The first sounds of the morning are of tuk-tuk and taxi engines as they come to life, their honking horns alongside the footsteps of the city’s informal working class taking to the streets. And, even earlier than that, the song and chant of Hindu morning prayer, and the feral dogs that slink to the shadows to sleep, no longer dominant as the sun begins its climb from behind Agra, India’s low hills.
If we aren’t careful, true Fascism will grow and take hold in this country – not Nazi thugs on the streets in their brown shirts perhaps, but our own, Americanized version of it, bloated and overwrought, with stars and eagles instead of a swastika bound by a thick circle that would keep anyone who isn’t anglicized, God-fearing, white and heterosexual at the bottom of an ever-deepening barrel.
Germany has addressed its past in ways most countries, especially the United States, have not: A sort of national psychoanalysis to keep something like the Third Reich from ever happening again.
It will only be a matter of time before the accessibility and readily-available nature of A.I. partners will supersede the time and effort it takes to impress a real one.
Raised after the fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR collapse, my relationship to a divided Germany, and of the war that led to it, was a tangential one.
We all know the things we want. We lust, we hide, we lie, we cheat, we need. We desire. It’s inherently, truthfully, human.