greekworks

The good news is, Paul Wolfowitz is toast. The bad news is, George W. Bush will name his successor. There is so much instruction, moral and otherwise, in this one more disgraceful tale of what has become the most disgraceful—but also, unhappily, disastrous and destructive—government in the history of American government that one doesn’t know where to begin. In this case, we’ll move swiftly on from the masterminds (such as they are, since the notion of “mind” in regard to the current US administration is more rueful longing than realistic description) to the accomplices—or, to put it in terms more amenable to current American fashion (and flight from reality), the “codependents.”

Notice the plural. There are many of them, a veritable planet’s worth (as befits the major international development bank), but, once again, it is the Europeans who’ve played the central role of spear-carriers to George Bush’s Nero. As with so much else, the Wolfowitz burlesque acted out at the World Bank (which wasted two years of the institution’s work) would never have happened had the Europeans on the bank’s board of directors shown some—any—independence from the imperial metropolis when the US president first nominated his then-deputy secretary of defense to head the organization.

At the time, it will be remembered, a profound institutional issue was exercising many of the bank’s shareholders, those from the developing world in particular. Why, these countries wanted to know, was the US continuing to exercise the sole right to name the bank’s president? After all, a plausible, and defensible, privilege granted in the final year of the Second World War, when both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were established at the Bretton Woods conference, hardly seemed so in a radically changed political and economic context six decades later. To point to the obvious, not only is the world drastically different today from what it was in 1944 (especially in the global distribution of actual economic weight), but the US has also changed enormously (in every real sense, for the worse). In fact, it takes considerable effort today even to imagine similarities in vision and purpose between the administration of FDR, which sponsored Bretton Woods, and that of George W. Bush, which openly proclaims its contempt for the very idea of international settlements in which the US must, like every other nation, on occasion follow as well as lead.

Given the preexisting discontent with the US monopoly on the World Bank’s presidency, the consternation was palpable following Mr. Bush’s announcement of his nominee in March 2005. Adding insult to injury does not begin to describe the clamor. The headline in the Financial Times (March 16, 2005) did not mince words: “Wolfowitz nomination a shock for Europe.” The most succinct comment on the Wolfowitz nomination was made by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prizewinning economist, who knew something both about the World Bank and its mandate, having served as its chief economist during the WTO Seattle protests: “The World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street protests and violence across the developing world.”

In the event, neither protests nor violence ensued, in the developing world or anywhere else. Nor did the World Bank become a figure of hate—at least, no more so than it has been for the last few decades. The world as a whole, it seems, was—once again and for the umpteenth time—willing to give the United States a pass, and the benefit of the imperial doubt, willing to let it lead and see where it aimed to take us, willing to sit down quietly and avoid rocking the boat of “international consensus,” which has proved so…consensual (the precise word is servile) to American wishes since the end of the Cold War (and the onset of this new, successor crusade, indeterminate in length, indefinable in purpose, impossibly—if interminably—waged against an abstract noun, although its victims, by the tens of thousands, are far from abstract).

One of the oldest tropes in European politics is of American “naïveté” in expectations of politicians and political reality. The truth is that the gullibility of European politicians, and of their governments, vis-à-vis the United States during the last quarter of a century has been spectacular—to such an extent that it makes one wonder whether it is actually gullibility or, more probably, a strategic surrender to US interests masquerading as (endlessly) violated innocence. As European electorates (in “new” as well as “old” Europe) are not as forbearing of US brutality in the world (and of the corresponding mendacity about it) as are their governments, the latter, for that reason, now constantly feign shock, shock, to learn of American actions after they’ve occurred (and of American motives after they’ve been revealed). And so, once again, the representatives of Europe’s governments presumably slumped into their armchairs slack-jawed when George W. Bush proposed to transfer the intellectual author of Operation Iraqi Freedom (and of the The Arabian Nights-like tale of Mesopotamian houris showering American soldiers in rose petals and feeding them baqlawa) from DoD to the World Bank in a bizarre, ideologically inverse, wannabe replay of the famous migration decades earlier of Robert McNamara, confirming Marx’s observation about history’s tendency to intellectual degradation the second time around. A day after the Financial Times headlined the “shock” to Europeans, however, The Wall Street Journal was editorializing a different point of view altogether. “Banking on Wolfowitz,” the newspaper titled its leader (March 17, 2005), subtitling it, “And you thought Iraq was difficult.” Clearly, according to the house organ of unreconstructed neoconism, the point to appointing Mr. Wolfowitz was precisely to shock and awe the World Bank.

Mission accomplished. And, once again, as ever with neoconism, the imperial agenda was camouflaged in sermons of virtue in the delusion that the natives abroad are as stupid as the empire’s own citizens back home, who gave up caring a long time ago about who lives and dies in the various expeditionary missions to civilize the barbarians as long as it isn’t them. When serving directly under Mr. Bush at DoD, Mr. Wolfowitz’s mantras were democracy and freedom, and his cause the war against terror. At the World Bank, serving Mr. Bush indirectly, the new mantras became “accountability” and “governance” and the war to be fought was against the depredations of “corruption” (invariably of the developing world, and of its brown, black, and yellow peoples, who must be edified in the high moral regimen of the white men and women running the Enrons and Halliburtons and BPs and Shells and Exxon-Mobils and stock exchanges and military-industrial complexes in New York, Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin). It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it; to quote the Wall Street Journal again, “…if anyone can stand up to the Robert Mugabes of the world, it must be the man who stood up to Saddam Hussein.”

The notion, of course, that Mr. Wolfowitz “stood up” to Saddam Hussein, in a High Noon kind of duel in the sun, would be laughable had it not become so tragic by now for the Iraqi people. As for “the Robert Mugabes of the world”—let alone Mugabe himself—it’s not at all clear, to be polite about it, what Mr. Wolfowitz has done, exactly, in the last two years to “stand up” to them. Then again, there are Journal editors who remain convinced that we’ll find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq one day. No retreat, no surrender. War is hell, whether against terrorism or corruption.

Nevertheless, even if you think that he’s performed a service to humanity despite all the destruction and infamy he’s helped to visit upon the world and his own country, you’d still think it was a bit rich for Mr. Wolfowitz to be lecturing other people, and governments, on “accountability” when he denounced the then-chief of staff of the US army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, for making “outlandish” (in other words, correct) assessments of the necessary US force strength in a “post-Saddam” (that is, occupied) Iraq, and then helped to supervise the worst foreign-policy disaster in the postwar history of the United States. (Yes, worse than Vietnam, as military strategists are increasingly pointing out, since the latter tragedy never provoked the infinite number of fronts against us the world over that this one has, and will.) Has Dr. Wolfowitz ever been brought to account—will he ever—for his tenure at the defense department? Or, for that matter, for his hugely unsuccessful couple of years at the World Bank, which have, quite literally, paralyzed the institution from his first day in office? We know better. (We don’t want to be accused of American naïveté.) Still, one would think that the good professor, being such an expert on arms and the man, would understand the advantages of discretion over bravado.

But that is not the way of the neocons, who are nothing if not impermeable in their pride. What was it that that Bush adviser once told journalist Ron Suskind? That Suskind was part of “the reality-based community,” who believed that “solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality,” but that that was “not the way the world really works anymore.” For Bushism, that anonymous adviser explained, “discernible reality” was an illusion: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (“Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” Ron Suskind, The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004) This is breathtaking, mindless arrogance (and positively bone-chilling in its neo-Hitlerism). It is also, quite literally, lunatic nonsense.

It takes a real emperor to understand the pitfalls of empire. There is no more succinct description of Bushism’s imperial shipwreck(s) than Napoleon’s famous diagnosis that, “The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means.” As Corsica’s most glorious son essentially invented French patriotism (among many other codes), he also understood the sheer artificiality of any notion of “great” (let alone “indispensable”) nations. “A celebrated people,” he warned, “lose dignity upon a closer view.”

Fortunately, for the world, reality does exist, and, for quite a while now, it has been laying Bushism, and the Bushists, lower and lower each day, as it’s been stripping the dignity of the celebrated people who have allowed themselves to be led by such men and women. Last month, The Economist dedicated a column to neoconism’s walking wounded. It titled its analysis, “Sidelined by reality” (April 19). The problem, the magazine stated, “can be traced back not just to flawed execution but to flawed thinking.” Well, yes, obviously.

Take Mr. Wolfowitz, for example. It has been argued that, despite his actions at DoD, he cares profoundly about fighting corruption in the developing world and, therefore, of alleviating poverty. Such an argument was made earlier this month—by an African, no less—in the op-ed pages of The New York Times. The article by Nuhu Ribadu, datelined Abuja, Nigeria, and entitled, “Why Wolfowitz Should Stay” (May 1), argued that, “Mr. Wolfowitz’s presidency…has been largely defined by his energetic support for a new Africa that is struggling to emerge.” It went on to aver that:

No one at greekworks.com is an expert on Africa, let alone Nigeria. Just a passing glance at the Times’s foreign-news pages, however, offers enough information for a very different perspective. We don’t know if Mr. Wolfowitz is “a champion of using international development institutions to deal with some of the world’s major problems.” What we do know are two salient facts: one, broadly biographical, the other, specifically programmatic. First, for the biography.

