Yesterday, I heard it as the thing first in the morning. It was still dark outside and I reached back to the radio switch with an irrational surge of worry. All that came through was "Feiern im ganzen Land." "...parties across the nation..." and then I let out a breath I didn´t know I was holding.

This doesn´t even affect me I found myself thinking, or does it? Germany is stil governed by a coalition that moves forward like a narcoleptic elephant. So why this awkward euphoria among all the people I met? And then the most extra-ordinary thing happened in the first class that day. We were talking about Adorno´s Enlightenment text, the structure of evil and antisemitism and violence as mislead projection processes of the subject, when my professor made a loop and started to talk about torture, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and how torture is trying to eliminate the subject´s sense of their own selves. Suddenly he became all quiet and said that hopefully this would all come to an end now. An eerie silence stretched out in the room and many people smiled to themselves. Until then I have never in my life actually seen Hope. It gave me goosebumps.
I know that this guy can´t change around everything that has gone wrong in the past eight years. I also know that the more hope is held up, the more it can be disappointed. But he embodies all the potential of America that has been kept unused over the course of the last years.
( There´s more... and music. )

In my first Television class ever I learned that the first male gay kiss on American television was "peformed" on the NBC sitcom Will&Grace. In addition to being a quite funny and witty show that exposes many of our shallow human desires which backfire and trait the ideals we try to hold up, Will&Grace did an extraordinary thing in their second season. For the first time in the history of American television two men kissed on-screen. Or maybe it wasn´t as extraordinary but long overdue? After all, there were two gay men among the main characters. So it was this kiss I was thinking about the other day after I had seen an episode of Blackadder:

( Not that there is anything wrong with that. )