Column | Arnie, our interpreter

The own development is not compared to that of Reinout Oerlemans. I lived in a residential group in Nijmegen when he as Arnie van Good times bad times the common space came in. The fashion was left there, but the commercial was consistently looked at during the beet dish or leek pie. In the meantime, most of us have hardly experienced a development and he is a honorary consul in the US.

The actor became a multi -millionaire with copying television formats and has now settled with wife and children in a family villa in LA. Every now and then he lets us enjoy us. Frank Evenblij was allowed to come and film, it was already noticeable that the success had done him well. Reinout has been talking for a few years as a statesman, wise and mature. The difference with George W. Bush and Barack Obama is of course that Reinout has never been president, but we know a lot in Holland …

Reinout has outgrown us, that is more annoying for him than for us because when he is back in our little frog country – Americans don't even know where it is, what we think is totally uninteresting for them – he always strikes how bad we are aware of the world overseas.

Well, this week he was there again. He was allowed to come to Eva Jinek to talk about himself and America. The idea: a piece of Arnie and then freely struggling, but it didn't work at all. Reinout came to explain to us as a worried father of the Fatherland America. He has released himself from us, has taken off to another dimension and when he looks down from his cloud, he is surprised how small we actually are. Eva had clearly prepared for Arnie and not for this Elder Statesman. She always finds it laughter, Gerard Joling about the cabinet or Alexander Klöpping with a robot, but now she suddenly sat next to a lot of ready knowledge. She could not help but look. Reinout explained our Trump very calmly and was then overloaded online with compliments from people who normally get annoyed when they look at a talk show. Even I started to understand the news: there is really nothing wrong in the world. Nothing to worry about at least. If Reinout already sees something strange then it is here in our small silly land that Trump and JD Vance do not even know where it is. Give them wrong. According to Reinout, it doesn't matter much what we think and that is strangely enough reassuring. I can still hope that a awake editor has made a follow -up appointment so that in times of crisis, in our opinion, we can still sleep well because honorary consul Reinout explains that something we at that moment experience as strange in America is quite normal. He is the interpreter we have been waiting for a long time. He thinks that too. Ever since Arnie.

Marcel van Roosmalen Writes a column on Monday and Thursday.

To share





Mail the editors