As one can see by this brief biographical outline, Dr. Wolfowitz’s entire life has been spent on military and security issues. He is not an economist, and has never run a business. With the exception of his stint as ambassador to Indonesia, he has never had anything to do with—and would be the first to admit that he has neither basic nor extensive experience in—development issues. As such, being named head of the World Bank was, one would think, a professional bridge too far. Robert McNamara, at least, was an economist who had once been the youngest assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a famously successful president of the Ford Motor Company (the first outside the Ford family to hold that position) when LBJ named to him to head the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz’s immediate predecessor, James Wolfensohn, was an investment banker with a degree, again, from Harvard Business School who had worked on three continents before going to the Bank. (As an Australian who was a naturalized American citizen when Bill Clinton appointed him, he also had a decidedly international view of the world.) It is an indication of the contempt with which the current US president faces most global issues (with the obvious exception of “terrorism”)—from climate change to the consequences of globalization to, yes, development in the developing countries—that he named such an evidently unqualified person to such an unquestionably important post.

It is hardly a coincidence, then, that, upon taking up his new position, Mr. Wolfowitz did not direct the World Bank’s “energies toward fighting poverty and improving human life,” but, rather, toward fighting “corruption” in the developing world—or, to use Mr. Ribadu’s formulation, toward “rescuing” people “from the scourge of misrule, which leads to poverty, disease and early death.”

First things first: the “scourge of misrule” is an innately slippery phrase. What does it describe, exactly? Robert Mugabe? Saddam Hussein? The Saudi state? Or, perhaps, the US occupation of Iraq? Or Afghanistan’s present “democratic” regime? Or, even more to the point, municipal government in New Orleans? In any case, the jury is out as to whether the “scourge of misrule” actually leads to poverty, let alone to disease and early death. It might lead to such; it often does lead to such; it will ultimately lead to such, but, ultimately, to echo Keynes, we’re all dead anyway. The truth is that the links between “misrule” and poverty are complex and, occasionally, even benign.

There is not an American historian who does not know that Tammany Hall, while stupendously corrupt, also made it possible for many of the huddled immigrant masses that ended up on New York City’s teeming shores not only to survive, but also to secure a government job and, thus, some sort of future for their (extended) kith and kin. The Irish cops and Italian sanitation men and Jewish teachers and Greek diner-owners (and, decades later, black bus drivers) who became the backbone of New York’s lower middle class would have taken a lot longer to do so had it not been for Gotham’s notorious “misrule.” Every sociologist knows that political corruption is simultaneously a political morass and a social network. That is why the repressive (Ba’athist idealists would say distorting) violence aside, the Ba’ath party under Saddam Hussein essentially functioned the same way as Tammany’s Democrats did—or as the Republican party did under Ulysses S. Grant during the Gilded Age. It is also why “good government” and “reform” movements are so often led by upper-middle, professional, and upper classes, as the depredations of “corruption” are perceived to be the work of benighted plebeians.

Funny, though, how those plebeians see things radically differently. We have no doubt, for example, that the more Hugo Chávez extends his Bolivarian revolution throughout Venezuelan society, the more corrupt that revolution becomes. We also have no doubt that there is, in fact, something authentically democratic about this effort, and that to extend the principles of democracy into social life, as Mr. Chávez is doing, requires a redefinition of “good governance.” Mr. Chávez is clearly not only a popular leader, but also one who has not been afraid to test his popularity fairly at the polls. While the US, and the World Bank and IMF—from which institutions Mr. Chávez recently and conspicuously withdrew his country—might abhor him, the manifest majority of his fellow citizens have repeatedly elected him to lead them. (The Western mediacracy habitually transmogrifies popularity into “populism” when the popularity in question threatens Western interests.) Thus, to the choice posed by so many fastidious NGO types in the West—corruption with Chávez or “good governance” without him—most Venezuelans would not hesitate to opt for the former. Actually, they would not hesitate to laugh out loud. Good governance, they would respond in disbelief? In Venezuela, before Hugo Chávez? Excuse us, señor(a), but you obviously don’t know anything about our country.

Or, we would add, about any country. Why did Lula win reelection in Brazil with the same 61 percent of the vote (minus a few tenths of a point) that he received in his original election, although his entire administration was mired in a vast corruption scandal the second time around? Or, to take a completely different example, in a different socioeconomic context, why has Vladimir Putin been so consistently popular in Russia although he has conspicuously (and with authoritarian sang-froid) flouted all the “rules” of “free-market” governance and Anglo-Saxon notions of capital(ist) order? The answer is the same in both cases (although for very different reasons), and would have been the same answer given by a Tammany wardheeler on the Lower East Side decades ago: the great mass of laboring people believe that economic democracy is impossible without some form of “corruption”—i.e., social intervention—in the (re)distribution of economic goods and services. (Greeks know all about the efficient redistributive social effects of partisan corruption from the recent two and half decades of rule under PASOK, which created unprecedented wealth—much of it linked to government contracts or “access”—for that notoriously indefinable, and therefore expansive, class of the mikro-mesaioi.)

What really sticks in the craw of Mr. Wolfowitz’s critics is that this is the man whose department of defense handed the US armed forces to Halliburton. This is also the man under whose “management” Iraq itself was handed over to systematic pillage. On May 12, the lead story on the front page of The New York Times read, “Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says.” It began:

That’s roughly $1.8 to $5.5 billion per annum, or about $7 to $22 billion in the four years of the US occupation. Quite a swag. Of course, in an age-old Western tradition of ceremonial hand-washing that goes back to Pontius Pilate, the criminal appropriation of all this wealth is blamed squarely on—who else?—the occupied, not the occupiers. The report was prepared by the US Government Accountability Office and completely whitewashes US responsibility for this “misrule”—although, according to the Times, it does point a finger at (surprise, surprise)“smaller refineries not controlled by large Western companies in places like China, the Caribbean and even small European countries.” It’s the fault of the Chinese again, or of the Jamaicans, or of those perennially perfidious Europeans—but not of “large Western” oil companies because, of course, we all know how deeply moral and steeped in profound traditions of corporate integrity and social responsibility these companies are.

How, indeed? After all, theft is “ingrained” in these semi-barbaric people. Allah be praised that Shell Oil will put everything right. (We just hope it doesn’t lead to the same results as in Mr. Ribadu’s native Nigeria, where the Goldman Environmental Prizewinning journalist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the country’s military junta for his unceasing opposition to the environmental destruction of the Ogoni people’s homelands in the Niger Delta by, yes, Shell Oil.)

After reading this reportage—shameless both in its racism and in its exoneration of the US (and, more generally, the West) for destroying not only Iraq’s economic viability and social coherence, but its national unity—one understands why “they” hate “us” with a purple passion. Meanwhile, in the ether regions of unimpeachable Western morality and integrity, the head of the World Bank cooks up sweetheart deals for his…sweetheart, hires old cronies at will, hems and haws, denies and recants, threatens and conciliates, fulminates and abnegates, vows holy war and everlasting love, claims to be the victim of conspiracies and cabals one minute, and merely misquoted the next, while billions of people in the developing world are continually maligned for their “ingrained” corruption.

Two last points. Nuhu Ribadu is chairman of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission—an appointed position. He was appointed by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also responsible for the recent elections in Nigeria, condemned by the EU, in the words of the head of its monitoring team, for “ballot box stuffing, alteration of official result forms, stealing of sensitive polling materials, vote buying and underage voting” (BBC, April 23). The head of the Transition Monitoring Group, the Nigerian citizens’ organization monitoring the polls, called the election a “charade.” Under the circumstances, Mr. Ribadu’s praise of Mr. Wolfowitz provokes many more questions than it answers.

Finally, this whole debacle might have had a constructive, and profoundly renovative, ending if, following Mr. Wolfowitz’s inevitable resignation from his position, the European members of the World Bank insisted that the US finally give up its right to name the institution’s head, just as they would, in turn, surrender their right to name the head of the IMF. But that did not happen, of course. Essentially because the Europeans, in the end, are as dishonest about their commitment to global democratic governance as the US is. Naturally, all this hypocrisy and patent self-aggrandizement is obvious to the entire world—which is why Hugo Chávez is laughing all the way to his own, newly founded development bank.

Sports

News of Ferenc Puskás’s death on—of all days—November 17 last year brought back memories of the first time I saw him, and nearly kicked a ball to him. It was on a hot August afternoon at Panathênaikos’s home ground at Leôforos Alexandras in Athens, during a team training session. A little incongruous perhaps, given that Puskás acquired his legendary status as a player with star performances in the greatest stadiums of the world while competing in major tournaments. But for a 15-year old Athenian born when Puskás was already famous, it was good enough.

