Gnarr (14 page)

On July 7, 2005, the date on which the bombings in the London Underground hit the news worldwide, I happened to be staying in London myself. For days and weeks afterwards, the city seemed paralyzed; the fear, insecurity, and mistrust were palpable. The
perpetrators were young, radical Islamists, and there is one scene in particular that I’ll never forget: I was sitting in the Underground, when suddenly a young man got in, apparently of Arabic origin, wearing a small backpack over his shoulder. My heart began to race. My first impulse was to get off at the next station and take another train, one without Arabs. But that would have been ridiculous, so I stayed where I was, a bundle of tension, mistrust, and fear. What if the guy had an explosive device in his backpack? I tried to push my way inconspicuously through the other passengers to increase the distance between him and me. If he suddenly started yelling “Allah Akhbar” through the train compartment, I’d simply throw myself to the floor between the rows of seats.

I must note that I wasn’t the only passenger to react that way. The young Arab soon stood alone at the far end of the compartment with plenty of room around him, even though the Tube was jam packed. Everyone involuntarily kept their distance. And that is prejudice. The natural protective response of the brain to a presumed imminent danger. To my great relief, the backpack carrier didn’t have a bomb. He got out at the same station as me and strolled quietly away.

Afterwards, I was a bit ashamed, but now I’ve come to terms with it and tell myself that it was a natural human reaction. People come in countless different types, and that’s the fascinating thing about human culture and society.

But why do people use these superficial criteria to reprimand their fellow human beings? I assume that, here again, our innate, deep-rooted need for security lies behind it. In other words: in familiar surroundings we feel most at home, where everyone looks like us, acts like us, and thinks like us, where we always know more or less what to expect. In this way, prejudices are simply relics of our primitive nature, and thus completely normal.

This is where selfishness comes into play. When we smell a chance to exploit others for our own interests, we want to take this opportunity. I’m not at all trying to defend this—I try to resist such temptation as much as possible—but I can understand it very well. I understand which internal forces are at work. I understand why women are oppressed in some countries and are treated as second-class citizens, why they have no rights, and are patronized, pushed around, and forced to submit to rigid, arbitrary rules. I find all this fundamentally wrong and deeply despicable. But I can understand it. Men want to limit women’s power as much as possible, out of pure selfishness of course, to exploit them more easily for their sexual interests. This works particularly well in the religious sphere.

There’s just one thing that will probably always remain a mystery to me: homophobia, as it is called. In my eyes this is the greatest conceivable aberration.
Phobia
comes from the Greek and means “fear.” Anyone who suffers from arachnophobia is afraid of
spiders. Perfectly understandable. “Homophobia” on the other hand is an entirely different matter. This is not about people who once upon a time in their youth stumbled into a gay bar, got the fright of their lives, and have never managed to put the trauma behind them. The vast majority of those so-called homophobes are what are generally referred to as Philistines. Therefore, homophobia is not a phobia, but stupidity and intolerance. And most of all selfishness. These people have simply cobbled together an abstruse worldview, or some naive theory about life, God, the world, and all the rest of it.

What do I care if my neighbor is gay or not? Not a bean. Nor if he’s into collecting dolls in traditional costume. In my view, a lesbian woman is just as normal as one who smokes a pipe. I just find it fascinating how different people are, and I cannot understand for the life of me what is supposed to be “unnatural,” in other words “against the will of nature,” about lesbians and gay men. Such a view is already complete garbage, as nature itself has no will, let alone any plans or intentions. But Mother Nature is open to the widest variety of characteristics, peculiarities, and different types, and what can’t preserve itself is sorted out again by selection. As we know, homosexuality can be proven to have existed since earliest prehistory and is therefore a natural and integral part of evolutionary history. If it went against the laws of nature, then nature itself would long since have eradicated it, and it would be as
extinct today as many other natural phenomena, from the dinosaurs to the Neanderthals.

To grant to same-sex couples fewer rights than those granted to every other couple is just about as absurd as banning a white man from living with a black woman. This was indeed once verboten, or at least frowned upon, in many parts of the world. The same evolution will happen with attitudes to homosexuality. When I see rallies at which people fight bitterly against the equality of gays and lesbians, I can’t help thinking back to the unrest in the American South at the beginning of the last century, when backward hillbillies protested against the equality of blacks.

If you sit at home in your living room brooding about whether the guy next door is gay or the woman who lives on the floor below you is a pipe-smoker or your boss collects dolls in traditional costume, then you should seek professional help.

The same is true for transgender people of every variation, cross-dressers, drag kings, and drag queens. This gender diversity, too, is completely natural, and is incredibly creative in the way it is lived. Since I’ve been aware, I’ve had a weakness for women’s clothes—and for an actor and comedian, of course, this is a definite plus. Styling myself as a woman has quite a liberating impact on me.

Where this costume mania comes from, I can’t exactly say. I grew up almost exclusively among women. My mother and her sisters were my main caregivers.
Dad was usually at work, and when he did come home, he usually went around in his uniform. Many people claim they can easily recognize the different types of women in my repertoire. My sister, for example, finds it tremendously hard to watch me in female roles on stage, because she thinks she’s watching herself. I really just use their words and body language—these are already in my blood.

When my mother died, I went through a severe identity crisis. It was as if something essential, part of my inner being, had suddenly been cut out of my life. I not only lost contact with my “roots,” but also with a part of myself that seemed to have died with her. Eventually, I realized that it was actually the other way around: a part of me did not die with her, but a part of her lived on in me.

When we started going through her belongings, I absolutely wanted to keep her makeup stuff. In the weeks after her death, I kept having the sudden need to put on her lipstick and use her nail polish. A few times, I even popped into a meeting or a City Hall debate with painted lips and painted nails. Many people recoiled at this or thought it was inappropriate, but for me it was a completely natural expression of how much I missed Mom.

