But it will be generally agreed that on the evening of October 18, 1983, Prime Minister Papandreou delivered a speech in Constitution Square before a great number of people. The word ‘great’ is admittedly vague, but it will have to do.
Beyond this hard core of fact, however, things at once begin to get uncertain and foggy and nefos-like. Nevertheless, the local newspapers manfully took up the event and gave it full coverage. The celebration of PASOK’s second year at the helm was called, amongst other things, ‘a Roman triumph’, ‘a Pyrrhic victory’, ‘an earthquake’, ‘a fiasco’, a ‘monotonic reprint of The Social Contract’, ‘a fiesta’, ‘a swan-song’. It was said to be the largest crowd scene since King of Kings; the widest desert waste since Lawrence of Arabia. So much for the text.
Photo reportage, it is said, tells all. In this case it was better: it was even more than all. There were photo splashes aimed up Queen Sofias showing people massed all the way to Larissa and down Queen Amalias as far as the airport – and possibly to Cape Sunion. Other papers showed front page photos of pastoral scenes of a few out-of-towners loitering around the shrubbery in the center of the same square at the same time.
Avoiding the awkwardness of exact numbers, who were these people and where did they come from?
Straight from the shoulder: they were every patriotic Athenian brought together in a great outburst of spontaneous joy and thanksgiving for the government’s getting rid of foreign bases and setting the domestic economy back on its feet. Or, straight from the hip: they were nothing but party stalwarts and hit-men raked in from all parts of the country (leaving not one to guard the green) and packed into every available pullman which, during the event, were parked three-deep around the circumference of the Acropolis.
The significance of this gathering is as clear as the above. It means that PASOK will sweep in with a clear majority at the next election and will stay in office until the return of the Elgin marbles. It means that PASOK has run out of steam and that New Democracy, with her virginity miraculously restored in the pool of opposition, will leap off her broomstick and jump blithely back into the whole right and central sections of the parliamentary chamber. It means that Aeroflot is packing up the remains of Lenin, transporting them here, and setting them up in the Zappeion. It means that the Greek people, like Ivory soap, will vote a 99.8% pure white ballot in the next election.
If this in-depth news analysis seems shallow, there is a theory worth looking into. It is said that the people who watched the event on television could judge the matter sensibly for themselves. Indeed, there did appear to be an enormous number of people on the screen, through the banks and banks of floodlights (courtesy of Phillips, and, via ERT, compliments of the tax-paying Greek laos) gave a Wizard-of-Oz look to the crowd and the surroundings. There were many patches of green flags all bobbing up and down in unison. The chanting of slogans was clear, manly and uplifting. There was none of that confusion which marred those disorderly rallies which took place at the time of the restoration of democracy in 1974. Mr. Papandreou spoke well. The banks of red geraniums below his podium set up on a vast exhedra at the foot of the square looked pretty. And it didn’t rain, as certain weather casters predicted – it only came five hours later, in a deluge.
If this version appears to give off a faint whiff of truth, there is an accompanying rumor that should be mentioned. Namely, that the whole program had been filmed by ERT in an enormous studio built for this particular purpose up in Maroussi. Or, more logically, that the live show in Constitution Square was spliced in artfully with the filmed one. At least this could explain some of the more startling discrepancies in the reportage.
In either case, move over Gandhi: PASOK “greenguards” will sweep the Oscars in Hollywood next year and the more flamboyant sectors of the Greek media will, by acclamation, be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is no business like show business, and big business always wants to be bigger.