After scoring on three straight shots, all with his lethal left foot, Puskás’s fourth effort crashed against the cross bar, spinning high over the barrier behind the goal and bouncing up the concrete stands. I rushed up the steps and caught the ball. I looked over at him as I readied myself to kick it back on the field, but he had turned away to talk to the admiring players. It was after all, a training session, the fun was over, and the real task at hand for Puskás was coaching his players on how to kick the ball into the net.

Still, for me, it had been a cherished moment of close contact with a legend of European soccer. And it was a rich reward, back in 1970, for being part of a small crowd watching the pre-season training of Panathênaikos on a very hot August afternoon at the team’s home field. We were there to witness with our own eyes what the notoriously unreliable Athenian daily sports papers had reported, that Panathênaikos had managed to secure as its coach the great Puskás. For two decades, he had starred as a player, first, for the Hungarian national team in the early 1950s and then, following the 1956 Hungarian uprising, for Real Madrid, the greatest team in Europe.

No one seemed to worry that this was Puskás’s first coaching job. (No wonder he was out there shooting the ball himself that afternoon). That Puskás had deigned to come and work in what was, let’s face it, one of Europe’s soccer backwaters was an honor for Greece. It was proof, moreover, that Panathênaikos, the perennial champions in the 1960s, had earned some international respect despite a string of unimpressive performances in the annual European Champion Clubs Cup (now the UEFA Champions League), the major, European-wide knockout competition that included the winners of the domestic leagues in each country.

Yet none of us could imagine that Puskás would not only grace Greek soccer with his presence at Panathênaikos’s helm, but that he would lead the team farther than any other Greek team in the history of the European Cup. Those were the days, of course, when Europe had just over 30 nations, so the tournament of all the national champions involved only 32 unseeded teams. Nonetheless, for a Greek team to make it through to the round of 16—a rare occurrence—their first-round opponents had to be weaklings. Luckily, that year, Panathênaikos drew the champions of Luxembourg, Jeunesse Esch, whom they disposed of easily by winning both on the road and in Athens.

The draw for the next round pitted Panathênaikos against the Czechoslovak champions. That year it was Slovan Bratislava, a team that had won the championship for the first time since 1955 by overcoming the two powerhouses, Slavia and Sparta, both of Prague. But while they may have been provincial upstarts, Bratislava were, nonetheless (in those days), Czechoslovaks, and their country a respected soccer power. In the first of the two games between them, in Athens, Panathênaikos scored a quick goal and went on to win 3-0. So, while they lost the return game in Bratislava 2-1 on a cold November evening, the Greek champions went through to the next round thanks to the rule in such cases that favors the team with the wider winning margin. It was the first time a Greek team had made it to the quarterfinals. The coach was the toast of the town.

Puskás must have found Greek elation at this minor success very amusing. He himself had won the European Cup three times as a player with Real Madrid, and he had scored a hat-trick in the memorable 1960 final in which Real beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3. His prolific scoring rate of 512 goals in 528 matches helped Real win five successive Spanish league titles and Spain’s annual Copa del Rey tournament once (which, when Puskás’s team won it, was actually called the Copa del Generalísimo—as in Franco), along with their three European titles.

Known as the “Galloping Major” because he had played for the Hungarian army team Honvéd, the great Puskás had always been as interested in food as he had been in football. Indeed, his short, barrel-chested, and stocky frame deceived many opponents, who underestimated his skills before they saw him perform. On that August afternoon I first saw him, there was ample evidence that his girth had expanded considerably after retiring as a player a few years earlier. His celebrity status augmented by Panathênaikos’s success in Europe, Puskás would eat out almost every night. His favorite taverna was Ta Souvlakia tês Kyra Marias in Chalandri, a suburb just north of Athens, and his favorite dishes were grilled pork sausages, souvlakia, and suckling pig on the spit.

Puskás took a low-key approach to his coaching job in contrast to his visits to tavernas. Personally unassuming, he used warmth and humor rather than fear to assert his authority. He fostered team spirit, and good relations among players and himself, by organizing team outings to movie theaters and, of course, restaurants. This was unique for Greece, but it was welcomed by sportswriters as yet another sign of the Greek sport’s “Europeanization” thanks to Puskás’s coaching style.

But “coaching style” may be putting it a little too strongly in Puskás’s case. He himself was the product of an innovative coaching philosophy that the Hungarian national team honed in the early 1950s. It entailed nothing less than revolutionizing the static way the game had been played until then: players limited to their regular positions. The Hungarians replaced this static style by teaching their players to move around the entire field interchangeably—what is known in basketball as “moving without the ball”—a system that required them to acquire a variety of skills.

There was no chance, however, that Puskás would experiment with the good but mostly workman-like players he had at his disposal in Athens. In his ghostwritten memoir, Puskás on Puskás, published in English in 1997, he had this to say about how Panathênaikos went on to eliminate Everton, their opponents in the next round of the European Cup: “I honestly did not think we’d stand much of a chance against the English champions. I told the players to just relax and play; try to help one another all the time. I didn’t give them any fancy tactical instructions; you can draw a lot of pictures on the board, but have you got the players to do it with?” (p. 218). Nonetheless, he got the most out of them—just as he did with the modest but satisfying offerings of Greek tavernas—and the Greeks went on to defeat their English opponent.

When Puskás’s team played Red Star Belgrade next, in the first of the home-and-away games of the semifinals, the lack of star quality of most of his players was exposed by a heavy defeat in Belgrade. With Panathênaikos losing 4-1, a 3-0 or a 5-1 margin victory was needed in the return game in Athens to progress to the final. Puskás worked his magic yet again. His players won 3-0, which meant they were going through to the final game. (The rules state that, in the case of a tie in number of goals scored after the two games, the team that scored the most “away” goals in the series wins.) Crowds poured into the streets to celebrate.

In 2001, Greek TV broadcast a special to commemorate Panathênaikos’s participation in the European Cup final. The players were asked what it had been about Puskás that made it possible for him to make them the first-ever Greek club to reach the final. All of them answered that it was neither strategic nor tactical training, but, rather, just the sheer self-confidence they gained from the fact that this legend of world soccer was quietly reassuring them that they could do it. The fact that they had Puskás on their side instilled in the players a confidence in their abilities that helped them overcome Greek soccer’s perennial inferiority complex when faced with the challenge to do well in Europe.

The 1971 European Cup final took placed at hallowed Wembley Stadium in London on Wednesday, June 2. Panathênaikos faced the mighty Ajax Amsterdam, who were something of the Real Madrid of the 1970s. The Dutchmen won 2-0, but playing in that final represented—and still represents—the highest achievement of a Greek team in a European club tournament.

For Puskás, it also meant a return to the scene of one of his greatest triumphs. It was at Wembley in 1953 that the Hungarian national team, having won the Olympic gold medal the previous year, became the first foreign team ever to defeat England on home soil with a stunning 6-3 victory. Puskás unwittingly contributed to stoking the complacency of the English players before the game by his telltale appearance. “Look at that little fat chap; we’ll murder this lot,” one of the England players remarked as the teams took the field. But the murderer turned out to be the Galloping Major, with his left foot just inside the eighteen-yard box. The portly Puskás bamboozled the English defenders all afternoon and scored two goals.

Puskás’s state funeral took place on December 9, 2006, in Budapest with a Panathênaikos delegation in attendance. It began with a ceremony at the national stadium, which had been renamed Ferenc Puskás Stadium in his honor a few years ago. His casket—draped in Hungary’s red, white, and green flag—was placed on a black catafalque in the center of the field, while a sea of candles lit up the stands. The casket was taken by horse-drawn caisson to Hero’s Square for a military salute, on its way to the funeral service in Budapest’s Saint Stephen’s Basilica. Puskás was laid to rest under the dome, bringing a day of national mourning to an end.

Meanwhile, on the same day back in Athens, Panathênaikos was eking out a hard-fought victory against Larisa in a Greek league game at the Olympic Stadium. Puskás would surely not have been very impressed with the level of play. But he would have seen a silver lining. Just across Kêfisias Avenue that runs next to the stadium lies Chalandri, and its taverna offerings of grilled meats.

Alexander Kitroeff teaches history at Haverford College and is a contributing editor to greekworks.com, which published his most recent book, Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics.

Arts & Letters

Petros Martinides’s second book (see the first part of this essay, “Reflected Fates,” February 20) of his recent trilogy, H elpida pethainei teleutaia (Hope Dies Last, 2005), takes place during the summer of 2004, an unforgettable time, one can argue, in modern Greek history. For this was the summer that Greece, for the first time since 1896, had hosted the Olympic Games. But this event took place in the shadow of yet another event that has since been engraved into the collective Greek psyche. I am talking, of course, about the participation of the Greek national team in the European soccer championship (Euro 2004) in Portugal. Against even the most optimistic predictions, the team not only qualified for the second round of the tournament, but managed to go all the way to the final round and win the trophy in a memorable final game against the Portuguese host team (and one of the favorites).

