Stupidity is a fake crown that can nevertheless shine far and wide, and currently nobody is wearing this with greater pride than the main opposition party in the Greek parliament.

One would normally not waste breath or spittle in reference to this gathering of ignoramuses and incompetents, which for the six years they were in power until last October did all they could to give the final push down the cliff to the rickety contraption called the Greek state.

But when their ape-like bigotry makes headlines in Germany, at the very moment when the German ministry of finance is putting the finishing touches to the rescue package eagerly awaited by all of us here with the hope of avoiding utter ruin, they should be castigated in the firmest possible manner, lest people in the civilized world get the notion that all of us here are as brain dead as that.

On Thursday last one of their MP's for Thessaly disputed the right of the German government to prescribe fiscal rectitude for Greece on the grounds that Germany has not paid war-time reparations and that there are Greeks who are still mourning the fate of their fathers at the hands of the SS. This is taking the discussion to the lowest possible level of vulgarity, besides feeding the corresponding anti-Greek hysteria of the German tabloid press.

Someone ought to remind his Idiotic Honor that the billions of subsidies, on which his Thessalian constituents grew fat asses and bellies producing nothing and ruining the vital ecosystem of their area in the process, came primarily from the German exchequer. Besides, a huge part of the government loans that fed their appetite for luxury cars, villas and brothel fun also came from German banks. This shameless exploitation of historical traumas is a bathetic evasive action that I would not dignify with even a fart in the Honorable Member's face, except that it fosters an undercurrent of nationalist mindlessness on the streets which if not checked will make much more difficult the escape from the present deadly trap.

The incident also demonstrates that in political terms there is no alternative to the present government despite its manifest inadequacies. Its spokesmen to their credit have not adopted the Neanderthal approach of blaming the Europeans for the unconscionable squandering and stealing of European money by the Greek feudal elites. Just yesterday, at the meeting of European social democrat heads of government in London, the prime minister himself acknowledged again that Greece's plight is of its own making -although I could barely suppress a laugh seeing him seated next to the Norwegian Premier, whose country's social decency and probity is at the exact antipodes of the Greek case.

That said, it must be remarked that the authorities here are still hoping to banish the danger by applying a talking cure to the situation. They are a discombobulated crowd running in all directions like headless chickens at times. They keep desperately trying to apply rhetorical band-aids to a life-threatening wound. Their actions always come after the fact and after much resistance, which means that when they do come they are already overtaken by events.

Still, we will see how they face down the current sabotage of the country by striking customs officials. These latter are the vilest tribe of all-devouring beasts creeping on the face of this earth. They have been for generations exercising a ruthless stranglehold on the average citizen and business. Their systematic blackmail has rendered them fabulously rich, with the government rewarding this thuggery with outrageous bonuses in the hopes that some portion of what they extort from us might end up in the state's coffers. From what I hear the authorities are challenging the legality of the strike in court. Let's hope that they prevail.

All this makes even more imperative the strict and unbending supervision of Greek finances by the European authorities. This is of course humiliating for the average patriotic citizen here, who seems however to realize that the bitter pill is unavoidable if we are to escape the clutches of our domestic malefactors. What is in any case intolerable is to hear a member of the political party that put the last nail in the country's coffin emit shrill cries in defense of its national independence.