Foolery doth shine around the orb like the sun, if we take Shakespeare's word for it -and he was known to be partial to some fools at least, such as Yorick or Lear's attendant. That there are many types of folly, some of them praiseworthy with Christianity chief among them, was adequately explained also by Erasmus, although neither he nor his English epigone clarified the issue as to the ratio of worthy fools to the worthless kind.

Experience, however, can be said to have established that the average fool is also an unmitigated scoundrel. This is the type who lives by the motto "fiat stultitia mea, pereat mundus", unable of course to comprehend that if the world goes under then all of its contents also tumble down into destruction including the fool's own likes and dislikes.

The most succinct definition of such self-defeating foolery is the preference for one's material desire of the moment, the gratification of which will clearly lead to the frustration of the sum total of them in the medium term. The portion of the Greek populace currently incited onto the streets by a corrupt union leadership, whose activities in collaboration with the criminal political elite led to the present economic break down in the first place, vie unfortunately for the distinction of being the prime example of such suicidal ignorance.

They are frothing at the mouth at the prospect of giving up ten percent of their current income as the price to secure the rest ninety per cent in the future. Their declared preference is to keep one hundred percent now, even though this will lead to the complete forfeiture of everything first thing tomorrow morning.

They are egged on to rage against the very institution (the EU) whose generous outlays made possible the extravagant mode of living of an aristocracy of public employees, in complete and scandalous disharmony with any productive labor performed by the said privileged cliques. It is these despicable drones that have brought the life of the capital to a standstill in the past few days, occupying the government budget office and preventing traffic in the main thoroughfare of Athens with the authorities just looking on. It is these thugs, a few dozen former Olympic airways employees violently claiming the outrageous grants and pensions promised to them by the previous government of idiots, liars and quacks, that have unfurled the flag or revolution (!!!!) and national honor all in one. And to defend these kinds of anti-social privilege a few thousands of professional protesters (whose mental operation has been usurped by a reflex of screaming systematically bred in them by abominable party hacks) are periodically trotted out by political leaderships whose victory in the current arm wrestling would condemn these same unfortunate fools to perpetual misery.

No wonder, then, that the game is by no means over, despite the relative calm of the past few days. The prime minister managed, through a round of skilled and dignified diplomacy from Berlin to Washington, to pose the Greek problem in terms that elicited a sympathetic response abroad. But behind this political screen the core wound is still festering. For his enemy is within. And if he loses his nerve in tackling the elements in his own party responsible for (and still defending) the cancerous growth of our anti-social public sector, then the ruin will not be finally averted.

This is not to suggest that the sweeping measures he announced before he embarked on his foreign peregrinations are just. On the razor's edge of destruction they could not possibly be. Masses of people are going to pay for the misdeeds of feudal elites that pampered them with false vistas of social largesse while feeding the insatiable rapacity of parasitic minorities. Still, big electoral majorities did support these mendacious peddlers of a fake paradise. Besides, the stolen billions cannot be gotten back. The only hope is that through a shock revamping that will introduce a modicum of honesty in the administration of the state a new beginning will be made for the sake of the next generation.

Beyond that what is needed here is a true cultural revolution -pardon the expression for its odious historical associations. This, as I have written before, would amount to the restoration of social labor as the leading value and claim in society, after a generation in which socialism came to mean to defraud and shake down and despoil the common weal for the sake of private interest, the most successful looters and parasites posing as the chief "revolutionary" example to follow. It is not in an ironic vein that I suggest that this is tantamount to a return to authentic Marxist values.

One last sad thought. The most deleterious consequence of the current financial breakdown is that it has distracted us from the real task, which is the cultivation of a new collective consciousness. The enterprise of knowledge and culture has been waylaid by the need to deal with the abominable machinations of our worthless social and political leaders. It has been to a great extent inevitable that to dissent from the malefactions of our rulers one would have to roll in the gutter along with them. Just to witness the moral and mental putrefaction of our public space ipso facto soiled and spoiled and contaminated one's own conscience and thought. One found oneself hating and despising, even though it went against one's own best instincts. But hatred and contempt is never a constructive moral or social sentiment, even if its object is the truly hateful and contemptible. The good can never win by evil means. But unfortunately the extremity of the general predicament forced even the best to become in some sense the same as the targets of their aversion. So we all got sucked up in a mighty vortex of ill-feeling, malediction and vindictiveness. This descent into a welter of turpitude, aggressiveness and intolerance is not yet ended. But maybe we are approaching rock bottom.

