As often happens on Parts Unknown, the show you are going to see Sunday night is not the show we intended to make. I’d been to Cologne, years earlier, for a book fair, and I’d enjoyed myself. The endless torrent of tiny beers, the pig knuckles and schnitzels — my kind of place. Though locals referred to their town as ugly, I found it pretty and cinematic. I knew our old producer, Tracey Gudwin was living in Germany, and looked forward to the opportunity to work with her again. I had every intention of making a food and beer-centric, happy horseshit, non-issue driven, totally apolitical show — hopefully with plenty of Kraftwerk jokes and Sprockets references.
But that’s not the way things played out.
Shit happens.
What’s “better”, when talking about your country, your community, your family — to do what is clearly, by nearly all standards, the morally “right” thing? Or the “smart” thing? The thing that is, on balance, the wiser, safer, and far easier thing for you and those close to you? Some situations draw those choices in stark contrast. Others not.
Not all choices are comfortable. Not all solutions to problems are easy or quick or complete. And questions — often the biggest, most important questions — are often without the kind of quick, clean, simple answers we might like. The answers might take years to resolve. The answers — satisfying ones — might well never come.
Cologne, Germany found itself right at the center of a worldwide debate just a few days before my crew and I arrived hoping to make a happy food show.
Here’s how the story played out in the news around the world: Little Cologne, an island of tolerance in an increasingly isolationist Europe, who had thrown open their doors to a disproportionately, generously large influx of desperate refugees from Syria and the Middle East, who, unlike so many other Western communities had greeted the new arrivals with teddy bears and offers of lodging — was now the victim of a horrendous New Years rampage in which hundreds of women were assaulted — seemingly by the very people they’d just welcomed.
The story was, of course, more complicated than that. And the degree to which recent arrivals were involved overstated. But here it was anyway: The “I told you so” moment. Being one’s brother’s keeper is one thing, opening one’s home and one’s heart to the traveler in need, bone deep religious values, charity, empathy — that’s all fine and good, but when you are talking about rape and sexual assault — well, that calls even core values in to question. That’s the moment when principles tend to go out the window in favor of what appears at least, to be practicality.
But Cologne chose to stay the course. And nearly everyone I spoke to felt that even this, was a problem that could be solved. It was an astonishing thing. I’m quite sure my city would not have reacted the same way. I am not sure that I would be capable of acting the same way.
This will be an unsatisfying episode. And a contentious one. There will be no happy ending or comfortable sum up. Life gives us precious few of those. We will have to wait many years to see if anyone was “right” or “wrong” and to determine the real cost of making a moral decision.
Is it better to be smart or to be a fool? The answer to that question seems simple. Who, after all, wants to be a fool?
But we are happily fools for love at various times in our lives. There’s no other way, really. That leap of faith to give yourself to another person requires a willing suspension of disbelief — a denial of statistics, empirical evidence and good sense. But we do it all the time. And I think, judging from the sweep of popular music history, we tend to like it like that. Who, after all, wants a “sensible” relationship?
Might it follow then that we shouldn’t aspire to live always by sensible choices? That what is good for us in the short term is not always the “best” way? To live always by what’s right now in front of our faces and the imperatives of keeping things running smoothly for me and mine, good business, no problems — that’s the kind of shopkeeper mentality that got the world into a whole lot of shit back in the day.