After the silence

The long silence is only partly due to summer laziness. The chief reason is that thinking and writing about the desolate state of this society wears you down emotionally and morally. You may excoriate the filth gushing forth from every institution and just about every person molded by that iron-clad public mentality, but you still cannot avoid being fouled by it. You try to keep clean by averting your gaze, by constructing an alternative universe where the essentials of humanity mocked and falsified in this place are still alive. But this is also a desperate subterfuge. The evil and the ugliness keeps pounding you from all sides, and in order to keep it out of doors you have to exert a mighty effort that also sucks up every ounce of your vitality.

With respect to the economy the disaster keeps dragging on. The political establishment is engaged in a suicidal race of business as usual, with mutual recriminations about entirely inessential issues when the boat is steadily sinking. The general stupidity of the government, combined with the dissolution of the civil service and the resolute resistance to any change of what is left of it, is pushing us further and further into the whole. The prime minister keeps absenting himself on extended trips abroad, apparently imagining that public relations alone and nebulous rhetoric about the "goals of the millennium" will massage foreign attitudes, and especially that of the markets, into the illusion that the country has turned the corner. But everybody knows otherwise. At the same time, his idea of managing the crisis at home is to keep reshuffling his government adding more and more useless individuals to its roster, breaking up the ministries and giving them funny, and Orwellian, names, so that nobody knows anymore who is responsible for what. The opposition is playing their usual irresponsible game of disagreeing with everything, and blaming the reforms imposed by the foreign supervisors for the dire condition of the country, whereas this foreign assistance and control is the only thing that prevented the bankruptcy back in May and the only thing that promises an eventual return to a semblance of health if its prescriptions are carried out. As for the antediluvian left, they are tearing themselves apart about who is to be the more efficient wrecker of what is left standing. There are only two faint rays of hope: first, that the people at large seem to have realized the gravity of the situation and the nature of the dilemma we are facing, namely that we either suffer a lot in the medium term or we die completely; and second, that at this point Europe is in fact the captive member in its relation to this incorrigibly reactionary and self-devouring country. If Greece founders, then Europe does as well. So, whether they like it or not they are forced to do everything to prevent that. This means that foreign economic tutelage -thank God- is certainly going to be extended beyond the current three-year period of the rescue plan, and that eventually the colossal debt is going to be restructured in some orderly way. As for me I plan to be out of here before that happens -and plenty of others are also thinking along the same lines. It is just so thankless to talk about this situation. The body politic and social is putrescent by now, and the rot has penetrated to the very core of the collective mind.

But, to change the subject (it is not a change really, but a discussion of the same collapse from a different perspective) it is interesting to discuss another aspect of this anxious summer. I want to refer to what passes for "culture" here, and especially the way in which a faulty and degenerate sense of identity lays hands upon the works of the ancient classics and completely mangles their meaning, their aesthetic integrity, their human significance. As usual in the past couple of decades, miserable collections of untalented and illiterate nonentities calling themselves actors and directors put up shows of Aristophanes in particular, as well as of the other classical tragedians, in which they arbitrarily change the text, inserting their own inane rantings in order to make them "contemporary", and perform "experimental" or avant-garde renditions that are the silliest and most insufferable concoctions pompous puerility can come up with. All this is clothed in foolish post-modern verbiage of "subverting" the canon etc. amounting to nothing more than the license they give themselves to insult, sully and destroy the mightiest monuments of the European spirit to which these ugly dwarfs and usurpers have no intellectual or emotional connection. Their notion of Aristophanic raillery and ridicule is to dress up in clownish costumes, paint their faces in screaming colors and perform hideous contortions, in order to cajole laughter by means of gutter vulgarity rather than the majesty of the poetic word. The same with respect to tragedy, where their understanding of pathos is to scream with hoarse and brutish voice, so that one can barely hear any words at all, splash themselves with red paint to simulate blood, and make "horrible" faces and gestures, in an apotheosis of disgusting kitsch. This disease has penetrated all the way up to the venerable National Theater, which is today but a collection of these idiotic mannequins pretending to be the flower of contemporary artistry. The National Theater, roughly up to the end of the sixties, had worked out a respected tradition of tragic sublimity, which -replete with academic rigidity as it undoubtedly was- still managed to evoke the existential mystery that pervades the ancient texts. This well-honed idiom harmonized with the splendid venues of Epidaurus, Dodona, Philippi etc., which in the summer used to come alive with something approaching the soul of that stupendous poetry. Today, these hallowed places also have been demeaned and insulted as stages for the pestilential arrogance of those buffoons. This protest is surely as ineffectual and self-wounding as that about the state of politics and the economy here -but it has to be registered nevertheless.