So, finally the Greek prime minister bit the bullet. He did it after five months of prevarication trying to appease the old-school "socialists" of his own party, the ones that laid the foundations for the present disaster, the ones that were responsible for loading the pre-election manifesto of the governing party with all kinds of mendacious promises flying in the face of reality.

No matter the delay and its heavy cost: he still has to be lauded for the radical decisions that he took, admittedly with the watchdogs of the EU breathing fiercely over his shoulder.

The measures are not just, for they will hit hard not the party-affiliated caste that stole the European billions and secreted them away in Swiss bank accounts in order to finance a disgustingly lavish lifestyle, but the millions of ordinary citizens who have been bled white over the years in order to support a lying and cheating government in cahoots with the aforementioned kleptocrats.

But, at this extreme point where survival is at stake retroactive justice is simply not possible.

If, despite this, the decades-long orgy of debauchery and exploitation of our "socialist" feudal classes is finally ended and the pseudo-welfare state that they erected is dismantled, the price is worth paying for the sake of our children.

But this is the beginning of a hesitant beginning that may be easily derailed if the traditional inertia of blatantly egoistic interests posing as the defenders of social values is allowed to reassert itself. For this not to happen Europe must not avert its gaze. It must keep pressing for the completion of the institutional dimension of the process of reform, i.e. the elimination of absurd bureaucratic regulation and control in all fields whose purpose was precisely to stifle all creative initiative from below, whether in the economy or in education, that would truly benefit the commonweal.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an argument against the welfare state as such, or against government intervention in the economic field, in a general theoretical sense -in the same way that being against Stalinism or Brezhnevism is not at all tantamount to being an opponent of socialism, Marxist or otherwise.

It is the Greek state apparatus of the past thirty years, its particular mode of control of the society, its rotten national-socialist ideology and the attitudes of parasitic passivity that it inculcated in the population at large that ought to be the target of uncompromising hatred and loathing.

It is the Greek political elites of all ideological hues that usurped the honorable and praiseworthy demand for a political authority that cares for its citizens, and especially those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, and used it as a lying pretext for the most shameless regime of catering to insatiable minorities at the expense of society as a whole.

The aforementioned demand represented a genuine longing of the masses which in previous generations had been subjected to multiform deprivation and suffering. But the upstart political leaderships that emerged after the fall of the dictatorship just proved to be morally worthless and intellectually empty in the management of this legitimate political aspiration. They hijacked it, thus hoodwinking the people that they were custodians of their interests. But in fact, precisely at the moment when the accession to Europe provided the material means to erect a decent system of mutuality and effective social services, they proceeded to distort this ideology into a cover for the most ruthless rapacity of strategically situated cliques.

This tyrannical exploitation was underpinned and furthered by a deliberate cultural practice of deconstructing traditional values and verities, such as politeness, respect for one's fellow human beings, recognition for diverging points of view, tolerance for alternative modes of existence etc.

Aggressive dogmatism, inhuman bullying and slander of those thinking differently from the self-appointed prophets of mock-revolutionary truth, hatred of all sorts and plain rudeness gradually prevailed as the mark of "progressivism". Sartre's famous dictum that hell is the other came to be realized in the streets and other public spaces of this country.

The very idea of morality, i.e. the recognition of the other as an equal in terms of his/her rational essence and autonomy, was ironically debunked as the lie of "bourgeois society". Thus, schools and universities, especially after the bogus reform of 1982 that turned them over to uncouth party apparatchiks, began producing illiterate individuals despising the whole set of ideas and values that comprise human civilization, as well as the basic stances that define humanity per se.

This does not mean that right thinking, humane and intelligent people just disappeared -quite the contrary. But they had to retreat into obscure niches, the only place where they could retain integrity and exercise their right to think for themselves. The public sphere was taken over by the wild-eyed inquisitors of national and "socialist" orthodoxy -the two merging into a foul mixture in due time.

Unless this contamination of the public mind is somehow healed any economic reform, however radical, is bound to remain ineffective. Unless people grasp the elementary thought that socialism is not your right to benefit yourself at the expense of others, but rather conscious and self-denying labor in service of the common good, i.e. the supreme manifestation of morality; unless the goose-stepping detachments of various pseudo-revolutionary groups understand that occupying the Acropolis or the ministry of finance or burning the city down is fascist barbarism; unless high-living "trade unionists" grasp that defending, often through violence, the outrageous privileges of civil service aristocracies that suck the life-blood of the great masses of ordinary workers is reactionary oppression, there is no real way out of the crisis.

