A fuller, more up-to-date portrait reveals a people who can be just as frustrated and grumpy as other people, particularly when they are slogging down socialism’s third road to austerity.
They can even be argued to suffer from a death-fixation, not only by their road habits, but their insistence on celebrating death rather than life. Every year we are called upon at the appropriate time (which is always the day of expiration) to remember Gina Bachauer, Katina Paxinou and last month Maria Callas, Kanellopoulos, Manos Katrakis – and being not averse to foreign body-snatching – Marylin Monroe, in quick succession.
In 1981 a great ballyhoo was made over the 30th memorial for Sikelianos, but few bothered to note his centenary three years later. By the same token in 1988 we should be mourning the 164th year of Byron’s passing rather than celebrating his bicentennial. Luckily, the exact death dates of the ancients are lost, or we should be spending our lives at graveside memorials with holyva running out of our ears. One can easily imagine the announcement: “2769 years without Homer”.
Greeks are pretty partial to remembering catastrophes annually, too: the Fall of Constantinople, the Burning of Smyrna, the Nazi Entrance into Athens and now the first anniversary of the Kalamata Earthquake.
If we began with an idealized bust, fortunately this portrait of death and despair only takes us down to the waist. To get the full portrait we must now disrobe further and reveal the prime minister’s latest policy for ethnic renewal. In his speech in Thessaloniki last month he gave such a rosy picture of the Grecian economic idyll as to make Theocratos green with envy and Greeks jump back up on table tops. Within moments, austerity was drop-ped, wage freezes thawed, taxes diminished and free-market policies endorsed. If the conservatives felt he had stolen their program, so much the worse for them. Instead of studying grim Eurodim polls and OECD reports, they should have been reading the fables of Aesop – that repository of Greek political wisdom – in which the fox always runs off with the cheese. And noway was the prime minister going to celebrate disaster, either, by attending morbid ceremonies in still-shattered Kalamata. Pleading too heavy a work load, the prime minister went out on a life-loving three-day cruise in the Aegean with – well it’s high time to introduce the heroine.
Half-and-half, or miso-miso, may mean half-milk, half-cream in some countries, but in Greek it doesn’t. It apparently refers to a TV discussion show of that name, but it really identifies its MC, Dimitra Liani, an airline hostess who met the prime minister high in the sky. He was very kind to appear on her first TV program because he tends to shy away from that sort of thing. Miso-miso has since become a useful household word. So when Mitsotakis – a tall fellow who plays Aesop’s stork in Greece’s ongoing fable – landed in Thessaloniki to make his economic speech and called out rhetorically, “Andreas, all the way with wage indexation, not half-and-half”, everyone thought that was terribly clever.
On that very day, as Eleftheros Typos described it, the prime minister set off on a mini-holiday with the mayor of Vouliagmeni on the latter’s yacht, Ann Malou, accompanied by Dimitra, a girl friend and a few gorillas – that is to say bodyguards. Stopping first in lovely Kythnos, the party that evening gathered at Ipeiroti Taverna where, since the great man was instantly recognized, local PASOK folk joined in. The prime minister danced the Zeimbekiko and Dimitra clapped her hands.
The next day – Black Kalamata Day – the party reassemble at Taverna Babouni in even lovlier Syphnos. This time Dimitra danced the tsifteteli and the prime minister clapped his hands, though the gorillas weren’t so friendly. People dressed in their Sunday best, gathering to greet the great man, were rudely pushed away, “Get away, off with you, hit the road! The prime minister isn’t here for an official reception.” On Monday there was a final dip in Vathy Bay, where eyewitnesses reported the ladies topless, before returning to the tiresome mainland to take up the work load.
It seemed like one of those old romantic comedy films – updated, of course, as Aliki Vouyouklaki would never have appeared bare-chested and no one then would have thought to cast Dimitris Papamihail as prime minister.
There was nothing sly or surreptitious about this argosy. It was all out in the open. Greeks are not puritanical. If a political leader admitted at a rally to committing adultery in his heart, there would be no mass-faintings in Syntagma.
Written words doesn’t carry much clout in Greece, but words are “winged”, as Homer noticed. So when the cabinet was reshuffled six days later and all the veteran, benched PASOKs jocks jogged back onto the field, knowing looks were exchanged. It was perhaps untoward of the prime minister to have stressed moral excellence so recently in Thessaloniki. For, if people follow the example of their leader, as they are wont to do, it may be difficult for a yacht to find a berth on Kythnos.
Margaret Papandreou has sternly denied recent reports that she is starting her own party. Even more farfetched is the rumor that she may join forces with Gary Hart to revive the Center Union. He isn’t even Greek – and Mrs Papandreou only by marriage. Of course, that quintessential Greek dancing the zeibekiko on shifting Aegean sands, Anthony Quinn, isn’t Greek either. So, maybe, the full-length composite portrait of the Greeks remains incomplete and unsigned.
