Dimou suggests that the decree proclaiming the founding of this law should carry the title “For the Protection of the Citizen” and the crimes committed against it labelled “Tormenting the Citizen”.
Chief among the tortures to which the citizens of Athens must submit are: wasting an hour and a half daily trying to put through telephone calls; waiting another hour or so for buses; suffering pollution which is epitomized by the sinister cloud that reappears with ominous regularity over the city; risking exposure to flash floods which inundate the city annually; circulating for hours in traffic to find legal parking areas and garnering the stack of so-called necessary documents which must accompany almost any transaction involving motor vehicles. Dimou has come to the solemn conclusion that someone must be responsible for all these things, that he should be held liable and duly punished, not only because these crimes cut the productivity of the country drastically but because they result in mental anguish as well, whose consequences are incalculable.
The labyrinth through which Dimou threads his argument is clearly bureaucratic and the Minotaur to which it inevitably leads, the culprit who devours Athenian citizens by the handfuls every day, is the Ministry of Communications. It is Dimou’s original belief that the chief purpose of a bureaucracy is to serve the nation’s citizens; not to serve itself. The journalist suggests that. communications suffer primarily because they are under a state monopoly and are therefore immune to the incentives of competition and profit with the result that working hours at the Ministry are consumed by office chat, chain-smoking and sloth. Because bureaucracy is faceless, no one feels that he is to blame for anything. This results in a state of stultifying irresponsibility on which even the primitive application of the carrot and the stick has no effect, since promotion and dismissal of civil servants are equally unlikely.
This immunity of the bureaucracy makes it impervious to criticism, even from the Fourth Estate. Complaints in the press are so common that they have become routine. By some perverse inner logic the permanent complaint lodged against the Establishment has led to the permanent establishment of the complaint.
Realizing that any attempt to remove civil servants or restructure the bureaucracy itself would be an effort of Sisyphian futility, Dimou resorted to a poll among his readers which would lead to the presentation of an annual award (in the official jargon of prize-giving): “to such persons or organizations which have contributed most to the disrespect for human dignity and to the misery of the average citizen”.
The award, called “The Squeezed-Out Lemon Prize” is a beribboned-decoration of a squeezed lemon, wrought in gold and designed by the famous Greek sculptor, Theodoros. The citation accompanying the 1979 award reads in part as follows:
In the name of those who are trampled and squeezed daily into antique buses;
In the name of those whose trains, due at seven o’clock, arrive at nine;
In the name of those who daily search for parking places;
In the name of those who wait: for buses, for letters, for telephone connections, for planes;
In the name of those who are obliged to buy safety belts which no one wears; to observe yellow lines on streets which no one obeys; to study a traffic code which is never applied; to choke on public vehicles which have no controlled mechanical check-ups; to hazard against drivers who pass inadequate tests; to stand in line at the Ministry snarled in red tape; to pay fines for cars towed away from in front of their homes because of the incapacity of the state to provide legal parking areas; to waste hours and energy every day in getting to their destinations:
The 1979 prize of the Squeezed-Out Lemon is awarded to the Ministry of Communications. The results of the poll gave such an overwhelming majority in favor of the Ministry that silver and bronze awards for runners-up will’not be handed out this year.
As if to prove its impervioushess to-such gestures, the Ministry of Communications now has allowed the public in on its latest weighty deliberations. Showing its great concern for improving transportation conditions, the Ministry announces that it is planning to change the color of the city’s taxis whose drab gray hue adds so little cheer to the streets of Athens. Among the proposals are blue with a white stripe, for patriotic reasons; yellow, to”make the vehicles stand out; and green, presumably to make up for the lack of trees. Others, however, have proposed black to suggest a period of indefinite mourning.
UNICEF in Greece
IN early May, Donald Allen, Director of the Information Bureau of UNICEF for Europe, arrived in Athens to visit the National Committee which supervises that organization in Greece. Allen, a former journalist with The New York Times and Newsweek, has dedicated himself since 1972 to the welfare of the world’s children. UNICEF began as an emergency relief program for the children of Europe after World War II but has since expanded its chief objectives to the plight’ of children in the developing Third World.
“If a bomb with the power of the one that destroyed Hiroshima fell today,” Allen said in a interview, “it would be headline news. The fact that 100,000 children die every three days now is not considered news. Our news is not the ephemeral kind which fill the papers, but the kind which is permanent.”
Allen in his interview emphasized the inescapable condition of interdependence in the world today from which no country can escape, and pointed to the oil crisis in the Middle East as a classic example of it. The dire condition of the world’s children should be everyone’s concern: 400 million have no health care, 300 million live in areas where the water h polluted, 100 million suffer from malnutrition, and 175 million are without schools. 15 million children die every year in developing countries and 5 million in the developed ones.