Meanwhile, the prime minister ought to be commended for making a bold start -even though his choices are going to hurt people that are not to blame for this debacle.

To be an accomplished, all around numbskull takes effort; to be a numbskull of world renown is the product of high art; to be a numbskull of world renown that also manages simultaneously to shoot himself in the head is the work of unparalleled genius. The Greek political classes and their lick-spittle "journalist" helpers have managed to excel in all three departments in the past few days.

This is a supremely critical moment: the Greek government is running out of cash to pay its bills in two weeks, and our survival depends upon the willingness of our EU partners, especially the Germans, to offer a financial helping hand. And yet, quite on form, the slimy non-entities that run this country have chosen precisely this moment to put on display their abysmal meanness of spirit and their autistic primitivism by unleashing an anti-German furor for which alone they would deserve to be left to to stew in their malodorous juices.

If they were literate, they might just read the blood-curdling deadline of the Daily Telegraph declaring that Greece has well-nigh buried her chances of rescue on account of her anti-German rhetoric.

The latest salvo in this obscene campaign was delivered by our traditionally self-obsessed deputy prime minister, who in a rambling discourse on the BBC basically equated the present German government with the nazis. This earned him the enthusiastic approbation of the extreme nationalist right. It also gave the signal for a cacophony of ignorant hatred that flooded the airwaves with intellectual filth of nauseating virulence. Language is being depleted of words potent enough to characterize this orgy of mental stupefaction and moral degeneracy, whose protagonists are precisely the people who in the last thirty years have grown fat by misappropriating the funds provided principally by those they are calumniating for the purpose of modernizing this country.

Truth to be told, the British journalist conducting the interview deliberately provoked the outburst of the weighty gentleman in question -not that the latter did not relish the opportunity to unleash his warped historical interpretations. The British press, as is well known, is steeped in anti-German bias too -of course on a much more sophisticated level of historical awareness (I am talking about its serious component) compared to its Greek counterpart. So, they have used the Greek crisis as an opportunity to pour some of that traditional venom, using expressions such as "the sound of Wehrmacht boots in the streets of Athens" (in the Guardian) and "Greece balks at self-immolation for the sake of Germany". This Schadenfreude is of inestimable use to the Europhobic segment of the British establishment, with Cameron emphasizing that under his prospective stewardship (which I hope never materializes) the UK will never adopt the Euro.

Of course, some of the British columnists were trying to make a legitimate point, one that I also stressed in one of my previous posts: namely, that the rescue of Greece would be in Germany's own interest given the latter's economic predominance in the Eurozone. This is a point of view which is also given prominence in German newspapers as well in an attempt to counteract the understandable, but still simplistic and wholesale, anti-Greek animus in the populist press and in the streets.

But these reasonable counter-arguments to the hardline opponents of the Greek rescue such as Issing are picked up here not as arguments, but as a pretext to deny any wrongdoing on the part of the Greek ruling elites and to blame the current situation wholly on the evil machinations of imperialist enemies who want to strangle history's "chosen people". The shameful thing about our domestic situation is that it has long degenerated into a collective psychopathy where the few rational voices are drowned in the drum roll of bestial emotionalism. The most laughable delusions have taken on the status of sacred truths, in a puerile self-absorption that has cut off the public mind from any connection with the wider world.

To his credit the Greek prime minister, despite some verbal concessions in parliament, did not kowtow to the screeching vermin of nationalist idiocy -although given the extremity of the hour he should have thrown out by the ear both his deputy and the comical Speaker of parliament who led the anti-German raucous threatening to bury us as a people worth the name.

I fervently hope that there are enough sane and sober leaders on the German side to rise above the gutter in which prominent opinion leaders here are flailing and writhing -and indeed the signs are that there are such, with the chancellor among them. She has invited the Greek leader to Berlin and during their meeting on March 5 let's hope that the final deal will be struck pulling us out of the hell hole that the malfeasance of the Greek feudal party-political aristocracy has dug for the Greek people.

It's a good thing that there are thoughtful voices in the Greek press with the courage to castigate the embarrassing foolishness of the nondescript nonentity playing Speaker of the Greek parliament, who had the nerve to call in the German ambassador to complain about what the German press is writing (!!!) in connection with Greece. How dense can you be indeed... Only goatherds cut off in their mountain gorges and unaware that a world exists beyond the ridge that can be expected to show such grunting imbecility -and goatherds possess a great number of redeeming virtues that render them infinitely more attractive than the pompous nincompoop in question.