Martinides’s story unfolds in the shadow of this event in Thessalonikê. The pace of the narrative follows that of the soccer games themselves, with a climactic ending that parallels the night of the championship match. While the entire country is captivated by the miraculous, thrilling performance of the Greek soccer team, another drama takes place in the city. It is in this parallel drama that Alexis Olmezoglou appears again in a lead role. The author effectively captures the spirit and the atmosphere of that memorable summer in his novel’s prologue:

One can see here how the author, with narrative precision and a heavy dose of irony, is capable of reflecting a zeitgeist, of capturing and situating a particular moment or event within a broader historical and political frame. But it also quite clear in the following pages that this context soon pretty much disappears altogether from the plot.

What follows instead is a narrative that fills in the gaps of the young intellectual’s story since the last time we read about him. He has defended his dissertation, experienced a disappointing affair with a young actress that has financially ruined him, and is in a state of indecision about his future. As a character, he remains essentially a solitary figure, without family, friends, or any real interest in what is taking place in the outside world. (Perhaps this is why the author abandons any references to the political climate in the country at that time). His references to soccer and its role in the formation of national identity, for example, remain at the level of cliché, very similar to his attitude (full of irony) toward public life in general. His life begins to resemble some of the fictional lives in the books and comics that he has spent his time reading and writing about. Martinides’s depiction of the detective figure as detached and uninterested in the outside world is very much within the confines of the genre. Although he acts, moves, and forms relations within his social space, he prefers to maintain a distance from it at the same time, especially emotionally.

The narrator also informs us that Alexis Olmezoglou has spent the last few months writing a crime novel, based on his own recent painful experiences, with which we the readers are already familiar since they constitute the plot of Martinides’s previous novel, Moiraioi Antikatoptrismoi (Fateful Reflections). As we read in the story:

The idea that the main character has just written and is about to publish a book, which we have already read, raises questions about his identity and its relationship to the fiction. Olmezoglou’s identity is already shaped and determined by the book that he hasn’t yet published but that we have already read. The character’s own presence and reality are not only haunted by his previous experiences but already destabilized by the fact that he was fictionally created in the previous work, a work he now duplicates. Consequently, although Olmezoglou as investigator attempts to expose the fictions that other characters create about themselves, it is the “reality” of his own life that is ultimately put into question through the self-reflexive nature of the stories within stories. In the end, Olmezoglou overcomes his obstacles because the other characters underestimate him as a result of their failure to read his manuscript properly.

What seems to be the main event in the lives of his fellow townsmen, indeed the entire country, leaves him indifferent. For him, Euro 2004 is only a distant event. It just provides him with the opportunity to take advantage of an empty city whose inhabitants are riveted in front of the television set. Just as the tournament is about to begin, another event captures his attention: a destructive fire in the warehouse of his publisher and the discovery of two bodies in the ruins. As it turns out, it is a case of arson, and one of the victims dies of asphyxiation before he is burned in the fire. The other, however—Elpida, whose death was introduced in the prologue—has been strangled. Initially, this event attracts his curiosity only because it concerns his future publisher; yet it soon becomes a central event in his life. Taking advantage of everyone’s absorption in the televised soccer games, Alexis engages in an erotic game with the publisher’s wife, Magda. While her husband watches the matches with friends, Alexis volunteers to teach her to drive in the hope that the lessons will turn into something more interesting. What he fails to see at this point is his engagement and participation in another very dangerous and well-orchestrated game.

What begins as a story of infatuation and seduction with the young, beautiful, and elusive Magda turns into a dangerous contest of deception, violence, and murder. For it is during the driving lessons that something goes terribly wrong and turns Olmezoglou from an innocent outsider to someone in deep trouble who must prove his innocence in order to save his life. Like any good soccer game, Martinides’s well-constructed narrative is suspenseful, with characters whose intentions and plans are hard to read. No one is to be trusted or beyond suspicion. Our young protagonist finds himself in yet another scrape, and, as time and the story progress, the possibility of hope and survival narrows. Olmezoglou himself needs to take the appropriate action, anything necessary to save himself. To quote from Tzvetan Todorov’s commentary on the genre and on “the story of the suspect as detective” in his now classic essay, The Typology of Detective Fiction: “In order to prove his innocence, this person must himself find the real culprit, even if he risks his life in doing so. We might say that, in this case, this character is at the same time the detective, the culprit (in the eyes of the police) and the victim (potential victim of the real murderers)” (p. 51).

It soon becomes clear that the boundary between lawful and criminal behavior is tested. The young intellectual, Alexis Olmezoglou, engages in a dangerous game that forces him to cross and confuse these boundaries in order to exonerate himself and, ultimately, save his life. In the end, in an unexpected (and, one might add, ironic) conclusion, it is the very unexpected and unimaginable themselves that allow him to get out of a very difficult situation. The victory of the Greek soccer team demonstrates to him, and to all of us who spent a memorable month glued in front of our TV sets (or radios, in my case), that, indeed, “hope dies last.”

In the end, I found Martinides’s second novel of more interest than his first because of the narrative’s fast pace, relative simplicity and tightness of plot, and the avoidance of some of the problems I touched upon in my previous review (endless literary references, pretentiousness, etc.). Through the parallel drama that takes place on the soccer field, the book creates a thrilling anticipation and climactic conclusion, while employing some of the classic elements and themes of the genre: a femme fatale, the testing of boundaries between lawful and criminal behavior, corrupt cops, and the greed and moral corruption of the bourgeois intelligentsia. And yet, at bottom, the problem remains the elusive main character, Olmezoglou himself, who is still too much of an intellectual creation and not enough of an imaginative one. In other words, he is hollow as anything other than an intellectual exercise and, in the end, remains bound within the self-recursive gesture of the two novels, rather than fully capturing the reader’s imagination.

Apostolos Vasilakis teaches literature and philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Arts & Letters

This is a handsome show in every respect. Two hundred eighty-eight objects of all kinds—coins, vases, inscriptions, bronze figurines, even larger marble pieces—are augmented by a splendid catalogue in which photographs of the highest quality provide a permanent record and, in the case of items difficult to see, much welcomed enlargement. It is a luxury to study the photographed coins and small bronzes up close, as it were. The lines on the lekythoi are suddenly so distinct as they never seem to be when gazed at in the vitrines. The Onassis Cultural Center is a treasure not that well known. The exhibition hall is small, and the wallspace limited, but, in this show, the objects are arranged for maximum ease of viewing as well as for reasonably good circulation. Whenever museum burn-out threatens to descend, the visitor can escape to an adjacent cafe with the now only too ubiquitous waterfall. Some viewers will want to settle into the cafe with the catalogue, in which one can read longer, fuller versions of the captions affixed to the objects on display. Most visitors, I suspect, will want all the clarification they can get.

The pride of the exhibition is the famous marble bust from the archeological museum of Sparta identified (on no particular authority) as a representation of Leonidas, the king of Sparta who led his band of soldiers to their deaths defending the pass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian forces of Xerxes in 480 bce (in case you haven’t seen 300). Its iconic value is such that there were reportedly demonstrations in Sparta objecting to its exportation even on a temporary basis. For those who will never get to Sparta, this is a rare treat. But of considerably greater interest perhaps is the small, marble grave stele of a young man, also from Sparta’s museum, which is dated to the second quarter of the fifth century. It displays a dejected youth seated, his drooping head propped up by his left hand. His upper torso is bare while a himation drapes his lower body and thighs, thus allowing for the modeling of an adolescent chest, as well as the folds of fabric against limbs. The piece is exquisite for the refinement of carving, for a sentimentality that is more than a hint but hardly excessive, and it will come as a surprise to many viewers who entertain the notion that Spartans of the fifth century were indifferent to the arts in their singleminded pursuit of military prowess.

There are many Spartan surprises in the show, which is its great merit. The world knows, or thinks it knows, the artistic achievements of Athens. Sparta is often a blank page in the book of cultural history. True enough, the Spartans’ cultural production was demonstrably nowhere near the quality or quantity to be found in Athens (although excavation has also been nowhere so pervasive in the area of ancient Sparta). But an item such as a structural detail of a marble throne for the god Apollo designed by an Ionian working in Sparta, which combines features associated with Ionic and Doric architecture and is dated to the late sixth century, shows a society open to experimentation and foreign influence. The vases on display reiterate the well-known fact (to professionals at any rate) that Athenian vase-painting owed much in its earlier years to the Laconian ware exported from Sparta. Some of the Laconian pieces are a revelation, such as the kylix by the Arkesilas painter depicting Atlas and Prometheus, which was lent to this show by the Vatican Museum. The intensity, the drama of the painting of the two figures, is remarkable in an art form that seems to celebrate stasis above all else.