The chief purpose of the Information Bureau of UNICEF is to sensitize the public to the needs of children. The enormity of the problems, however, tends to numb the public rather than arouse it. Today, emergency relief only plays a small part in the total expenditure of UNICEF, as the organization concentrates on helping countries to help themselves. While, for example, UNICEF may provide the serum or vaccine which is used in an inoculation at the cost of the price of a pack of cigarettes, it is up to nations themselves to provide the means for bringing health care to their people.
Greece joined UNICEF only in 1978. Although the country is today considered developed, and therefore falls into the category of self-help, the local organization has little financial means. As in most developed countries, the problems of children here are social and psychological ones. Anyone, including foreigners, can join the Greek Committee of UNICEF and work on a volunteer basis. Its headquarters are at Xenias 1, Plateia Mavili.
Kifissia Endangered
THE late poet George Seferis once wrote that he preferred the cool breezes of Kifissia to the skyscrapers of New York. Today he might easily have preferred the zephyrs of Central Park to the highrises of Kifissia. For generations, Athenians have enjoyed making excursions to their city’s most famous suburb, known for its gardens and villas, for its tavernas and cafes and even at one time, for its waterfalls and splashing brooks. The water has long since been diverted into the city’s hydraulic system. Much of the pinewoods have since been cut down and now a growing number of Athenians have escaped the city to buy flats in Kifissia. As a result, many old houses (whose oddities caught the affectionate eye of Osbert Lancaster in the 1940s and led him to pronounce Kifissia as having some of the most extraordinary suburban architecture in Europe) are being pulled down to make way for apartment houses.
Yet old Kifissia has been able to preserve some of its fin de siecle atmosphere. Modern buildings and shops set up beside tumbled down rubble walls, overgrown gardens and sagging neo-classical, Gothic, Moorish and Italianate facades give an ambiguous charm to a town that is decaying and reviving at the same time. Athenians still flock to Kifissia in the spring and summer to stay in the spa-like hotels of Kefalari, to visit the annual flower show, to enjoy the cool evenings in taverna gardens, to take horse and carriage rides up Othonos Street lined with plane trees and, traditionally, to steal flowers from Tatoiou Street gardens on the first of May. Kifissia has appropriately been called “the lungs of Athens” and as such it has served the city well.
Traffic-circulation planners, however, are no lovers of lungs, nor are they much good as planners, either. When the National Road was being built nearly twenty years ago, no auxilliary road was built to connect it with the eastern sections of Athens. Meanwhile, Kifissia and the suburbs north of it grew. The result has been a clogged Kifissia Road with a bottleneck in the town itself largely due to through-traffic, much of it commercial, with oil tankers, cranes and military vehicles carrying explosives. Planners have therefore proposed making the main street into a one-way thoroughfare going north, and widening Tatoiou Street, making it one-way moving south and constructing a bridge over the railroad tracks at the cost of 500 million drachmas and joining this route to the main Kifissia Road just below the town. The widening of Tatoiou Street alone would remove two thousand trees, destroying its gardens and a good part of the town’s surviving attraction. What is curious, if not arrogant, about this plan, is that it is called a “temporary” solution. In five years’ time — and it is unlikely that the bridge which has particularly irked the local population can be completed in this time — it will be supplanted by another plan.
It would be foolish to accuse such planners of contempt for the past. They are ignorant of it, and are motivated most likely by a narrow, transitory, despotic utilitarianism. Athens is a tableau vivant of the results of such methods. But that has been happening over many years and a more aware, more voluble and a more concerned public is growing to curb the actions of official irresponsibility.
In the last month alternative plans have been drawn up and submitted by a citizens’ organization which wants to preserve central Kifissia. Over one thousand signatures have been gathered in protest of the original plan which has, of course, only been submitted to the authorities for study — but which, interestingly, was discovered to exist only by chance. The medieval darkness which invests so many similar ministerial considerations often only comes to the light of day when the bulldozers arrive at dawn to assert their rights of public domain without prior warning — and of course without compensation. A thousand signatures may seem few in a town like Kifissia which today boasts 50,000 voters. But it is hardly a boast: of these, only 8,000 vote from Kifissia; the rest are recent arrivals who have not yet transferred their voting privileges from the precincts of their previous domiciles.
As in any community, in a matter of this kind, there is a clash of interests — commercial ones which want as many passers-by coming through town as possible, and those of residents who would like to preserve the town for the attractions that drew them there in the first place.
The lack of effective local government has been one of the banes of democratic process in this country for a long time. Servility to authority goes far back into the days of Byzantine overlords and the Ottoman occupation. After the War of Independence, authority came from abroad, and later, domestically, from above, dictated from a highly centralized government in Athens. The lack of responsibility, freely taken, on the part of citizens will inevitably lead to irresponsibility on the part of government.
Effective pressure from private institutions and citizen-groups, however, has increased in recent years. In the case of Kifissia, local foundations and institutions are alert to the problem, and a growing number of people have become aware that the haphazard, short-sighted, narrow-minded planning that Athens has suffered must not be allowed to spread.
