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I COULDN'T believe it. There I was at my,
my, must emphasise the my here,
hang-out, and there was not a stool in sight
for me to sit on! I mean, what is the world
coming to? Makes you think, really, what's it
all about, this life, when your second home
away from home, your, must stress that
primordial territorial claim there, hasn't got
a seat for you? You are left placeless, just
like that, on an unassuming, ordinary
week-night. And is there relative compassion?
Do the proprietors to whom you have loyally
given half your fortune and divulged all your
innermost thoughts claw their way to helping
you out? No, because they're far too busy
looking smug and musing that "yeah, our
business has suddenly picked up, hasn't
it?"
So what do you do? Fight? Scream? Make a
scene? Sulk, skulk, become a has-been? You
shrug and hum "maybe tomorrow", that's what.
But here's the crux - do you mean it? Or has
something in your relationship with
your bar been forever tainted? And if
so, can anything ever happen to change this?
Change is the key word here, I hear a wise-man
who hasn't had a visitor in his Himalayan hut
for far too long whisper with well-concealed
excitement. Change, my child, is a part of
life, it is the essence of life, and you must
accept it. Must? Must? You ask, annoyed,
throwing your toys around the floor in a
hysterical fit you know you would laugh at
heartily if you were watching.
Greeks love change. So much, in fact, that I
am seriously considering devoting the rest of
my life and going to Leicester University in
England, where the Boon from Mills & Boons
novels actually teaches a course on Love and
Romance, to teach my own course on Greeks and
Change. I may have used a very cheesy (but
true, annoyingly enough) metaphor to make my
point, but the issue at hand is valid.
Greece
is a microcosm that captures all the changes
of the world like honey to bees. Honey is
sticky and fluid and sweet and rich. Things
can be drawn into it and once they fall in
they can move around, slowly, whilst they
languorously, and eventually, suffocate. This
is how many new things happen here. Take a
trend in fashion, music or stocks. It will be
quickly absorbed, considered sweetly, and then
not allowed to breathe because the atmosphere
is too thick with mis-thought, which results
in it not only dying a horrible death but also
making the honey more lumpy and unclear and
unappealing.
You can see trends arrive here and bang!
explode like fireworks before
everyone's eyes (there's absolutely no
problem with getting the word out on things in
this country and in particular in this city,
where an afternoon coffee with your friend at
Kolonaki's Da Capo cafe can cost you your
entire reputation because the person sitting
elbow-to-elbow with you happens to have keen
ears and not a nice bone in his body), and
everyone in turn "oohs" and "aahs".
Then there's time for gossip and analysis.
Cheap TV talk-shows, news debates, magazine
features, newspaper specials, cocktail-party
and hairdressers' (what's the difference, I
ask) discourses, during which people take
sides. Is it cool? Is it really interesting?
Shall I buy it? (You can take "buy" in both
senses of the word here), Will it improve my
image? Shall I visit it/ endorse it more than
once? How much has it been
seen/done/acknowledged abroad?
Please take note, with reference to the final
category of decision-making, that in our
language there is actually a word for being
infatuated and overly impressed with all that
comes from outside our borders. Unlike the
internationally well known Greek-origin term
xenophobia, which is a fear, distrust
or dislike of anything foreign,
xenomania, which has practically the
opposite meaning, is used almost exclusively
in
Greece
. It is used to critically label those
nationals who seem disatisfied with their
home-grown lot and, in a state of despondency,
look elsewhere (abroad) for "better"
things.
Looking for more favourable options - or
simply idealising, envying or preferring those
outside your own country is often something
that does indeed deserve to be regarded with
contempt and apprehension. Not for the fanatic
nationalism-based motive that everything is as
good as it gets right here and everything
outside our lands is foul (that would actually
be a form of xenophobia), but because
it's simply a lazy concept. Lazy both in terms
of imagination and action. The exemplary ideal
is for a society to carefully estimate its
potential and use all it has as a foundation
for building, with dedication, patience and
planning something a great deal more superior
out of it. Not simply grabbing the ready-made
product from elsewhere. The second-to-final
phase following the arrival of change is the
phase of action: who actually chooses to do
what with it. And it is through the action,
certainly not the analysis and discussion
part, that people - some relieved to have made
the "right" choice, others mortified to have
opted for unanswerable individualism - decide
whether this change is there to be further
developed or dropped.