One wonders about the type of audience the curators had in mind in creating the show, however. A chronology (geometric, archaic, classical, etc.) or taxonomy (Corinthian, Laconian, black-figure, red-figure, etc.) that is right out of a Classical Archeology 101 handbook seems to be directed at the neophyte viewer (although he/she would need a crash course in relative and absolute chronologies), and indeed one would imagine that a public exhibition such as this (with free entrance, to boot) is catering to a crowd off the street. In thanking the curators for inviting his contribution to the exhibition, Paul Cartledge remarks that the exhibit “marks a ‘first’ for the presentation of a selection of Spartan artifacts en masse in a North American context.” We may assume, therefore, that the target audience is New Yorkers or tourists visiting Manhattan. On the other hand, the exhibition captions demand some level of expertise. Terms such as “protomes” to describe the head and shoulders of a horse, or “coroplastic workshops” (places in which small terracotta figures were produced), like the use of the Latin title of an ancient Greek text, produced in this reviewer a frisson of déjà vu, returning him to graduate school. The same narrowness that a reliance on technical language suggests seemed reflected in the omission of references to analogous or complementary material in the extraordinarily rich collection on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It might have been a big help to the man on the street who might want to stroll just some 30 blocks up Fifth Avenue. Likewise, the viewer might have welcomed an explanation of what is meant by saying that a scene painted on an Attic red-figured pelike “is imbued with the ethos of the Parthenon and Erechtheum friezes.” While looking at an eighth-century geometric pyxis from Sparta, this viewer was astounded to read, “This pyxis is representative of Laconian pottery produced in the second half of the eighth century b.c. At the end of this century, which coincides with the end of the First Messenian War, the Parthénies (the lineage founded by Spartan women who bore children to helots during this war) founded the colony of Taras (Tarentum) in Italy. The presence of corresponding pottery in Italy indicates that relations between Sparta and Taras were close.” Hey, wait a minute. Helots? Spartan women? Adultery while the men were at the front? With social inferiors? Everybody lived to tell the tale? More information, please!

So much needs to be explained, the “archaic smile,” for instance, on the Leonidas bust; likewise, the nudity of small, bronze male figurines that are described as a “trumpeter” or “a rustic.” A viewer puzzling over why a bronze “man putting on his greaves” would put on his shin-guards without bothering to slip into some underwear might also ask what, exactly, is a greave? The quotation from Theognis written in over the head of a male reclining at a banquet depicted on an Attic red-figure kylix is properly identified as a homoerotic and pederastic sentiment, just as the curator notes that the hare depicted on the vase is a commonplace erotic gift to youths. But why hint when everywhere else the didactic tone is so relentless? Don’t ask, don’t tell, just hint. The curator omits to mention that this is a stag party: “lots of dancing, singing, reciting,” he says, but should have added “lots of flirting.” What is an ill-informed person to do with these hints, especially a contemporary American who has been educated to demonize homosexual experience? There is no reference to the great value placed on homoerotic relationships by the aristocracy of both Athens and Sparta, or the belief among conservatives such as Xenophon that homosexual relationships among Spartan males—a hallmark of their culture—was one of the reasons for their superiority.

In a show that is meant to encapsulate Athenian and Spartan cultures, its organizers have encountered the usual dilemma of offering up ideas when visuals are what are displayed. Essentially, they count on the viewer knowing the tried and true story of Greek-speaking peoples in the sixth and fifth centuries bce: the invention of the alphabet, the invention of coinage (although really a Lydian invention, the Athenians and Corinthians seemed to have perceived its use as money and for commerce), both of which made democracy possible; Spartan subjection of their neighboring populations, and their subsequent evolution into a controlled and repressive society, vaguely reminiscent of South Africa; the Persian War, in which a relatively small group defeated the mighty hordes of Persians, thereby illuminating the virtues of steadfastness, courage, and self-sacrifice; the establishment of the Delian League, which brought unprecedented prosperity to Athens, allowing for the “Greek miracle” of fifth-century Athenian high culture—the Parthenon and all that (ignoring if possible the underpinning tribute money demanded of what started as allies in the League and became de facto subjects). Allusions and discussion of all this are to be found here and there in the exhibition captions, as well as in the two essays on Greek history, one by Cartledge, an eminent authority on Sparta and professor at Cambridge, and the other by Donald Kagan, the Yale professor, some of whose writings on Athens and the Peloponnesian War have sparked controversy for his conservative political reflections on contemporary events. He is more subdued here, but both men, while exalting courage and steadfastness in the face of danger, also view the story of Athens and Sparta—and their military engagement with Persia—as a clash of civilizations: democracy, individualism, and capitalism against totalitarianism, faceless hordes, and irrationality. The average viewer might easily succumb to thoughts of the conflict of Islam and the West as it is played out in the media. Well, maybe we are meant to see Charles Martel in Leonidas although history repeating itself is an idea pretty much discredited nowadays. As Louis MacNeice so memorably wrote in his poem, Autumn Journal:

Professor Kagan seems to be warning us, who have allowed our self-discipline to soften into decline here in the West, when he says on page 267: “The result in 338 was a major Macedonian victory at Chaeronea that brought an end to the era of the independent Greek polis and the Hellenic period, Greece’s most creative epoch.” What does it mean to say “Greece,” one wonders. There was no nation-state, not even a rudimentary structure that allows for the word, Greece, one would imagine. How was the independent Greek polis such as Athens to continue? There were no annual operating budgets, no economic base to the society other than tribute money. That did not make for political stability. Sparta, with its diminishing population, had been in decline for some time. (Rosa Proskynitopoulou has an excellent if brief assessment of Sparta on the way out at the close of her essay on Laconian metalworking.) Kagan makes it sound as if it could have been otherwise. Maybe, when all is said and done, the Macedonian victory was a natural consequence of the situation? What, in fact, does most “creative” mean? What is the broad overview? Maybe the metaphor should be sought in the destruction in the battle at Chaeronea of Thebes’s Sacred Band, the battalion of men who fought with their lovers to the last against Philip. Isn’t it finally all about adaptability?

Charles Rowan Beye is distinguished professor emeritus of classics at the City University of New York, a contributing editor to greekworks.com, and author, most recently, of Odysseus: A Life.

Arts & Letters

The anthem sung by the crowd following the impassioned plea above, as Robert Altman’s film comes to its piercing end, is a peculiar—and peculiarly American (this is Nashville, after all)—circling of the affective wagons. The chorus resounds in oxymoronically defiant resignation: “It don’t worry me. It don’t worry me./You may say that I ain’t free,/But it don’t worry me.”

Robert Altman never won an Academy Award. But, then again, neither did Hitchcock or Chaplin or Lubitsch or Hawks or Welles, although they all received honorary Oscars, those “lifetime achievement” consolations meant to assuage Hollywood’s easily assuageable guilt and to camouflage the stupidity, cynicism, and (worst of all) thermonuclear envy that has always driven its prizegiving. Altman got his last year. He was gracious, but also unsparing, if in a characteristically indirect way: “Of course I was happy and thrilled…to accept this award. And I look at it as a nod to all of my films because, to me, I’ve just made one long film. And I know some of you have liked some of the sections, and others you….Anyway, it’s all right.”

Well, no, it wasn’t, and isn’t, but there’s nothing to be done for it now. Altman won’t be making any more movies, as he died last November, and so Hollywood won’t get another chance to make amends. But Tinseltown’s tough. Besides, as Altman once explained, “They sell shoes and I make gloves.” If anything, it’s a miracle the cobblers let him make his handwear for so long.

Nashville was released on June 11, 1975, exactly five weeks to the day after the fall of Saigon on April 30. Less than nine months earlier, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon had resigned from the presidency. That’s what you call overdetermined. If there was a zeit to the geist of American cinema in the Seventies, it was Robert Altman, although, ironically (or, maybe, pointedly), he had turned 50 a few months before Nashville’s premiere.

Renoir was, of course, the greatest filmmaker ever known, both in his own time and well after his genius was universally recognized, as an “incompetent.” Writing more than a decade after Renoir’s death, even Andrew Sarris referred to the “lapses and longueurs” in his work. Despite Sarris’s oft- and effusively documented admiration for Renoir, he, too, could feel that the director’s results were often so “messy” that, arguably, none of his films could be considered “well made” (see “The Magnificent Child,” The New York Times, March 25, 1990).

Of course, “well made” is in the eyes of the beholder, just as one person’s mess is another’s riches. To take the most famous “mess” in the history of cinema, even if The Rules of the Game hadn’t suffered its infamous butchery because of distributors and producers (and censors) that relegated almost a third of it to the cutting-room floor, it seems so fractured, so disordered, even today (when it has been more or less restored) that a first viewing of it is exceptionally disorienting. But that’s exactly the point, not only to this work, but to every movie Renoir ever made.

