I was riding on the Berlin metro, as usual. The sun and its warmth had finally returned to the land and everything outside was looking green and pleasant. Inside the car, the people looked as sullen and miserable as usual. The suns rays beat atop the subway car's roof as it emerged to the above ground part of its journey towards my workplace, intensifying the pungent aroma that accompanies all Berlin subway trips.

I sighed as I looked to the monitors for the news and found the new 'Cartoon of the Day' segment. It showed a simply drawn picture of the infamous NY harbor and Statue of Liberty off in the distance as a desperate and haggard looking turkey-vulture flapped its wings with vigor and screamed "Europe, I'm coming!"

The symbolism registers immediately, but what could it mean. So if vultures feed upon the dead, then Europe is dead... But the vulture looked like he was in quite a hurry. So Europe hasn't been dead for very long and the vulture thusly needs to get to it before any others do? But... no that can't be it.

Then it has to be a play on the vulture as the bottom-feeder of the animal kingdom. Or maybe that they are also famously ugly... Or that they feed upon the scraps of the toil produced by other animals. Of course, that has to be it. Or is it. I'm still rather undecided on the matter, but I couldn't get the maddening image out of my head.

Maybe that's not it... Maybe it means that once America dies from the economic crisis, that it is going to come and feed on Europe? Maybe.

It was just so painfully misconstrued. Almost as bad as that silent subway film.

I'm confronted with a lot of blatantly anti-american sentiment over here. Whether it be in the form of "art," open debate or just straight-forward insults, it always comes clearly from a hate rooted in misguided resentment. There is so much of it, that I've begun asking German friends of mine who have traveled, if they found anything like this in the US. Of course there weren't any cartoons lambasting an entire culture publicized in the most public of areas, but they definitely heard some ignorant and hateful things from the mouths of uneducated fools. How regrettable it is that we are all automatically a product of our borders.