety and depression, and 20 years that were mostly lost, I’m starting to understand what the hell had been going on.

Some of it was my dad’s fault, some of it my mom’s fault and most of it was my fault. But it’s all good, because life happens (or not!).

As I was changing my political views, my dad’s became entrenched and frozen in time as he was getting older, especially in the last few years of his life. “Flexible” is not a word that I would use to describe him.

When it comes to global warming, his attitude had always been one of denial. “People have been talking about the dying of forests for decades! Look around you! Look how many trees!”
Until the facts suddenly became irrefutable, then his attitude became one of fatalism. “It’s too late now anyway, and there’s nothing we can do. We are doomed.”
That was typical. “There’s nothing one can do” was one of his favourite phrases.

A eulogy

Look, I really wish I could write more positively about him but that wouldn’t be good for my mental health, my sense of identity and it wouldn’t be the truth.

He was an emotional vampire, a giant black hole sucking out everyone’s life energy. After every phone conversation with him you were utterly drained, even if you started off with the sun shining out of your ass. It was like playing ping pong and every single ball you hit fell into a hole, rather than coming back, so you had to hit another one, and another one, until you were completely exhausted.

He also saw himself as wronged and unjustly treated by the world, the poorest person on the planet. Nobody ever had it so bad.
Conversations weren’t a two-way process; it was like listening to a cassette recorder that played the same tape every time, regardless of what you said.

On a professional level he has achieved a lot. After he became head-teacher of a high school in the town of Pfullendorf, which was housed in dilapidated old buildings, he managed to get approval for a spanking new building costing tens of millions and increased to number of students from 200 to over 700.
He was a brilliant teacher, enormously intelligent and is level of knowledge in history unmatched by anyone in a radius of 100 miles.
At his funeral, the mayor and many others were gushing about the contributions he made to the small town as deputy mayor, member of the council, founder of the history museum, and many other things. He had been awarded honorary citizen of the town, an honour only shared by 6 others in 100 years.

But all of these things don’t really matter when you’re the son.
For the things that matter, he wasn’t there when I needed him. He wasn’t there to solve family problems, he just swept them under the rug or avoided them. There was no honest and open conversation about things that were inconvenient, ever.

“The human needs an occupation” was his motto. That might be right, be he was using all his various occupations so he didn’t have to confront himself or anything else.

Up until the end, he was not able to confront his demons and to find peace with himself. I do not want to end like that.

Is this the end?

It’s not the end for the US of course, it never is. But it’s not looking good.

I don’t know how to end this short piece because I don’t know the future. What is clear is that we have taken a terribly wrong turn at some point and things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to.

Life was better before social media, which makes everyone miserable, yet there’s no way you can close Pandora’s Box once it’s been opened and all the wretched ghouls have been set free. These guys have a monopoly that we all depend on. It’s a new type of technological serfdom.

AI is a scam that is making a few people very rich and everyone else’s job shittier and their job prospects more precarious.

The USA was once our greatest friend that we looked up to (even if that view was somewhat distorted), now it’s a madhouse and the people that are running it are not just crazy, but simply evil.

If the system doesn’t work, what’s the solution?
Well for a start it’s the changes that I’ve mentioned at the beginning.
Will the US be able to make those changes?
Nobody knows, but as long as people such as Senator Bernie Sanders live, there’s hope.