There is a reason Renoir is the greatest naturalist in the history of filmmaking and why, moreover, he is a much greater artist than his father, whose work imprisoned him in a sentimentality that might have been inadvertent but was, ultimately, an inevitable consequence of an emotional entrapment that arose directly from his art. For the son, however, the depiction of the human world meant exactly that: surveying an affective, social, and—something that was always enormously potent for him—environmental topos that could only be determined to the extent it was recorded. This is naturalism shorn of ideological presumption and certainly liberated from sentimental prescription. This is the world as it is: complex, contradictory, often inexplicable, and usually impervious to arbitrary attempts at explanatory order. In other words, “messy.”

Put another way, this is the world seen agnostically: layered, diffuse, inconstant, self-defining, but, in the end, accessible to us, even if not particularly familiar or amenable to uncomplicated understanding. Lapses? The camera in Renoir’s films is so often not where it “should” be because human understanding is so often a result, not to say a function, of accident rather than purpose. Renoir’s editing is also frequently less than “seamless,” but, then, human consciousness is repeatedly jarred into comprehension, as the confrontation between being and otherness almost habitually results in disjunction rather than connection. As for his “longueurs,” what makes human relations so poignant if not the cumulative paralysis of men and women frozen by their very need to communicate with one another? What is psychoanalysis, in the end, but an endless “longueur”? Indeed, it is precisely Renoir’s longueurs that make his work so utterly, and consistently, revelatory, if for no other reason than that silence is the most ancient and effective form of expression, in its directness even more so than in its ambiguity.

And then, of course, there is Renoir’s roving camera and depth of field. Well, yes, getting at “truth”—as much as it can be established—is a bit of a bother. You’ve got to figure out which cranny to look into, which hint to follow, which “obvious” and “self-evident” truth is no more than strategic mendacity and self-interest disguised as moral certitude. There’s a reason why classical decoupage—i.e., Hollywood’s esthetic of (apparent) continuity and contiguity, of shot/reverse-shot, master and cover shots—is the most effective form of propaganda ever conceived by the human mind: it works. Which is to say, it deceives. One’s mind—one’s entire affective universe—is guided in a way that only music can duplicate (something that Ingmar Bergman always understood), except that the movies’ narrative singularity give them a power (and verisimilitude) that music cannot begin to compete with.

As the two dominant paradigms of filmmaking, editing and mise en scène (to use shorthand to denote visual style in the frame, as opposed to one based on the relationship of frames), are both famously associated with left-wing filmmakers (Eisenstein and Renoir, respectively), ideology doesn’t help much in explaining artistic structure. Furthermore, any theory of art claiming greater (or more “authentic”) reality is, fundamentally, belied by the fact that art is always artifice, and making art a series of subjective interventions on (against?) the objectivity (and innate contingency) of the world. Which is obviously why there’s also no such thing as documentary filmmaking per se, let alone “direct cinema” or “cinéma vérité.” The best we can hope for is honest self-consciousness on a filmmaker’s part, so that the nature of his or her deception is both transparent (which transparency, of course, is precisely what classical decoupage strives so hard to conceal) and, even more so, of a mimetic quality that reproduces, even if only in the faintest form, the actual perception (and perceptual obstacles) of human beings in the world, as opposed to outside of it, literally watching it roll on—a physical impossibility in “real life,” but precisely the position in which most movies always put us.

The critical problem is (accounting for) the world’s contingency. How does an honest filmmaker depict what’s what in the world, and why that is? Renoir’s answer was also his response to classical decoupage: a redefinition of the temporal (continuity) and spatial (contiguity) as emanating not outside but inside the frame—in other words, through the camera, as opposed to on the flatbed (and to decoupage, be it classical, Eisensteinian, or otherwise).

This is the world of messy movies, of lapses and longueurs. Of a realism that is the closest film will ever get to reality, of a naturalism that is as faithful to—and structurally mimetic—of natural contingency, if not exactly nature, as artifice can ever be. This is the cinema of Renoir and Robert Altman, in which what happens, happens, not because it must but because it will.

“Remember, son,” Buffalo Bill counsels his nephew in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, “the last thing that a man wants to do is the last thing he does.” When he died, Altman was in preproduction for his next (quintessentially Altmanesque) project, a fictionalized remake of the 1997 documentary, Hands on a Hardbody. This was, after all, the man who, when asked about it, likened retirement to death. Still, there is an eerily elegiacal quality to his last film, A Prairie Home Companion: it almost seems to be a requiem, not so much for a man as for an entire culture.

“We come from people,” Garrison Keillor says early on in the movie, “who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.” Hearing that line in the theater in Paris, where my wife and I have been living for the last couple of years and where we saw the movie, after Altman’s death, I immediately thought of the lunatic euphoria in which Americans have been sunk for the last quarter of a century since the dawning of morning in America. It just seems that, somehow, in some way, the long, postwar march from 1945 to 1980 had become, by that latter year, too difficult, too painful, too demanding of general sacrifice and needful of genuine citizenship. Somehow, in some way, by 1980, just five years after Altman released what is probably his most resonant movie, the American people decided to collectively stick their heads out the window, exhale, and scream—following the now-famous advice of the film made the following year by Altman’s fellow fifties-something director, Sidney Lumet—“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

As so often before in the twentieth century, however, the injunction by an artist to his fellow citizens to express and then channel their rage ended up having radically different results from those intended. The man elected fortieth president of the United States in 1980 was not the man that that infinitely lucid ranter, Howard Beale (“We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions….None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds—we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. WE are the illusion.”) would have voted for, as he was the absolute embodiment of the tube’s domination of American life. (It is vain but instructive to speculate on what Howard Beale would have made of YouTube.)

So began our excellent adventure of moral and existential deregulation (and ideological re-regulation): from the Reaganite Eighties, when greed was good, to the Clintonite Nineties, when greed was even better because it was now “globalized,” to the Bushite Noughts, when greed just wasn’t good enough and had to be pumped up by empire. There were hiccups along the way (there always are in hostile takeovers)—a couple of towering Manhattan infernos here, a Madrid train-station massacre there, mass murder even farther away, in Mesopotamia—but, hey, “stuff happens,” to quote our former secretary of defense.

And yet, according to Keillor/Altman, we came “from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle….” Well, yes, we did, once upon a time and long, long ago. But we don’t believe that anymore. What we believe now is that struggle is a burden, a misfortune—bad financial planning. That only happiness matters in life (my happiness, my life), that happiness is the sum total of human purpose, that happiness is the only goal in a “goal-centered life,” to echo the autistic instrumentalism of America’s professional purveyors of existential sedation. And what is “happiness”? Indefinable, perhaps, but, like pornography, recognizable as such. Like pornography, too, able to transform genuine desire into coopted, commercialized, alienated—thoroughly exploited and therefore thoroughly exploitable—need. Happiness as it ever was, except more so, excessively so, not merely material, but freighted, not simply accumulative but a Himalayan swagheap, as if sumptuary exchange is equal to, better than, sexual exchange, which has now become so prosaic, so easy, so ubiquitous, so spectacular (as defined by Debord, not DeMille), and, thus, so utterly boring that accumulation in itself—massive, disproportionate, irrational, endless, verging on, indeed, spilling over into, psychic disorder—is the only way to reconstruct our erotic lives, is, in truth, the only eros we have left in our civilization.

You may say that we ain’t free, but it don’t worry us because we’re fat and rich and happier than hogs in shit—or at least we think we are, which is all that matters in the end. In Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Ned Buntline explains the rise and fall—and self-deception—of nations (and, presumably, empires): “A rock ain’t a rock once it becomes gravel.” Later, he points to an existential chasm: “Injuns gear their lives to dreams….The white men—they’re different. The only time they dream is when things are going their way.”

It is not hyperbole to say that most of Robert Altman’s films were about America’s reveries, and of the delusions arising therefrom. Altman made a lot of movies (about 50), a few of which deserve an entire volume each. Suffice it to say that when future historians look back on the cultural terrain of the last quarter of the twentieth century, M*A*S*H; McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Nashville; Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Secret Honor; Short Cuts; A Prairie Home Companion, and about 40 other movies together will constitute a chronicle of that time (and of the times before and after) with which very few other accounts—artistic or academic—will be able to contend for sheer poignancy and narrative power.

