After the chilliest and wettest spring in a decade, the heat suddenly turned on, creating a dramatic atmospheric inversion and sending ozone and nitrogen dioxide levels to record highs. While the Environment Ministry was listing all its recent accomplishments, hundreds of Athenians were sent to hospital with respiratory complaints.
If the climate is subject to change, the measures – and counter-measures -to the meteorological crises it causes are predictably ingenious. When an emergency measure was announced forbidding any vehicle into the center of town without at least four passengers, citizens calmly packed their black-swathed grannies and aunties into their cars and headed for the black cloud. Luckily, ancient Greek women raised on clean-aired mountain-sides can survive anything, so there were no casualties.
Because it was end-of-the-year examination week, and students and teachers had to get to their testing venues, restrictions on traffic circulation had to be lifted two days later. In desperation, all the government could think of doing, was to implore the public to stay home.
Athenians may not be the most public-spirited people but they can put up with a lot. Even for them though, there is a limit to how many home-delivery pizzas one can consume or the number of Chinese dinners rushed through the smog by Flying Waiters, SA.
The climate that was being talked about last month was not confined to the environment. Prime Minister Mitsotakis talked about the need for an appropriate investment climate, and then moved on, naturally, to politics. “A positive political climate exists for the governement… but a political consensus is being hampered by internal conflicts within opposition parties.”
He was, of course, referring to the ongoing Koskotas trialat which former Premier Andreas Papandreou has been charged with embezzlement, and the split in the Left Coalition. Although Mr Mitsotakis has expressed the hope that Mr Papandreou will be cleared of all charges against him and that the communists will continue to play a significant role in political life, the uncharitable may detect the trace of a smile flickering over his face as he says so.
It is interesting, in the garish light of the Koskotas business, that Mr Papandreou has expressed his deep concern for the moral climate of the country on sundry occasions. The whole sorry matter of the Bank of Crete scandal with its trumped up charges against him and three of his ministers, he regards being in very poor taste. One can hardly disagree, when one sees a confessed criminal, extradited from the US to Greece, given a hero’s reception on arrival. The cavalcade which swept the former banker from the airport to Korydallos prison was royally pompous.
In the jail’s most exclusive wing, the once mighty junta rulers of the country were shunted off to cells overlooking the inner court to make way for the illustrious newcomer. .Sic transit gloria mundi.
Always looking beyond the particular and the transient, Mr Papandreou ignored these unsavory details. “When I speak of crudity and a fall in public standards, I do not refer to matters relating to an individual but to broader political ethics,” he said.
“He condemns what he has caused!” spluttered the government spokesman, but 40.1 percent of the electorate ignored the outburst because they believe that the great man has been framed.
President Karamanlis, using an even wider lens, takes a global view of the political climate. At a luncheon honoring European Community ambassadors on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Greece’s accession to the EC, he said, “From the day that Mikhail Gorbachev announced his revolutionary reforms and overturned the balance between the two blocs, ‘the balance of terror’, the world has entered a new phase of history filled with hope for the free human being, but also concern and uncertainty about international life.”
Two events last month vividly marked that transition, both having to do with the collapse of the old order. On 23 June, the Coalition of the Left formally split between the hardliners and the reformers, and five days later, the American flag was lowered over Ellinikon military airbase after 44 years.
The origins of both events were historically closely connected. If the Cold War is defined as beginning with the Truman Doctrine, then it can be said to have started here in March, 1947. As a result, the Ellinikon airbase went into operation later in the year and KKE was formally outlawed, a suppression that lasted for 28 years, fostering or prolonging a climate of acrimony and tension whose effects are still felt.
Yankides sta spitia sas! was the most popular graffito in the country for a generation. Chalked out on hillsides in the Pindos, painted on whitewashed windmills in the Cyclades, or fashionably sprayed with Glo-paint on the walls of Athenian suburban gardens, it tried to sum up all of life’s problems in four words. Nobody would want it back, but the Cold War superficially simplified things, as so many Eastern Europeans say. Today, Yankees have gone home.
“Humanity is going through a crisis in values,” the President went on, “a transition period characterized by intense concern, manifested by anxiety or violence, because people desire to distance themselves from one way of life and seek a new one… In other words, humanity is like a ship which has mislaid its compass.”
Having been buffetted for decades by circumstances almost wholly beyond its control, Greece is rummaging around looking for its nautical instruments. Mr Bush is visiting here this month; Mr Gorbachev has promised to come. The relationships are different; the climate has changed; and the country must gain confidence to steer its own course.
