But as things worked out (or, rather, didn’t work out) the Great Ethnarch had to be pressed back into service, since being saved is one of Greece’s frequent necessities. Many years ago – way back in the days when mules outnumbered Mercedes – Mr Karamanlis, then Prime Minister, said of his fellow countrymen, as he was enticing them towards the EC, that they would only learn to swim if they were thrown into the sea. He may for once have been wrong, for they have failed almost every swimming lesson since and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is often the only way the country is able to go on living. (An absurd notion since everyone knows that Greece will never die.)
This year, however, in his capacity as Chief of State, President Karamanlis expanded his opinion saying, “Nowadays, the whole world looks like an enormous madhouse.”
Many Greeks felt their tranquility of mind restored when they heard this, since the earlier statement had led them to fear that they might be alone in some kind of solitary confinement, but now, they could feel once again the warmth of human body contact, huddled together in a nest with a lot of other cuckoos.
The increasingly painful events of this past month only confirm the President’s view from the bridge up in the commanding suburb of Politeia, sadly reinforcing the belief that wise people, though alike, are few, but that everyone is mad in his own way.
Now Cable News Network has stepped in from Atlanta and saved us from °ur claustrophobic local concerns. Like, the deus ex machina in one of our old tragedies, it has descended into our living rooms and consoled us, saying there are more tragedies in the world than we could ever have conceived of.
CNN is a crash course in more than just ‘Scud Meets Patriot’. With more than enough Greek reality for us to cope with – with what Mr Mitsotakis calls “its narrow and sordid preoccupations” – we can now plop ourselves down, watch life from Atlanta, and find that the view of reality from there is even less real than it is from here.
On CNN the Gulf War is looking like all the other epics we have been watching on Antenna and Mega channels. The only thing which convinces us that we are watching the news and not fiction, is there isn’t anyone on the screen looking like Peter OToole, and instead we have comely Sharyl Attkisson whose hairstyle even improves on the fashion statements made by the anchorwomen on ERT, looking as if blow-dried, if not blown up, by Desert Storm.
Another merit of CNN is to hear as well as see President Bush and not have him distorted by the overvoice of some hysterical Peloponnesian newscaster. The talent the Washington government spokesmen display by saying almost nothing in an endless and repetitious torrent of mostly meaningless words should be closely studied by Mr Vyron Polydoras.
Even viewers who have taken honors in their Cambridge Proficiency Exams are enriching their Anglo-Saxon vocabularies, and Athens cab drivers instead of screaming blasphemies, debrief each other in technologically accurate artillery terms.
Another good thing is that the war has encouraged people to look at maps. Geography is not a strong point in education here, and most teenagers only seem to know that Greece is so squeezed into the lower righthand cor-ner of European maps that Rhodes has to be put in box and relocated usually west of Crete, awakening in the unalert a mirage of Atlantis.
Now, strategic maps of the Middle East has Greece, unexpectedly, tucked into the upper lefthand corner with Corfu chopped off.
If Greeks put their geographical and historical heads together realizing that map layouts are politically motivated, they might see Greece in the middle, the land bridge between the East and West. Culminations in Greek civilization have always rested on this fact, fighting to keep the trade routes open. They fought the Persians because they sought to obstruct them; Alexander the Great opened them up again. The Roman Empire set up barriers which the Byzantine Empire pulled down again, opening up the spice and silk routes.
Like Janus, Greece looks in opposite directions at the same time. The EC has made great strides in economic development and this is tempting. Even Mr Karamanlis says Greece “belongs to the West” but it really doesn’t. Its off-ish, on-ish relations with the EC is a reflection of this. The Gulf War has exposed the EC’s political weakness and it would be rash, on grounds of political partisanship, to knock the former socialist policy of developing closer relations with Middle East, since it is in Greece’s best interest to do so. That’s the way it has always been.
The view from the bridge of the frigate Limnos in the Red Sea is quite different from that of a Turkish frigate in the Eastern Mediterranean let alone from the Forrestal in the Gulf. Self-interest in nation-states guides all, which is why Greece keeps bringing up the parallel between the invasions of Kuwait and Cyprus, looks nervously at Turkey’s strategic position on the border of Iraq, opens up its NATO bases in Crete and prepares its hospitals there while peace rallies take place in Athens, and sends its fleet-footed Foreign Minister to Cairo and Damascus. In praying for a swift and positive end to hostilities, it might add a word of entreaty to Allah and Jehovah, too – just to be on the safe side.
