For people who don’t believe in national decline I present the March 2nd issue of The New Yorker. On page 55, Ian Buruma writes, in a memory of his beloved Dutch soccer team losing to the Germans in 1974: “To be beaten by the krauts felt like the Second World War all over again.” (The Germans apparently are one of the last nationalities that can still be called by a demeaning nickname.)
Then on page 60, there appears a quote from a letter written by Walter Benjamin after his arrival to Paris in the early ’30s: “The Parisians are saying ‘les émigrés sont pires que les boches’”– which is translated as “the immigrants are worse than the Krauts.” Why now capitalize the word when the original was in lower-case? There can be no clearer sign of our impending doom than editing inconsistency in The New Yorker.
