(NB: a friend who's a philosophy professor filled me in on who Leibniz was....)

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There are, naturally, a number of main roads named after Namibian heroes from the anti-colonial and independence struggles: Hosea Kutako Drive, Hendrik Witbooi Drive, and of course Sam Nujoma Drive.

A few major roads are named after foreigners: Robert Mugabe Avenue intersects with both Nelson Mandela Avenue and Fidel Castro Street. Way on the other side of town is Mahatma Gandhi Street. And Laurent Desire Kabila is in the opposite direction. Hmmm. That has to mean something.

But the neighborhoods are where the street names get really interesting. There are plenty of German and Afrikaans names that mean little or nothing to me. But then you start to see themes...

One neighborhood has streets named after composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Puccini, Mahler, Bach.

An area nearby has constellations and celestial bodies: Aries, Hercules, Taurus, Libra, Hydra, Mercury, Andromeda, Perseus.

There's the obligatory African-game neighborhood, with Eland, Gnu, Springbok, Impala and Eland streets. Then there's a different kind of game a little further south, where Eland meets Rugby Street, which intersects with Cricket, Netball and Softball streets.

The first street-theme I noticed was in a neighborhood called Academia, near the university campus. The streets of Academia are all named after philosophers, although I have to confess that I don't recognize them all. Leibniz? Who's that?

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if there was some kind of grand theory behind the street plan. Is there a reason why Darwin intersects with Plato and Aristotle but not with Locke or Aquinas? Aquinas meets Sartre but not Voltaire. Socrates ends at Bacon. Plato turns into Jasper somewhere. Hume is nowhere near Hegel.

I can't make any sense out of it.

Yup, it has become a specifically US American phenomenon. The religious zealots, thank God, left Europe when they feared that their kids might become  influenced and thus, in their eyes, corrupted by the exposure to a too liberal European culture.

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819

Nothing to do with the difference between the two - that's about foreign policy. Buchanan is the very incarnation of the extreme Christian right on the culture war front. And while Pat Buchanan is certainly placed within a European tradition, it's not one of the better ones, given his love for Franco and somewhat more qualified appreciation for Mussolini. These are traditions I wish the Europeans would keep to themselves - his tradition is that of interwar right wing populist, authoritarian and semi-fascist fundy Catholicism. Frankly, I'd vote for the neocons over Pat any day -  he wouldn't be as bad for the rest of the world, but he'd be much worse here at home i.e. where I live.

Neither Dutschke's assassin nor the local CDU campaigners were Axel Springer :-) In the sixties, there was definitely a culture war all over the West, in West Germany, Axel Springer and his papers were propagandists in it, not lone players.

I disagree with your narrow definition of the American cultural war as Christian fundies vs. everyone else. The a broader and long-time conflict trhat involved the civil rights movement, Roe vs. Wade, gun control, economics, entertainment etc., and roughly maps to liberal vs. conservative, is often called culture war. If you check Wikipedia, they describe different interpretations of a wider culture war. As it happens, Pat Buchanan himself features prominently in the article as a cultural warrior.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}