According to wise old Aristotle, catharsis is that good-all-over-feeling you get at the end of an appalling tragedy. Having been drained of emotion by the mayhem you’ve been watching, and purged by feelings of pity and fear, you are as morally cleansed as a hound’s tooth.
Although PASOK can’t be said to have been a single action, as Aris also said tragedies should be, its two terms were rich in mayhem and incidents arousing pity and fear. It also had a beginning, a middle and an end. So, after the curtain fell in 1989, the word ‘catharsis’ was picked up, meaning: tidy up the Augean stables left by the socialists.
Eight years of having your cake and eating it was bound to result in an over-abundance of waste products. So a coalition government was put together of conservatives and the Left and, led by former submarine commander Tzannis Tzannetakis, it decided to get down to the bottom of things.
Resurfacing a month later, the government announced that a few trials investigating alleged foul play were in order. Among the most important of these were the Bank of Crete Scandal, the Public Utilities Scandal and the Wire-Tapping Scandal. The first went on for nine months, and although one PASOK minister was found guilty, former prime minister Andreas Papandreou was cleared of charges (by a majority of one).
Then came the Public Utility (DEKO) trial which was concluded last April. This involved the governors and directors of government agencies accused of fraud and breach of faith for illegally transferring huge amounts of cash from their organizations to a bank which they knew was being investigated for irregularities. As a result, the corporations nearly went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by taxpayers burdened with higher rates.
Ten out of 13 accused were found guilty, but when, in mid-April, the first sentence was read out, the capacity crowd in the courtroom erupted in torrents of abuse, not against the guilty but the judges. Waving arms and fists, they pelted them with coins and cigarette lighters, forcing them to make an ignominious exit. One enthusiast even ripped the presiding judge’s microphone from its base.
No attempt at intervention was made by court officials or the police, leaving foreign journalists present puzzled that embezzlement could be so rapturously defended by people who had been called upon to pay for it.
So much for that catharsis…
Nevermind, thought the moral majority. The Wire-Tapping trial will restore the dignity of justice. The Tzannetakis ‘Coalition of Catharsis’ had added this to its laundry list when phone-tapping equipment had been discovered hidden in an air-duct leading into Confidential Conferences Service at the OTE technical center. Mr Papandreou was duly charged with ordering the Telephone Company to bug the wires of opposition politicians as well as those of his own party. If found guilty, he faced a 20-year sentence.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Papandreou refused to obey the summons calling him to testify since he had done the same a year earlier in regards to the Bank of Crete scandal at which he was tried in absentia. At the same time, the Coalition of the Left suggested that the matter be solved by political rather than by legal means, although it had voted for the trial two years earlier. Nevertheless, the public still took heart because the conservatives had always said such things were exclusively in the hands of the judiciary with whose process they would never interfere.
Again, Mr Papandreou sorrowfully brought up the possibility that civil disturbances might erupt if this travesty of a trial proceeded. So when cabinet members met on May 8 they could still hear in their ears that torrent of abuse and avalanche of coins and cigarette lighters which had greeted the sentences of the DEKO trial three weeks earlier. In any case, at that cabinet meeting a proposal to drop the charges was aired.
On May 15, 148 out of 177 MPs present in Parliament – the remaining 152 having either, like PASOK, boycotted the session, or walked out or been ‘indisposed’ – voted in favor of dropping the charges.
And so a divisive three-year epic dedicated to purging the political world of its former scandals came to end not in a noisy, show-off sort of way, but like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, with measured, quiet dignity.
Or did it? “Who killed catharsis?” demanded political gadfly MP and musician Mikis Theodorakis, who himself refused to vote.
“Not I!” said the Prime Minister, though he did cite “reasons of national unity” as the initiative to the political solution. There were whispers that the whole Macedonian issue had been manufactured simply to be rid of the issue.
Instead, the government has given a new and exciting twist to national catharsis: it has banned the use of plastic table cloths in restaurants and tavernas. These soiled symbols of Hellenic hospitality which said ‘Bon Appetit’ on them in every conceivable language are now part of the Big Bad Past. They must be replaced by “clean, good quality cotton or linen tablecloths.” Violators, the government threatens, will be prosecuted.
Not content with that major policy change, the Ministry of Transportation and the National Tourist Office have warned taxi drivers to clean up their act: dress properly, sweep out your cabs, empty ashtrays, use proper language, don’t tinker with taxi metre. Toady to tourists at every opportunity. We are expecting 10 million this year.
Mens sano in corpore sano – that’s the new slogan. Actually, the Romans pinched it from Aristotle. He probably should have kept away from drama and catharsis in the first place. Drama isn’t life: it’s an imitation of life. The public world was more his thing, and he concluded “politics is the art of the possible.” His descendants seem to have agreed.
