Days before Barack Obama is scheduled to address Europe at the "Victory Column" -- a nineteenth-century landmark tainted by the city's Nazi past -- some Berliners were decrying their federal government's decision to deny him the more dignified Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop. They don't seem to realize that German Prime Minister Angela Merckel has simply handed the Democratic candidate for president another opportunity to shine. [/more]

The Brandenburg Gate was an entrance to the city in the mid-1700s, and gradually embellished with columns and a chariot-driving Victory statue at the top. While the gate is associated with Napoleon and Frederick the Great, it stood for most of the past 45 years within the Berlin Wall "no-man's-land," a mined and barbed-wired "death strip" dividing West Berlin from the communist East Germany that enveloped it.

As American conservatives are fond of pointing out, the Brandenburg Gate was where Ronald Reagan stood to challenge Mikail Gorbachov to "tear down this wall."  Of more significance to Europeans, however -- and to Obama -- was the June 1963 speech by John F. Kennedy, who declared himself to stand side-by-side with a generation of Germans living on the front lines of the Cold War. In somewhat flawed German -- and not at the gate, but from the balcony of West Berlin's City Hall -- Kennedy famously told Berliners that he was one of them. While his message was clearly directed at West Germans, his words, "Ich bin ein Berliner," gave a sense of promise and hope to people on both sides of the wall.

Kennedy, essentially, was saying: "I'm an American; but I'm also a citizen of the free world." This is a spirited message that Obama can make even more meaningful in post-Cold War Berlin, a city where one in four residents now claims direct heritage from another country. I suspect that Obama will speak of unity in democracy while applauding diversity. It's a message that will appeal to Germans, who have always fretted over their identity as Germans. At least three German governments have used national identity to launch wars against their neighbors. Now, Germany is struggling to be an even-handed, open-minded world leader -- in the model of significant Americans who helped rebuild the country following World War II.

Obama's message will also appeal to Europeans, who are successfully constructing a union of historically warring states -- a social-democratic United States of Europe. More than anything else, perhaps, the European Union is rising on the American values of democracy and diversity.

No surprise, then, that the European media is calling Barack "the next Kennedy," who didn't require a high-profile monument like the Brandenburg Gate to tell the world about America's willing participation.  

Obama and his fans may note that the Victory Column ("Siegessaeule") was conceived during the American Civil War, a time of relative peace in Germany. The monument was relocated and appropriated by the Nazis, but it was born at moment in history when a diverse people began to identify themselves as "German." Now, Europe is working to put its many bloody wars behind it, celebrating its diversity and unity on a grand scale.

The United States has been, for many, the source and best practitioner of these very same ideals. Good will, diversity, equality, and democratic government are distinctly American values.  I predict that Barack Obama will stand proudly before the "Victory Column" and hammer them home for Americans, as well as for people around the world.

Our stuff gets packed into a big shipping container today for the 3,000-mile trip to Germany.

We're picking up and moving to a rented apartment on the west side of Berlin, where I hope to document the progress of that town toward environmental sustainability.

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As a longtime West Virginian who likes Barack Obama, it's sad to see everyone -- from the media to the candidate himself -- predicting his defeat in Tuesday's state primary.

One can't help but contrast it with the 1960 primary, in which John Kennedy was the winner - also surprising everyone. But at least he tried - and the state meant so much more to the campaign and the country in those days.  Kennedy's only Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, quickly dropped out of the national race the night he lost the West Virginia primary.

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    I was just reading about the anniversary of a German counter-culture convention that took place in January 1978.

Fifteen-hundred students gathered at the Technical University, in Berlin. One veteran of the event said it was full of "craziness and truth" -- a time in which young people didn't merely want to discuss an alternative society; they wanted to live it -- either there in Berlin or "someplace else."

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Technical difficulties, now resolved, have kept me off the blogpath for a while.

I taped interviews as recently as October. Grant funds are spent, and I'm looking (wishing) for new partners and supporters, as I consider the great amounts of very fine digital video before me. These are the cold and lonely BrainWork days of winter. Picture me in fights with myself:  battling over how this project is the same -- and different -- than the one I envisioned yesterday. 