Apparently His Asinine Excellency has a conception of journalists such as applies to this country, i.e. either as mindless brutes simply spouting lines fed to them by the press offices of the political parties or as agents in the pay of various business interests and/or the government -or all of the above.

And then there is another minor detail: the content of the German articles that so enraged our good Speaker just happens to be true down to the last t, as the average person in the street here will readily tell you. And indeed it was the common knowledge of these common persons that the foreign journalists culled to present to their readers, who as a result have every reason to be outraged by what happens to their hard earned money once it reaches "the cradle of democracy", the "birthplace of the Olympic Games" etc. etc.

Incidentally, another recent exploit of this insufferable gentleman was to resist by tooth and nail any diminution of the scandalous privileges and astronomical bonuses enjoyed by Parliament employees, whose number exploded to about 1800 (from 600 or so) in the past five years as the relatives of various party hacks to the third and forth degree were inducted to sit around scratching their private parts while drawing salaries of 4000 euros per month. This at a time when the rest of us are asked to make huge sacrifices to put this country right again, while the whole world by now knows that the cause for the present collapse is the hydrocephaly of our public (and anti-social) sector.

But to repeat what I said in my last post: if your aim is to turn German public opinion totally against Greece and thus render politically impossible the rescue plan currently mulled by Merkel, it is in the manner of our Sublime Genius of a Speaker that you should behave.

The current anti-German outbreak in Greece was, to begin with, to be expected. Aggrieved national feeling and the bugbear that "The People" are subject to prosecution from all points of the compass is the well-tried recourse of bankrupt politicians who want to divert attention from their own failures and crimes. But beyond that it is also a sign of the complete ignorance here of the history of the project of European integration and of the history of Germany in particular.

The approach to Europe by the Greek ruling elites has always been instrumental. There is a more benign version of this instrumentalism, as represented by the elder Karamanlis in the 60's and early 70's. The idea here was basically to "shield" the country from its own weakness and disability, economic and political. Its integration into a populous market would confer obvious benefits to Greek business. Politically European norms and institutions would prevent the relapse into the kind of strife that brought about the military dictatorship of the sixties.

After the Cyprus crisis of 1974 another layer was added to these calculations, namely that Greece as a member of the European community would now have behind it the unanimous support of its fellow members in its various disputes with Turkey.

The economic calculation proved spectacularly right with the massive inflow of European structural funds, which the local rulers immediately set about to devour and to squander. That is the reason why the rabid opposition of the left to Greece's accession to what they idiotically called "the den of lions" was abandoned. And with the rise to power of the mock-socialist party in the early eighties this opposition was transmuted into an incessant "struggle" within Europe to extract financial benefits and advantages for "The People" (i.e. for the increasingly venal party and union apparatchiks) with the most minimal adherence possible to the common rules. This obstructionism and obstreperousness was of course irritating to Greece's partners, but it was put up with for political reasons.

This done, the emphasis now was increasingly placed upon the "national" goals to be obtained through Europe, primarily the check-mating of Turkey and later on the political obliteration of poor Slav Macedonia. The demand put forward was that Greece would itself define what its "historical rights" were in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean and that the others would simply fall behind these claims and self-definitions. When they did not, an anti-European clamor was raised.

Thus, as more and more European moneys streamed in to be transformed into Mercedeses and ugly imperial villas for the political elites and their retinue, the more intense the anti-European sentiment fomented by these crooked politicians and their squalid allies in the media. As the material well-being of the average Greek was rising rapidly and the country was being transformed from a dirt poor third world outpost into a tolerably developed state close to the European average, its political orientation veered towards a primitive thirld-worldism, with Ghadafi and Saddam and of course Milosevic and (yes) even Bin Laden later on as the shining lights of its opinion-makers. A vicious anti-westernism took general hold permeating all sides of the political spectrum including the dazed and putrescent so-called right. These antics, egged on after 1998 by an Orthodox Church that had itself adopted xenophobic nationalism as its standard, isolated the country on the European level, as civilized people could simply not comprehend this collective regression to the murderous psychoses of the early twentieth century.

I do not want to go into the details of the "national" debate -it would be a stomach-turning business. Suffice it to record one telling detail: when China, Russia and even "brotherly" Serbia recognized Slav Macedonia as the "Republic of Macedonia" no one batted an eyelid. When the US proceeded to do the same some years later it was perceived as an earth-shattering treachery and there were violent riots in Athens and Thessalonica. This gives you a measure of the perversity into which the public mind had by then sunk.

