Chancellor Angela Merkel: A Celtic Satire

Abstract

Glosses on Chancellor Angela Merkel: In ancient times the poets of Ireland and Scotland wrote satires on royals and chiefs they held to be administratively challenged and/or ungenerous to needy bards. The poems were not in strict form, but, generally, 17 line stanzas implied “should be put down”, while 13 line stanzas connoted “harmless but dim”. Walküre, whence Valkyrie, means “chooser of the slain” in Old German. In the bloodletting attending the formation of the present Grand Coalition in Germany, Edmund Stoiber was a casualty and withdrew, embittered, to lead Bavaria again. Angela is widely reported to find relief from the tensions of major political crises by baking cakes, a method more acceptable to the German middle-class than that once favoured by President Clinton. Prince Potemkin, lover and right-hand-man, of Czarina Catherine II, is – maybe slanderously – supposed to have had fake villages built in which actors mimed happy peasants as she drove past in her carriage. When Bush visited Angela’s provincial electorate, the real locals were sent somewhere else, while blokes from Germany’s security services replaced them, smiling, cheering and waving American flags. Consuming coffee and cake at 4 p.m. is the only Categorical Imperative that Germany absolutely obeys. The plot of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods resembles a stale lamington, as do Germany’s present economic woes. The Grand Coalition is also looking crumbly and dry, despite Angela’s keeping it in the fridge in glad-wrap.