This has absolutely nothing to do with my sexual identity. Wearing women’s clothes has no sexual component for me. Of course, I fully understand people for whom this is the case, because they’ve been born
in the wrong body; women who feel imprisoned in a male body or vice versa. Not so long ago, these people were condemned to spend their lives in deep despair, feeling confused over their identity. Again, the various religions have caused immeasurable suffering and damage over the centuries.

I’m afraid that religious belief—in glaring contrast to what is preached—has all too much to do with egotism and self-love. Many people succumb to fascination with religion only because they can’t accept the fact that after death it’s all over. So they’d like to believe in something, but not out of love of their neighbor—they just want to book a ticket for immortality. Hence it is no coincidence that the God of the Old Testament is such an angry and punishing God. We should be afraid of him. Thou shalt fear the Lord your God. Like people on a plane who are scared as hell about flying. Gratuitous fear is pure selfishness. As soon as the same people have solid ground underfoot again, they’ll calmly watch as the planes fly past: now it’s no problem at all—they’re not the ones on board. That’s why I don’t think religions are any use at uniting mankind. Instead, they tend to sow hatred and enmity. They are based in large part on selfishness, fear-mongering, and mass suggestion, and these things have never brought people together—quite the opposite.

And here’s where anarchy comes back into the picture. When I decided to venture out onto the political battlefield, there was just a vague impression floating
in front of me, something that can be difficult to bring into focus, hard to explain and define. Everything in life is relative. The perfect system that has an answer to every problem and will put the world to rights just doesn’t exist. Therefore, groups and organizations of all kinds—clubs, faith communities, political movements, and schools—try to create a structure to refine and develop the whole thing into a living organism. Unfortunately, this organism or this phenomenon tends always to focus on itself and turns into a blind and rigid self-worship. So this creature, this amoeba or whatever we want to call it, has no front eyes, as the amoeba can’t look forward any more than it can look back. It can’t see the other amoebas or make contact with them, since these too have eyes only for themselves. Viewed in this way, such systems are like the cells in our bodies. And just as a cell can catch a virus, our systems are also exposed to all sorts of threats. Naturally, they respond by defending themselves on the outside, and thus compensate for their weaknesses.

I am such a virus. I was already a virus when I was a child, I was a virus at school, and I am a virus in politics. I am a troll among human beings. I am an anarchist. Not because I believe anarchism to be the perfect system. But because the perfect system does not exist.

What’s our conclusion? What’s it all about? What is essential and what is not?

Despite all the media hype, I really don’t see myself as the founder of a new generation of politicians, and I’ve long stopped trying to cobble together some smart ideology for myself. Even as a small boy, I had an aversion to anything to do with contests and competition. I simply had no desire to be the best at anything. Not at playing football, not at dancing, and not at anything else. The true winner of the game for me is the one who has the most fun, and this is true not only in sport, but also in life. When I acknowledged my affinity for punk, this was a clear statement of my determination to break away from all that success-oriented, competition-fixated, performance-related way of thinking.

Life is mainly there for us to enjoy it and have as much fun as possible, but we have to become active ourselves and come up with a few ideas. It doesn’t need to be breathtaking—it’s enough if it’s surprising. Something unplanned always goes down well, because real surprises are becoming increasingly rare.

If I actually believe in anything at all, it’s democracy. Democracy is the key to a progressive society. I
believe in direct democracy. More precisely: in direct digital democracy. The threat to democracy is the misconception that we just need a capable leader, and then things will be sorted. But there are no such top dogs, even if everyone else is afraid to take responsibility, or simply too lazy to do so. Let’s face it: most of us much prefer to check out the latest episode of
The Walking Dead
than to traipse to some public meeting. That’s just how it is.

The Internet has changed the world, and it is about to change democracy. The Internet made Obama President of the United States, and it set in motion the Arab Spring. If you hand people the right tool for latching on to active democracy in a quick, uncomplicated way, from their computers, then they will most probably do so. But even here there are a few stumbling blocks. For example, we can’t let this become a gateway for lobbyists or big political organizations that want to exploit it to increase their power.

First and foremost we need to find ways and means to encourage citizens to participate and contribute their own ideas. How about, for example, if you linked participation with a kind of lottery and lured people in with one hundred, or even five hundred attractive prizes? One hundred iPods or something? After all, we’ve all filled in a questionnaire and answered a few dumb questions in the hope that our name will end up being drawn out of the lottery and we’ll win a mobile phone or some such gewgaw.

I am eternally grateful that I have been able to get to know so many interesting and wonderful people because of my position, people I would otherwise never have met: Noam Chomsky, Yoko Ono, and John Ralston Saul, Oliver Sacks and Richard David Precht. All these people have influenced me and helped me see a few things with different eyes. Of course there are many more people I’d dearly love to meet, but unfortunately I haven’t as yet had the opportunity to do so. One of them is Ira Glass—ideally in an interview with me for
This American Life
. The British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, too: I’d like to have a cup of tea with him some time, as I’ve always liked what he does. And then, of course, there’s Banksy. I owe him one, as he once did one of his graffiti for me. I’m always ready to invite Banksy to the best vegetarian restaurant he’s ever been in. I know who he is, but I’d never breathe a word about it, or contact him on my own initiative. Banksy and I are in fact secret brothers. Okay, maybe not in a biological sense, but we are made of the same material. People like him, interesting, smart, and inspiring, these are the people with whom I want to spend my time. With people like that, I don’t have to first explain what really counts, or tell them that you can’t behave like an idiot when dealing with others. With these people I can always do business: we can build something up together, as that’s what they want, too.