Eat The Rich

The center piece of this picture is a street-art image of Charles Darwin combined with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous quotes “eat the rich” (When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.). “Eat the rich” is also the title of a song by Aerosmith.Aerosmith was the first big concert I attended as a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina on 29 January 1998. It was a fantastic show. Thinking of concerts led me to remember all the wonderful open-air concerts I went to with my parents at Brandenburg Gate| Brandenburg Gate, concert, top, right |.The New Year’s Party, nowadays one of the biggest celebrations in Europe, a huge gathering between Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, is especially magnificent.The thought of dancing people reminded me of the huge aluminum sculpture Molecule Man| center |. The sculpture, standing in the Spree River in Berlin, consists of three human figures leaning towards each other. The artist Jonathan Borofsky says about his sculpture: “For me, this hundred-foot-tall alumi-num sculpture composed of three figures meeting in the center not only refers to the lightness inside our own solid bodies, but also the figures joining in the center refer to the molecules of all human beings coming together to create our existence. This symbolism is especially poignant for this 100-foot Molecule Man on the Spree River in Berlin since the river marked the division between East and West Berlin.”These three friends meeting led me to think about the World Clock at Alexanderplatz in the center of the city, where I often met my friends before we went on to party in one of Berlin’s music clubs | World Clock, center left |. The clock was opened to the public on 30 September 1969, shortly before the twentieth anniversary of the German DemocraticRepublic, at the same time as the inauguration of the Berlin TV Tower | bottom right|. The TV Tower was built between 1965 and 1969 and was intended to be both a symbol of Communist power and of the city. With its height of 368 meters it is the tallest structure in Germany. To the embar-rassment of GDR authorities, the steel sphere below the antenna produced the reflection of a giant cross. A cross that reminds us of Christianity. Hence the popular joke, not appreciated by the SED govern-ment, that this was the Pope’s revenge on the secular socialist state.From this amusing connection between religion and the TV Tower my thoughts wandered to the beautifulcathedral in Berlin called the Dom| top left |, and tothe German and the French Churches | bottom left |.If you have read the text until this point, your eyes probably look exactly like the newspaper street-art eyes| center left | ...therefore I will stop here!