So, Stavros Xarchakos last year decided he too would try to enter the Chamber, but from the right. This he succeeded in doing. Now, only after a few months, he has made a run for the exit from the center, slamming the front door and making a great deal of non-musical noise.
Greece, he said was a quagmire and becoming alienated from its cultural origins. “The present political system is corroded, deeply anti-intellectual, anti-ethical and anti-human.”
The country’s dinosaur-like leaderships did not possess, he went on to say, “the sense of obligation and responsibility to step down immediately and are tyrannizing the country.”
Adding that Greece is not only socially and economically bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well, he announced his resignation and said he would not be running in the next “pointless” election. Mr Xarchakos was very out-of-sorts, as a lot of people are nowadays, and that was only on the third day of the nationwide garbage strike.
The purpose of the strike of 6000 garbage collectors who belong to the Local Administration and Workers Federation, was to demand full contracts for about 17,000 temporary workers. Now, as most people know, one of the reasons why Greece is economically bankrupt (as Xarchakos maintains), is that it has an absurdly inflated number of civil servants who have nothing to do, or get in the way of those who do have something to do.
A gentleman who was here from Italy recently, where they have swollen bureaucratic problems too, noted perspicaciously, “Aha, ha! I see civil servants here do not work in the afternoons.” “Oh, no,” said his Athenian friend, “They don’t work in the mornings. They don’t’ come in the afternoons.”
In a country whose population is under 10 million, there are well over 400,000 employees in the public sector who follow work hours of sorts, and at least that many more who are on the government payroll as pensioners. That doesn’t seem to leave many people who have to support themselves, and their families. Of course, most of these people, who are perfectly able-bodied men and women, had been hired in turn for their vote-giving favors.
Being an election year (twice), 1989 sowed another great crop of idlers to put on the public rolls. Many, however, were employed on a temporary basis, and it is these who, now ready for harvest, are demanding permanent jobs until their days of generous pensions begin.
On the fifth day of the garbage strike, party leaders rejected price rises on petrol and tobacco, and other items which might irk their constituents, and the paying off of mammoth state deficits was delayed once more. Professor Zolotas, one of the “Four Sages” who transformed the economy of post-war Western Europe, was being hamstrung by the recalcitrant, short-sighted follies of a domestic economy whose problems could be solved if there were the will and the wisdom around to do so.
Until now Athens had been merely unsightly, but a strong wind accompanied by a light rain on the ninth day of the garbage strike, transformed the city into a vast, rancid imam bayildi, a whiff of which would have caused any stalwart Imam to have lost consciousness permanently.
On the seventh day of the garbage strike, Professor Zolotas was not so true-loving and avuncular as before, and mumbled something about printing more money which, with the inflation rate over three times that of the EC’s average, would, of course, be disastrous. But given the limited grasp of fiscal matters on the part of many workers, it may have sounded like a clever idea.
This fit of pique on the Prime Minister’s part suggested to the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) the bright of holding a general strike. With 1.3 million members, it could turn Athens into a complete, if smelly, standstill.
To prepare for this great moment, the 87,400 temporary civil servants embarked on a walkout 48 hours earlier. And for good measure, the taxi drivers’ union which, like malaria, breaks out again when the body is in a weakened state, announced another strike, saying that it would have nothing to do with the new Draconian pollution measures which are meant, perhaps wrong-headedly, only to prolong Athenian life in this vale of noxious gases.
Mr Theodorakis, who has lately dropped parliamentary dialogue to get on the scent of terrorists, may be persuaded once again to listen to the voices of his first love, the divine Muses. Then he, and Mr Xarchakos, who is temporarily out of work (but not a civil servant), could get together and collaborate on some uplifting Requiem Mass worthy of this apparently terminal political state. In fact, it might be a good idea if all MPs retired and took up music. They would certainly be better at it than governing.
