HG: Today on our blog we have the rare treat of an in-person interview with Herr Antwort Mann . . .
[Cough] AM: Herr Professor Doktor Antwort Mann . . .
HG: Er . . . sorry . . . Herr Professor Doktor Antwort Mann of the Institut für Alles Wissen in Fortzheim, Germany.
[Cough] AM: Pfortzheim!—mit ein puh.
HG: Er . . . sorry, again. Anyway, the Professor Doktor is here to offer scientific solutions to some of the troubling problems of our day.
AM: Dass ist korrekt.
HG: By the way, Herr Professor Doktor, how was your flight from Germany?
AM: Nicht gut! Economy Klasse, as you say auf Englisch, is the pits! I just now have been able to lower my knees from my eyebrows. Ah, but the hotel you booked me into—mit ein minibar mit Schnapps!
HG: That’s great about the hotel. But now let’s get to the issues at hand. First, a headline the other day on slate.com stated, “Goldman Sachs Warns That Rising Wages Could Cut Into Corporate Profits.”* Is that a serious problem? And, if so, what can be done about resolving it?
AM: Dass ist ein sehr serious problem! Especially if you are a Goldman Sachs partner! If the company keeps raising the wages of the workers, there will be less money for the partners to divide up for Christmas bonuses.
HG: But is there a solution?
AM: A solution there is definitely! Und really it doesn’t take a professor from the Institut für Alles Wissen to see it. What Goldman Sachs should do—is fire all its workers! Then all the profits go to the partners!
HG: I never thought of that.
AM: Maybe it does take a professor from Pfortzheim.
HG: Moving on—our next problem has to do with children . . .
AM: Kinder, ja?
HG: Here in the US we have the problem of the children who have been taken away from their parents at the borders and transported far away from them.
AM: Ja?
HG: And even the problem of these children—as young as one year old—having to defend themselves in court.**
AM: You make ein Witz—a joke—nicht wahr?
HG: It’s very wahr—er, true.
AM: Gott in Himmel!
HG: Speaking of God, then there are all those evangelicals who are clamoring for the protection of the unborn—fetuses, that is—but seem to have no problem supporting a government that won’t promote breastfeeding.***
AM: Breastfeeding is gut; I favor it myself. . . . Vell, for the kinderproblem, here we can rely on the advice of the klassiker dramatist Sophocles. In his Tragödie Oedipus Rex, the chorus proclaims, “best it is never to be born.”
HG: I don’t get it.
AM: You see, if the fetuses refuse to be born, they will never suffer the miseries of being separated from their parents, having to go to court, or having formula being forced upon them instead of mother’s milk—und they will always be protected by the evangelicals and right-to-lifers. Alles is solved!
HG: I do perceive one flaw here, though—if the so-called right-to-lifers support the unborn, but totally neglect the born, shouldn’t they be called the “right-to-be-unborners”?
AM: Hmm. I vill haf to think about that on the flight home to Germany. By the vey, you couldn’t make it First Klasse this time, could you?
***
** The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”
Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.
“I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.
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