It is telling of his global influence that three of the four filmmakers competing with Martin Scorsese for the Best Director Oscar this year—American Clint Eastwood, Englishman Paul Greengrass, and Mexican Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu—were honored for making the kind of multilayered, multiperspectival movie most associated with Altman. In Iñárritu’s case especially, the artistic line from Altman is so direct as to be almost genetic. Not that multiple perspectives, or apparently disparate stories coming together in the (usually terrible) end, prove that Iñárritu (or Greengrass or, to take another obvious example, Paul Haggis, who not only directed last year’s Oscar-winning Crash but wrote Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) would not have made the films he’s made had Altman not made his. Indeed, Altman himself was always the first to point to Hawks’s influence when film illiterates credited him with “inventing” overlapping dialogue. (“People talk about my signature, but I ask them if they ever saw Howard Hawks’s films,” he inquired of a Guardian interviewer last year.) In Eastwood, in fact, it is clear that we’re dealing with an entirely different, and autonomous, esthetic (and moral) model. (Letters from Iwo Jima is not only a work of genuine genius and uncommon complexity that will forever change the genre of which it is a part and of which it has immediately become a classic, but a remarkable dissection, of devastating lucidity, of the “American century.”) Still, virgin birth is a theological concept, not a biological one and certainly not an artistic one.

(Although the less said about this year’s Best Director Oscar, the better, I have to add that rarely has an honoree been so mismatched with an honor. Put aside the fact that Scorsese got the award for what is arguably the worst film he’s ever made—although with appallingly pretentious examples such as The Aviator, Kundun, The Age of Innocence, and The Last Temptation of Christ, that’s a hard call—or that he competed against four other directors who crafted films superior to his in every possible way. The problem is that he is the most overrated director of the most overrated generation of directors in the history of American moviemaking. With the exception of Francis Ford Coppola—whose The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation both deservedly competed for the Best Picture Oscar in 1974 and are essential works of American cinema in the Seventies—it is sobering to realize how much less than first seduces the eye there really is in the work of the “iconic” Gang of Four standing on the stage after this year’s Oscar for best director was awarded.)

So, what did Altman give to succeeding generations of filmmakers? Essentially, what Renoir gave him: everything. “The Rules of the Game,” Altman once famously acknowledged, “taught me the rules of the game.” I’ve always suspected that this recognition of debt referred to more than moviemaking. In any case, Altman shared with Renoir a sense of his own work. At the outset of this article, I quoted Altman’s judgment that he had made “just…one long film.” Renoir, too, believed that a “director makes only one movie in his life” and then “breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” (A major problem with Scorsese has always been precisely that the course from Raging Bull to Kundun, and Taxi Driver to The Age of Innocence, shows not so much “evolution,” let alone an unappeasable and encyclopedic esthetic, as a confused and utterly unfocused sense of his own work.)

Altman’s most important inheritance from Renoir—in actuality the singular one, encompassing all others—was the notion of plenitude, which is not merely an esthetic vision but a moral one. I said before that Renoir’s perception of the world—and, so, consequently, his filming of it—was “agnostic.” What I meant was that, as opposed to so many other filmmakers, many of them as great as he, Renoir did not approach the world as a problem but as a fact. Although he was (deeply) a man of the left, he did not believe that human rationality could be imposed, but, rather, that it could only be extracted from the social ecology (and accretions of custom and cohabitation) that human beings had developed both among themselves and, even more important, in active relationship with the natural world into which they’d been born. The greatest illusion for Renoir was precisely the notion that humanity could force any rules at all on the world’s self-regulating game, which, for him, was always one in which society was actively delimited by the realities of nature. Which was also why, in the end, it was obvious that “tout le monde a ses raisons”—although what is so often forgotten is the judgment that leads to that brutal certainty: that that is “Ce qui est terrible sur cette terre.”

It is ridiculous—a gross and utter miscomprehension—that this profoundly demystifying and disenchanted artist is now lauded as a “romantic” or even an idealist. Of course he was an idealist; what is any artist, after all, but a practicing idealist? It’s just that he didn’t believe his ideals defined actually existing humanity. He undoubtedly wished they would, but, in the end, it was more important for him that human beings understood that, regardless of ideals, the world was what it was, and had to be accepted as such. That was precisely the meaning of his agnosticism. The world—our world, made up equally of culture and nature—was, after a certain point, not amenable to reason, but only to acceptance. Life is hard, and then you die. Except that (thank the world for the small pleasures that are actually the greatest ones we can possibly imagine) there are occasional days in the country and picnics on the grass.

“I just think, um, there’s so many people in the world nowadays, it’s hard for Him to give the personal attention that He used to,” Sissy says about God in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. This is Altman’s translation into American demotic of Renoir’s agnosticism. Indeed, every aspect of Altman’s style—the multiple storylines, overlapping dialogue, dense soundtracks, ensemble acting and improvisation—confirmed an artistic and moral conviction that God is always in those details that may or may not be discernible at first glance to us mortals. It goes without saying that since this vision of the world was stubbornly democratic, it was just as obstinately opposed to the weird division of human beings into them and us, friends and enemies, good and evil. In fact, as far as his own country was concerned, Altman believed that everybody had a stake in, a right to, the American Dream—which, however, was, time and again, more American than dream. “I am the American Dream. Period,” Richard Nixon says in Secret Honor. “That’s why the system works. Because I am the system. Period.” Or, to echo Renoir one last time, “What is horrible about this Earth is that everybody has his reasons.”

Peter Pappas is co-founder of greekworks.com.

greekart

Tina Karageorgi is an artist based in Greece who makes installations and intricate paintings that often involve collaged materials. Her work in no way connotes an active sense of classically Greek materials or themes; instead, she is part of an international idiom that is more aware of formal and transcultural identifications than of the expression of culturally specific subject matter. It is easy enough to reconcile the specificities of one’s background with the need for a larger, more inclusive communication; however, the gap between the two grows wider as the pressure of a kind of conformity develops in the art world, the result of globetrotting and international awareness brought about by the media, ambitious shows of artists foreign to the venue in which they are exhibited, and an agreed-upon postmodernism that tends to be all-inclusive from a stylistic point of view.

As a result of this particular set of circumstances, the notion of art being Greek in a specific way is no longer a valid reason for its existence. There is something healthy about this new situation, in that the call of an essentialist nationalism carries with it the less attractive aspects of cultural awareness—as if there really were something that made one kind of art unique, and distinct from any and all other kinds. But the romantic notion of national identity can also be regarded as dying hard; indigenous characteristics of different peoples have a way of persisting, even if they are considered questionable by the intelligentsia who would use them. The real question facing artists, curators, and critics has more to do with whether such attributes can survive the international vernacular of installation, performance art, and conceptualism that currently dominates the market: it appears that there is greater meaningfulness in shared methodologies than in making boundaries, intellectual as well as geographic, beyond which the artist is unable to go. As it turns out, the art world has become so pluralistic that it proves almost impossible to tease from its productions an impression of genuine national difference, in the sense that such variation might be responsible for differing views and creations in art.

This is why Karageorgi’s art visits other cultures without succumbing to the domination of any particular outlook. Her technical skill in creating installations owes something to the idiom of environmental, site-specific works, developed for the most part in the 1990s: such art was often the currency of ambition for artists working at that time. Karageorgi’s art demonstrates a decided penchant for an existence on the cusp of painting and installation, a hybrid product that joins categories of conception, in ways that emphasize the integrity of the particular work being described. In Kimono (2006), for example, Karageorgi nods in the direction of Japan, her complex collage of different panels highlighted by freewheeling sketches of branches, with a center filled with blood-red blooms, in actuality, poppies. The arrangement of the panels echoes the structure of the kimono itself, such that we cannot choose between the idea of the clothing or its reality. The artist’s rejection of categories in favor of a holistic approach emphasizes the work as a gestalt, a work of art complete within itself. The rough impressionism with which Karageorgi has covered the work shows that there is a decorative cast to Kimono, which would make sense as it is an article of women’s clothing.

The lyricism taken up by Kimono repeats regularly in Karageorgi’s art, which appears to owe its poetry to Asian culture. Yet there is a starkness to much of her work as well, borne out by the sharp contrast of colors in the large (340 cm. x 323 cm.), painted construction entitled Section of Memory (2004), in which two columns divide a background into three equal parts. The columns are covered with images of modern houses painted black on clear plastic sheeting, while the background rises and ebbs with gatherings of bright red flowers, very much like the red poppies in Kimono. In her catalogue, essay curator Thalia Vrachopoulos sees the color as suggestive of blood and as an artifact from Japan: “in its shape it can be read as a Heian Period kimono that could have been illustrated in one of the ‘Tale of Genji’ scrolls.” As Vrachopoulos points out, the dramatic contrast of colors is reprised in the juxtaposition of hard buildings with the softness of flowers; here, artist Karageorgi appears to relish the sensory differences not only of materials but also of imageries put out for the viewer to see. The powerful drama generated by the use of opposing colors stays with us after we have seen the painting; for all its beauty, we also see a dramatic, potentially dangerous tableau, in which the red relates to blood as much as to flowers. Is it possible to link such a scenario to the stark dramas of Greek literature? It is hard to say. Even so, the very possibility of such a connection presupposes Karageorgi’s ties to her place and culture—even if those ties are tenuous and open to differing interpretations. There is an extravagance to Karageorgi’s work that might well affiliate, albeit in an abstract fashion, with the intensities of her background.

