Dear Reader,

During the weeks of production for this issue, billions of dollars evaporated, century-old institutions vanished, and neoliberals turned into state socialists. Appropriate times for the return of the last master of the great rock’n’roll swindle, Malcolm McLaren, who came to fame as the manager of the Sex Pistols, and instigator of various pop culture eruptions. So, on a cold October night I made a trek to the American Academy in Berlin Wannsee to attend a dinner and hear McLaren speak – he was in town for his art exhibition opening (what else do you do in 2008?).

Under the directorship of Gary Smith, the American Academy – imagine a 21^st-century platform for content/discourse implemented into a 19^th-century lakeside villa – operates an ambitious program, with an openness to people and ideas that its mothership, America, had come to lose over the last decade. Once called “the first American post-Cold War institution in Europe,” by Henry Kissinger, it has been a prime example of the soft power that the US is capable of – and that once brought civilization back to Germany.

But as Malcolm McLaren sat slouched in the leather armchair, starting to tell of his past achievements on autopilot, I was suddenly allured when he began to rant about the noble pursuit of failure in an American institution. How else can you actually summarize the legacy of George W. Bush?

I write this on the morning after the US presidential election. Change is official. The return of the great narrative, the American Dream, is possible once more. And the country that globalized the world without globalizing its own society is suddenly in the hands of a true world icon, Barack Obama. It was precisely the notion of the “post-American age” that made his success possible – the realization that unilateralism and fear-mongering have filed for ideological bankruptcy. As British philosopher John Gray states in our cover interview: “A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.”

So what else did Mr. McLaren say? That he celebrated lost times when ideas led to other ideas. Let’s hope that nostalgia for new ideas and change is indeed up for a renaissance, worldwide.

Joerg Koch