Too often, I can put my hand in fire to
concede, the new idea is eventually dropped.
Because as I say, our society loves change.
Loving change literally means loving change,
which, not surprisingly, goes to indicate that
things can't stay the same too long. Which
(and I was never really good at maths but
this, I realise, is an equation of pure
genius) equals inconsistency and
not-muchness.
True elegance, style, beauty, and confidence
comes of consistency. Imagine immaculate
Jackie O wearing her pink little hats and
matching Givenchy suits one day and Marilyn
Monroe's pleated white halter-neck, blow-up
dress the next. Imagine
Rome
with 205 types of architectural styles every
ten square metres. Or
London
declaring itself the capital of punk rock in
the 70s only to become the capital of jazz
funk in the 71s.
Consistency comes of confidence above all
else, and this country's confidence is on the
shaky side. Certainly one may quickly rise to
doubt that by saying that if there wasn't a
shocking element of over-confidence, so
many things, both great and small, wouldn't be
left to the very final moment before they are
completed.
Greece
has a knack for doing this successfully. It is
a kind of semi-masochistic risk-taking, a
procrastination that indicates to the world at
large that our nationals are both too busy
being indulgent in the period when they should
be quietly and resolutely focussing on the
project at hand, and that they are arrogantly
over-confident.
Last-minute projects can, overall, be said to
reach successful results, but great,
deeply-rooted improvements that cannot be
shaken come from a complete, wide-ranging
change in the complex make-up of something.
And that takes far more than a last-minute
effort, regardless of the ingenuity or
charisma behind it or the astounding
impressiveness of its outcome.
By anthropomorphic terms, Greece is like
somebody with a paradigmatically magnificent
birth, a tormented and abuse-ridden childhood,
an emotionally fluctuating, confusing
adolescence, based on a lack of appropriate
therapy after all the childhood abuse (maybe a
kind old aunt helped it through its tears but
she was from a mountain village and didn't
really know the right things to say to
effectively deal with the trauma), and a
hopeful but yet vacillating adulthood. By this
definition, today's
Greece
is a stunningly beautiful and very individual
- but not actually independent - entity on
quick-'n'-powerful painkillers and trying hard
to get in tune with itself, in order to
decide, via a somewhat convoluted process of
experimentation, which future path looks best
for it.
It is the induction, the remnants of an
obscure adolescence under weird parents (like
the Turks or the Junta) that brings change.
The poet Philip Larkin wrote: "They (beep) you
up your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but
they do/ They fill you with the faults they
had/ And add some extra, just for you." Read
this over and over, and you will realise that
it is not the product of a purely disconsolate
and rebellious mind. In it lies a universal
truth that whether it was intended or not,
whether it is fair or not, our existence is
corrupted and challenged by something stronger
and swarthier than ourselves, but that at the
end of the day it is up to us to achieve
atonement.
Point is, this country is not in the
change-obsessed and socially vacillating
situation it is in because it wants to be, but
because of the tormenting upbringing it has
had to endure. Most Greeks nowadays are aware
of the challenges they must face until they
reach a more assured and admirable standing,
and, particularly the younger generations, the
more broad-minded lot, aged from their tens to
their mid-40s, are positively determined to
try their best to change things - once and for
all.
Till then, we will have to tolerate horrifying
TV shows like Ant1's Katse Kala or
Mega's Prive, which glorify even the
by-products of talkative but inarticulate
local soiree sirens. We'll have to blink a
second too long as a journalist solves a
terrorist crisis with 32 tourist lives pending
and, whistling loudly, block out three more
years of foreign criticism, rooting from a
distinct lack of signs that anything is being
done, that at our Olympics, millions of
visitors may be requested to wear bullet-proof
vests, stay in tents anywhere, and use
meditative creative visualisation techniques
in order to view the new sports
facilities.
And at the end of a day of doing all this, we
will have to choose a new bar to (temporarily)
frequent. The familiar one has changed name /
location / image and now there's no seat for
me as Theodoros Pangalos is sitting in it
sinking his woes after having changed
"friends" and posts far too many times
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