If it were only like a house-raising.

If I only had the plans and the budget that are as solid as native stone, with a "task and talent" list and sublists -- all promising a great product that meets its audience more than half-way; a film that leaps off the screen. I'd send out invitation to the BrainWork party and we'd have that sucker built in time for the Saturday matinee. 

Filmmaking -- and life -- isn't like that.  Yet.

Back to it. Write me a note if you feel like it.  

Uploaded the new version of the trailer on You-Tube today.

Lots of other ideas in play. Looks like I might be going to China in October..... 

Since writing last, I've been to the 30th Denison Homestead Reunion, which was a blast.

I also got great footage of student Homesteaders from across the years. Great dancing, playing, more playing and - yes - even some interviews. It also allowed me to get nice "B-Roll" of wood stove in operation and home-grown shelves, etc.

Interesting to see 30 "generations" of Homesteaders. We'd all shared the same little slice of land, with different buildings, different building projects, a range of different animals, problems, etc.

Great fun to talk across these differences. Several of us - having been there in the first year or three - took on the role of OGs ("old gangstas" in current parlance, although "old geezes" served me just as well).

"Living simply" (and cheaply) is definitely a mantra among BTL'ers I've talked with -- and almost certainly a subtext of this film project.

More than one veteran back-to-the-lander recalls being a college student and reading "The Simple Life" by Helen & Scott Nearing. Voluntary simplicity and poverty appealed to these  folks as 20-somethings, their ears still ringing with "ask what you can do for your country," yet seemingly powerless to stop a deceptive president and his escalation of an unwinable war.

It's no surprise, perhaps, that more Americans today are attending to the call of voluntary simplicity, with our debts rising in tandem with our levels of complexity and alienation; our savings rates dropping about as fast as our faith in institutional competence.  

I've sometimes thought of publishing a "Hillbilly Guide to Living Rationally and Cheap." If I do, I hope I'll include a chapter on "getting along with the neighbors" who, as my subjects learned, often carry surprising resources into the mix. 

Many thanks, for example, to the students and others who are stepping forth to help me transcribe audio files into text, allowing me to move toward the next step of this project, the "paper edit." I have a lot of audio recording to turn into Word docs, and a little group that has volunteered to help out.

Makes life - and filmmaking - a little simpler.

Well, filming is at a pause, and a time for some editing is come. There is plenty of footage I haven't even looked at.  Today, I'm working on the first of some shorter pieces - "Mountain Minutes" - for further web-sharing of the project. (Ideas for a better title, if such exists, are welcome.)

I hope to use these "minutes" to share lessons that people have learned from the BTL experience. One big one for me is this: "Learn from those who came before you." I loved hearing (from Tom & Connie McColley) about how they STUDIED BOOKS to learn what they could about EVERYTHING - from plumbing to animal husbandry - and then they'd get/share information with NEIGHBORS.

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I spent a GREAT weekend in Roane County, interviewing some of the best people -and the best artists - you can imagine.
(Kudos - and heart-felt thanks - to accomplished filmmaker Jeff McCoy for taking time to do stellar service behind the camera these past few days!)

We spent time with artist blacksmith Jeff Fetty at his Leaning Oak Forge. (Also with Charlotte, his child bride.) We visited multitalented artist and craftsman Joe Lung, and chatted with Robin and Brenda Wilson. Greetings, also, to their several friends, who welcomed us into a wholesome and intellectually fulfilling Sunday meeting.

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I slid into Kanawha and Lincoln counties with my best borrowed, bought, and jury-rigged equipment last weekend. I met and sat with no fewer than 11 back-to-the-landers, by ones and twos, -- all recorded in well-lit and well-audioed conditions for a total of ten hours of tape. 

Lincoln's "newcomers" had a distinctly strong idealism about them. They came as early as 1968, some earning their rural "credentials" from such organizations as the Heathcote Community, the Catholic Worker movement, and VISTA. [Catholic Worker may have best captured the spirit of the BTL movement with its simply stated mission of creating an environment that "makes it easier for people to be good."]

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