The important consideration is this: the very heart of the project of European integration was the abandonment of the nationalist isolationism that has soaked the history of the continent with blood. The chief aim was the suppression of ancestral hatreds through the cultivation of open communication and shared institutions. And there is no greater and more inspiring example of this progressive effort than the Franco-German reconciliation under the leadership of De Gaulle and Adenauer. Rivers of German and French blood had flown into the Rhine in mutual massacre, but all this was consciously put behind for the sake of a peaceful and prosperous future. But this point was entirely lost upon the Greek ruling classes, who preferred to cement their rapacious and socially unjust rule by precisely cultivating the most atavistic forms of national hysteria.

One particularly sad note here concerns the active complicity of the left in this moral and intellectual degeneration. Their traditional anti-imperialism was effortlessly transmogrified into thoughtless anti-European hatred, stressing the "violation" of Greek "national rights" by the west with vehemence even shriller than that of the extreme right. Their ingenious way of camouflaging their reactionary nationalism as a "progressive" stance was the claim that the Bosnian Muslims, for instance, and the Macedonian leadership (even under the communist Gligorov) were agents of the Americans acting to secure imperialist control of the Balkans. On this reading the Yugoslav wars were caused, instigated, deliberately started by the foreign villains. They would never have happened if the Serbs and the Croats who were so much in love with each other and had such a history of harmonious coexistence had been left alone. This silliness was the guiding dogma of the Greek left who anointed Milosevic as the hero of anti-imperialist struggle.

The same profound ignorance and misrepresentation stamps the dominant ideas on Germany. That despite the inevitable survivals of Nazism, the post-war federal republic has made the most determined effort in its general culture and educational process to face up to the historical guilt of the country and to cultivate mentalities that would prevent any relapse to racist nationalism is something that no one is aware of here. That whatever resurgence of nazi-tinted racism one observes in the country emanates primarily from the formerly communist east, where the "workers and peasants" regime did nothing at all to deal with German historical guilt but rather cultivated militarism is a fact that would be vehemently denied. That Germany's participation in the unification of Europe and especially its abandonment of the mighty Deutschmark was the most important manifestation of this determination to anchor the country in a common European destiny, rather than adopt a renewed course of national aggrandizement with its concomitant Drang nach Osten, is also something no one has an inkling of or would appreciate. That Germany incurred significant economic liabilities as a result of these choices, by being for example by far the largest net contributor to the EU budget, is also something nobody notes. That the agricultural subsidies that for more than a generation now have fed and fattened an increasingly parasitic and destructive Greek so-called farmer class have come out of German pockets nobody admits. That the German tax payer has coughed up over this period something like 10000 euros per each inhabitant of Greece (according to some figures I saw lately) does not count for anything in the mind of the inflamed dervishes of nationalism here. All was fine as long as we were gobbling up Germany's (and others') contributions for the private gratification of our execrable (as everyone readily admits) rulers. Suddenly, now that they refuse to pour more of their own people's sweat into this black hole the righteous wrath of the "anti-imperialists" is ignited and the memories of the occupation return. The Germans "have not paid war reparations" and are out to get us. This is so disgustingly pathetic.

It is also stupidly self-destructive. There is a vigorous debate currently going on in Germany concerning the wisdom of rescuing Greece, while in the background the populist press is screaming for blood. If you want to strengthen the side arguing against the rescue, i.e. if you wish yourself in hell, then you adopt the moronic anti-German stance that is becoming increasingly loud here.

The talking (empty) heads of the Greek media and their partners in emptiness in parliament are in a tiff. Their "national honor" has been insulted by the cover of Focus magazine in Germany, depicting the Venus di Milo showing the finger. That this expresses the extremely hostile feelings of the average European citizen towards the lying and cheating policies of successive Greek governments goes without saying -but the prime victims of this trickery have been the Greek people themselves. So it violates basic human decency for the leaders of Greek feudalism who have destroyed the economic and ethical basis of their society by pocketing for themselves the vast sums of European economic assistance to affect an innocence they do not have. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. They deserve not just this kind of humorous put down, but infinitely more severe treatment which must include, if not the scaffold, definitely long jail terms. The unfortunate thing is that this shameless demagogy of the very people that brought the country to the brink of the abyss finds fertile ground among the people in the street, the principal victims I repeat of the thuggery of those now protesting about "national honor". This poisonous sentiment is a serious impediment to the implementation of any set of real economic reforms.

