The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

So I’m standing at the lights, and these two guys are in some kind of speed boat. Only I think that they were trafficking cocaine, rather than speed. C’mon, they’re not on motorbikes.

So I see these dudes, and I’m like, “it’s my duty as a good citizen to stop them going about their destructive ways”. The thing is though, the little red man/woman/citizen is up, and I’m like, “it’s my duty as a good citizen to obey the little red man/woman/citizen”. Torn by the conflicting drives and obligations, I had a little nervous breakdown.

After my recovery – and the flight to freedom from our Columbian friends in the speedboat – the little red man/woman/citizen got me to thinking about my favourite variation on the theme, the world famous Ampelmännchen.

You might be familiar with the Ampelmännchen tale, the friendly face of East Berlin. Like me, you may have even been to the Ampelmännchen shop and purchased an Ampelmännchen t-shirt.

The theory behind Ampelmännchen (are you starting to see how much I love writing Ampelmännchen?), was devised by cunning traffic psychologist Karl Peglau. Utilising the kind of underhanded and fiendish tricks best associated with the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the Soviet [-sphere of influence] Svengali bedazzled the world with the masterstroke that very nearly won the Cold War for the RED HORDES.

The idea of Ampelmännchen (there he is again) was rooted in a theory that anticipated people responding better to the traffic signals (obeying the commands of the state) if they were presented by a friendly character, instead of a set of meaningless coloured lights.

The was only one thing that stopped Peglau’s masterstroke of social control, and the fatal flaw in his thesis to reducing the world to a state of zombie-like subservience to the grinding mediocrity of a cold, grey and heartless drift along with the current of dialectical materialism.

That thing was emblematic of the failure of Communism to usurp Capitalism: the petit bourgeois hat that rested on dear little Ampelmännchen’s head! The apparatchiks under Walter Ulbricht took offense (probably) to the blatant vulgarity of that hat and thus stopped the mesmeric, messianic and enigmatic Ampelmännchen appearing on all manner of high quality East German goods (turnips, two day old loaves of rye bread, tractors, cruise missiles et cetera).

In honour of Ampelmännchen, I penned this little ditty. I apologise in advance for the crude German.

Ampelmännchen, Ampelmännchen, Ampelmännchen, Ampelmännchen

Mit dem kecken Schritt,
und Ihre glückliche Lächeln,
Sie wird Crush die kapitalistische Schweine,
und zertrümmern den imperialistischen Hunde,
mit dem kecken Wanderung durch das stolz sozialistischen!

Ampelmännchen, Ampelmännchen, Ampelmännchen, Ampelmännchen

Wie wir liebe dich so!