It was none other than Professor Panayiotis Kefalosystolakis, the eminent Greek psychiatrist. “You look depressed, my friend,” I said to him. “Anything seriously wrong?”
He sighed and said nothing for a few moments as I sat in another armchair beside him and unfolded The Times.
Then he turned to me and said: “Six thousand, no less.”
“Six thousand what?” I asked, uncomprehending.
“Six thousand psychiatrists are going to descend upon us between 12 and 19 October from the four corners of the globe to take part in the Eighth World Congress of Psychiatry which will be held in the Peace and Friendship Stadium.”
I pondered over this piece of information but failed to see why it should depress him.
“Are you involved in it in any way?
Are you having organizational problems?
Why are you looking so glum about it?” I asked.
He sighed again. ”I’m only reading a paper on ‘The conflict between the amesos and the avrio in Greek society’, that’s all, and there don’t seem to be any organizational problems, now that the delegates from the West African countries and Haiti have agreed not to demonstrate voodoo magic by turning all the South African delegates into zombies.”
“No,” he went on, ”what depresses me is that all those six thousand delegates are after our jobs here – well, perhaps not all of them, but certainly those from the EC countries who can set up practice in Greece any time they like.”
“They’re all coming pour tater le terrain , as they say in French. To test the ground. And Lord knows, it’s an extremely fruitful terrain.”
“You may, or may not have noticed that I have a vast and exceedingly lucrative practice. But, besides that, you will recall that no less an authority than the former prime minister and president of the Republic, none other than Mr Karamanlis himself, broke a long silence just before the last election to remark that Greece is an ‘ infinite lunatic asylum’. Many agreed that he never spoke a truer word. You may also have noticed that the recently divorced spouse of the man who governed the country from 1981, in an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show, quite frankly admitted that Papandreou ‘has taken leave of his senses’ . So what more proof do you want?”
“Oh come now,” I said, “there may be a higher proportion of lunatics in both high and low places in this country, but that doesn’t mean everybody is mad, or that there would be enough cases to provide as good a living for all the EC psychiatrists if they moved here.”
Kefalosystolakis eyed me coldly. Then he picked up the newspaper on the coffee table by his side and said: “Before you came I was reading this interesting item in today’s Elefiherotypia.
I quote : ‘The secretary-general of the ministry of transport and the president of the state bus company reported yesterday that the re are today 800 buses in service in Athens which have either done 600,000 kilometres or been driven for the past six years without maintenance of any kind. Some of them have floorboards that are so rotten, passengers have often stepped right through them, to find their legs dangling in empty space, some suffering injuries and suing the bus company.’
Now, I ask you, what people in their right mind would tolerate a situation like this? You will say to me that if 39 percent of the electorate was crazy enough in the last election to vote for a party that has ruined the country’s economy and perpetrated scandals and fraud that are unprecedented in Greek history, th en the little matter of riding buses with the risk of being dropped off at any moment through the middle of the bus is nothing by comparison.”
“That still doesn’t make Greece ‘an infinite lunatic asylum”‘ I remarked. “You want more examples of Greek irrationality? All right, who else in the world would accept to pay the price of a three-room apartment for a small car that he can only take into the city center on alternate days, while paying an exorbitant road tax, being fleeced for servicing and repairs by prima donna mechanics and risking his life on roads that are badly built, lamentably signposted and rarely policed, and then being hoisted to a higher tax bracket for owning a car!”
“Who else in the world would accept to spend hours in queues at post offices, banks, and government services when he is, as a taxpayer, bearing the cost of thousands of civil servants who sit around in other parts of the building doing nothing.”
“Who else in the world would accept a situation whereby he is refused accommodation in resort hotels in his own country because they are fully booked by foreigners paying a fraction of what he would have been charged.
And if he tries to go somewhere in the off-season, the hotels are either closed or freezing cold with no heating or hot water.”
“Who else would put up with a public education system that is so totally inadequate that he has to send his children to private schools and spend a fortune on private lessons to boot, and then send them abroad for a higher education if they are to obtain a degree of any value.”
“All right, all right,” I interrupted.
“You’ve made your point. I’ll admit we must be crazy to put up with all these things. But why should we think the foreign psychiatrists will do a better job than our local ones?”
“Because, my friend, another irrational aspect of the Greek character is to consider anything coming from abroad to be better than the local product.”
“Well,” I said, “present company excepted, I would say that generally speaking, they are correct in the assumption.”
