Miep Gies has died, a month and two days shy of her 101st birthday.I had the good fortune of exchanging a few letters with her in the late 1990s.She never liked being called a "hero".I can understand that. I agree with her that what she did is what any human being should do - no more, no less.She was a lady. What a lady!But for some strange reason what I remember most fondly - apart from her being the protector of Anne Frank and the custodian of her diary before it was published - is that she was once the "best Charleston dancer in Amsterdam". (You can take a girl out of Vienna, but you can't take Vienna out of a girl. :)And why not?It is a joyful heart what makes us want to dance.There is little room for darkness in a joyful heart, and no room at all for evil.A joyful heart doesn't need eyes to see, or ears to hear.The song coming from a joyful heart is possibly the best prayer there is.And I suspect the dance steps dictated by a joyful heart lead directly to paradise, wherever it is.
So, Miep, here is something just for you...
The text below is borrowed verbatim from a sister - well, "cousin" - blog. The post was written more than a year ago - and yet everything said in it still applies... (duh!)
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I've always wondered how many people actually watch (I hesitate to use the word "listen to") the dinosaur called the Eurosong.
It is my suspicion that most people only watch the final voting (which has long since become a self-parody, noticeable to everyone except the voters and the votees, it seems).
But even that has become tedious and boring beyond ridiculousness. After all, anyone who has ever watched it more than two or three times, knows by heart how each country will vote: Andorra will always vote for Spain and for France. Greece will vote for its neighbouring countries (except Macedonia, which it doesn't recognise as a country), with the highest number of votes going to Cyprus (the Greek part, of course), and viceversa. Russia will vote for all its surrounding neighbours and for countries which claim adherence to the Orthodox faith. Turkey will vote for Armenia (oh yeah, that'll take the sting out of the genocide of 1916!), Germany will vote for Turkey, no matter what: it's the country whence most of its foreign »guest workers« come from.
And so on.
The endurance of the cretinous anomaly called the Eurosong is one of the great mysteries of our time. I am pretty sure you have no idea who won last year, even if you did listen to the... ehm, music. With very few exceptions, none of the winners – not to mention the non-winners (who were more often than not actually better than the winners) – faded back into international obscurity whence they had emerged for that single night.
It's the debutante ball for »new democracies« - a sort of Vienna Ball, minus the music. In other words, it's tacky, wasteful, has no discernible social or even political purpose (even though voting is done almost exclusively on the basis of current politics).
Bring in the clowns already...
They are way more entertaining and they certainly have more political relevance, free thought - and more durable musical influence.
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N.B.
And the clowns ARE in... :)
