Günter Grass: nothing to see here, folks

Gunter Grass. Senile dementia and 'celebrity disease'.ë

Günter Grass. Senile dementia and 'celebrity disease'.

I wasn’t going to write about Günter Grass and his ugly poem.  Googling “Günter Grass poem Israel Iran” gets 789,000 hits. It has been covered from almost every imaginable angle. But I was asked my opinion, so I’ll make it short: what I think is that there isn’t much of a story here. A well-known personality enters his dotage. So what?

Grass doesn’t know who is doing what to whom. The proposition that Israel threatens Iran with a nuclear first strike is so impossible that only an idiot could believe it. Grass’ assertion of it tells us that he is completely disconnected from reality. Time to retire from public life and feed the pigeons in the Unter den Linden.

It’s a combination of senile dementia plus the “celebrity disease”: people tell them how intelligent and perceptive they are for so long that their inner editor shuts down, and popular prejudices and clichés bubble up and are emitted as if they were brilliant insights.

So Grass bravely stands up and says “what must be said” despite his certainty that he will be ‘punished’ with accusations of antisemitism. How courageous to join the anti-Israel chorus in a Europe already full to bursting with Israel-haters! Adding nobility to courage, he’s ready to accept the punishment if it will ‘free others from silence’. Pass the barf bag.

More interesting would be to study why younger people, who presumably still have some functioning brain cells, believe similar nonsense.

Just another ex-Nazi closing in on his reward. Nothing to see here folks, move on.

Technorati Tags: , ,

One Response to “Günter Grass: nothing to see here, folks”

  1. Shalom Freedman says:

    It is not just he is a former member of the SS in his dotage. It is that he who was a part of an organization and a state whose aim was to murder every Jew on earth is now adding to the deligitimization of the single Jewish state. And he is doing it in the name of ‘morality’.
    He is not simply an old fool, he is a wicked hypocritical old fool.