With respect to the "national" dimension of the Focus cover: one may call it tasteless -that would be legitimate. But to rip one's clothes in the name of the "sacredness" of antique symbols mishandled by vicious foreigners is just rank hypocrisy, which is in plentiful supply here. In the past few years storm troopers from the parties of the left have repeatedly invaded and occupied the Acropolis (breaking down gates by night etc.) in order to cover its entire southern (Cimonian) wall with their hideous placards denouncing now a visit by the American secretary of state, now this or that government policy. One cannot envisage a more vicious desecration than that. And yet not one of these highly sensitive national souls currently frothing at the mouth had a single word of protest to utter against this barbaric usurpation of the supreme symbol of Hellenic spiritual achievement by the philistine hordes of party-political brutishness. And the reason for this silence, amounting to support, was of course that the perpetrators of this cultural atrocity were self-proclaimed communists and "anti-imperialists". Under this cover any and every filthy anti-social act, including actual crimes, is readily excused in this country.

The campaign of the official classes against Focus stinks of pettiness and dishonesty. It is, above all, testimony to their complete ignorance of and contempt for Hellenic ideals.

A few short notes. My comments on the striking customs officials were made with the internal revenue officials in mind. But, they still apply: they are birds of the same feather. Besides the latter went on strike last week protesting the possible loss of their outrageous bonuses and just at the precise moment to make a mockery of the government's protestations in Brussels that Greece can cure its fiscal problem on its own. A more egregious kind of anti-social egotism cannot be conceived. These people, together with the wild-eyed trade unionists currently occupying the finance ministry, are dancing on the carcass of their country. They seem moronically to think that they can secure through violence something for themselves even though the entire ship is sinking. They can surely cause us all to drown, but they themselves will also suffer the same fate. Rats are not known as keen swimmers. With respect to the customs people it suffices to mention that they have left our houses without heating in the middle of winter.

A tale of two editorials: the Economist's comments on Feb. 18 are suffused with smart ass contempt bordering on cultural racism. That Greeks went out on Clean Monday (the beginning of Lent) to fly kites and eat sea food is neither here nor there. You cannot expect a whole society to turn itself off culturally simply because of the (admittedly extreme) financial predicament. Movie theaters and bars are also still open: what is exactly the Economist's suggestion? That we shut ourselves up in our rooms trembling and praying? The British high class has stubbornly refused to give up fox hunting even though public opinion is overwhelmingly against it and parliament legislated to ban it. I do not recall the Economist being terribly exercised about that. That said, the substance of the argument developed in the editorial needs to be taken seriously. But it is not self-evidently true. The founding of a European monetary fund can be an effective response to situations similar to the Greek one in the future, and this is the option envisaged in the rescue plan for Greece being worked out by the German finance ministry as reported on Saturday by Der Spiegel. The danger of undue political influence can be obviated through the strict rules of operation proposed.

Compare the thoughtful and constructive editorial of the New York Times on the same day, which is a continuation of the enlightened attitude first expressed in their editorial of Feb. 1 pleading for Europe not to let Greece go under. If Europe is interested in putting Greece on the road to a more sane handling of its economy they should not barge in to effect its "fiscal strangulation", the paper says. This kind of shock therapy will simply kill off economic activity thus crippling the ability of the state to collect tax revenue and hence balance its books. This is sensible counsel. It comes from afar, but perhaps because of that it takes a more rounded and long term view, which eschews ideological rigidity. In the Economist approach on the contrary one senses an overriding motive to uphold liberal economic orthodoxy first and foremost. This is of course the reason for the very existence of the Economist in the first place. But as Bush found out in September 2008 when the world collapses around you ideological virginity is a luxury that can barely be afforded. Fortunately, Merkel has also come around to the opinion that the prime consideration at this moment is a pragmatic solution to an impossible situation, rather than lily-white theoretic posturing. Her distancing from her liberal partners in the ruling coalition goes hand in hand with her wise decisions in the Greek case.

One last thought: I wish the bulk of Greek "journalists" and ignorant politicos barking and baying on the air waves each night would just take five minutes reading the consistently pro-Greek pronouncements of the great American newspaper -in case, that is, they can read at all. They should also consider, if again they are capable of any sane consideration, that it was the New York Times that exposed the machinations and hence the responsibility of Wall Street in connection with the Greek debt crisis. But I have a feeling that this is too much to ask.....