Sometimes the artist presents her concerns more straightforwardly. Forest (2006), of a medium size in its dimensions (150 cm. x 170 cm.), represents the poetic mystery of a stand of trees, the four major vertical trunks with short branches not so far from the inspired intricacies of a painting by Jackson Pollock. Against the gray background, the black trees and foliage at the bottom of the composition look enigmatic and portentous, as if containing a knowledge difficult to know and express. The ghostly imagery is lyrical in the extreme; throughout Karageorgi’s work there is a plan, a sense of purpose that intimates a higher order, in which the decorative becomes beautiful and the mysterious turns transcendent. What is most exciting, at least for this viewer, is the combined vernacular of figuration and abstraction, resulting in a seamless switch from one category of being to the other. While Karageorgi owes some of the effects of her lyricism to modernism, the gestural efforts of the abstract expressionists in particular, the conception behind her works is clearly her own.

Some of Karageorgi’s most compelling work can be found in her books: transparent pieces of glass painted over with abstract and figurative motifs, the individual panes layering together to culminate in both a sophisticated and complex imagistic collage. The blood-red poppies are again present; they serve as a symbol of both ephemeral beauty and the ubiquity of violence. As the viewer turns the pages of glass, held together by steel frames, there is a real sense of opening up to possibilities, both visual and thematic, that express what might well be called a tragic view of life. Karageorgi brings us to the center of an awareness influenced by certain kinds of fragility—is there anything more subtle or delicate than the blooms of a flower? Yet, at the same time, we can see in the force of her art a commitment to a truth intrinsically moral in its awareness and severity. There is a real task completed in her lyrical efforts: it is the labor of attaining a particular vision at a time when art can easily feel the same, no matter from where its origins derive. The lyrical moment is something that is hardly undertaken, let alone achieved, but it is clear that the artist wants us to undergo something of a conversion in the face of her exquisite imagery. Karageorgi’s world turns on the supposition that beauty and suffering are concomitant in the world, with the result that we are both charmed and warned by her art. This is neither popular nor easy to effect, but we are made richer by our participation in the subjective assertions and dilemmas of Karageorgi’s imagination.

Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.

Our Opinion

Unhappy is the land that needs a hero, the eponymous anti-hero famously warns in Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. By that measure, Turkey stands as a wretchedly unhappy land today.

Make no mistake. Hrant Dink was a hero. And, as Brecht well understood, he was one precisely because his country’s unhappiness demanded it of him. In the end, Dink sacrificed his life not because he wanted to—he had two daughters, a son, a wife (truly a comrade), and that driving sense of mission that only comes from a deep attachment to the world—but because his country was so thoroughly, pathologically unhappy that it needed to make him a hero for all time, which is to say a martyr.

The only fate more abject for a country than the need for heroes is the grim compulsion to transform them into martyrs. Blood will have blood, another playwright wrote centuries before Brecht. It is one of the sadder truths of the history of nations (invariably the history of mass murder) that those who openly reject facile identities are the least understood by—and, therefore, the most conspicuous scapegoats for whatever ails—the particular nation. Ironically, of course, these defenders of historical humility (and, so, of historical integrity) are—and this is where the irony swerves into tragedy—the truest and most unwavering patriots. Although he was viscerally opposed to partition, for example, Gandhi was, in the end, assassinated by a Hindu nationalist, not a Muslim separatist, since he was just as viscerally committed to Hindu-Muslim unity and saw an amputated India as artificial (and colonial) a creation as a monoconfessional “Land of the Pure” (aka Pakistan).

Here, in the United States, Malcolm X was murdered by hitmen of the Nation of Islam, that is, by his former co-religionists and comrades. Malcolm, too, had come to reject facile interpretations (idiocies, more accurately) of “white devils” and “original people.” During his umrah to Mecca just months before his assassination, he had finally witnessed authentic Islam, “a true brotherhood…of all colors and races,” he wrote to his followers back in Harlem. “You may be shocked by these words coming from me,” he continued, “[b]ut on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.” That rearrangement had not been “too difficult,” he continued, as “I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it.” Above all, Malcolm concluded, “I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”

An “open mind…necessary to…every form of intelligent search for truth”: there is no more concise description of Hrant Dink’s civic plea to his fellow Turkish citizens and—it should not be forgotten—to his fellow Armenians. All Dink wanted, both for the society and country in which he was born and lived, and for the Armenian diaspora from whose political program he often conspicuously dissented, was an intelligent—that is, a conscientious and, above all, honest—search for the truth. He knew, however, that such a moral passage was impossible without the preparation of an open mind. Dink wanted Turkey to face up to itself, to its past crimes and current incapacities. He wanted his fellow Armenians, however, to move on, to liberate themselves from the moral deadend of increasingly pointless, and debilitating, historical recriminations. Does it matter if the systematic extermination of 800,000 to 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians is labeled a “genocide”? Of course it does. Should this one question, nonetheless, precondition or preempt the relations of Turks and Armenians till the end of time? Of course it shouldn’t. Dink famously counseled his fellow Armenians to pull Turkish-Armenian relations from the pit “of a 1915 meters-deep well.” As Baskın Oran, the prominent Turkish political scientist, human-rights activist, and columnist for Agos, Hrant Dink’s newspaper, said of his colleague and friend, Dink implored Armenians to look at past and present “through the eyes of the other side.”

Still, if Dink wanted Armenians to examine the world through Turkish eyes, he also very much wanted his fellow Turkish citizens to reexamine their historical presence—and national rationale and self-constitution—through the eyes, ears, mouths, and hearts of the countless Armenians (and other minorities) who had been annihilated on the way to “modern” Turkey. The historical facts have been known to almost everyone outside of Turkey from the very beginning, namely, that the Turkish republic was predicated on a series of—for lack of a less controversial term—ethnic cleansings.

This in itself is not the problem, however. The United States was founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. The “United Kingdom” is a euphemism for the often sanguinary suppression of Scots, Welsh, and, especially, Irish. No one knows what “Spain” will look like 100 years from now, as the current configuration (of 17 “autonomous communities”) is the result of centuries of inquisitions, national repressions (of Basques and Catalans, most notoriously), and reconquistas of every sort, from that of Los Reyes Católicos to the most recent one of El Caudillo de la Última Cruzada y de la Hispanidad, which is being contested today as vigorously (and in more parts of the country) as ever. As for republican France, we know the human cost of that particular exercise in national formation—essentially, a civil war that lasted from 1789 to 1945. (We’ve manifestly refrained from delving into American and European crimes beyond the respective nations’ borders, as that would drown us in veritable oceans of blood.) So, no, the problem with modern Turkey is not its foundation, which it shares with all nation-states, including all currently democratic ones. The problem with modern Turkey, as Hrant Dink never ceased in trying to make his fellow citizens understand, was—and remains—its subsequent national development.

Or lack thereof. Which is to say that, in Turkey, as in most countries (including the United States), a republic is not the same as a democracy, and it certainly does not automatically endow its citizens with the inalienable constitutional refuge of either liberty or equality (especially before the law), let alone that most mystical of notions, fraternity, which was so brutally imposed in Turkey’s case that Atatürk’s infamous formulation—“Happy is he who says, ‘I am a Turk’”—quickly degenerated from an avowal of national pride to one of ethnic peril.

The person who was shot in the head—three times in the neck and head, to be precise—was, of course, Hrant Dink. It is to Mr. Erdoğan’s credit that, immediately upon learning of the crime, he made it clear, both to his fellow Turks and the world at large, that the perpetrator had also “fired at freedom of thought and democratic life in Turkey.” Still, the lifeless body on the pavement of Halaskargazi Caddesi, covered with a white sheet, was that of Hrant Dink. There are few worse abuses of the truth than the posthumous appropriation by the powers-that-be of those who are ceaselessly persecuted by those powers until the moment they die (violently, more often than not, by what always seem to be feebleminded defenders of offended collective “values”). Turkey might have been “fired at” by a 17-year-old high-school dropout, but it was Hrant Dink who ended up dead on the pavement of central Istanbul.

As for the teenaged “ultranationalist” himself, we can only shake our heads at the depth of the moral morass in which Turkey finds itself as the rest of Europe proceeds toward the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Are we the only ones who feel impelled to ask the most obvious question? Namely, how, exactly, does a 17-year-old become an ultranationalist? We understand perfectly well how he or she can become, say, a soccer fan, or a precocious violinist, or a budding entrepreneur, but what perverse abdication of responsibility—or, even worse, active complicity—by the adults responsible for Turkey’s youth can lead a young person still on the threshold of worldly understanding to “ultranationalism” and, much more tragically, to the crimes that inevitably ensue from it.

What makes all of this particularly germane and disturbing (and poignant) is the fact that Ogün Samast was apparently caught so quickly because his parents recognized him on the surveillance video broadcast directly after the crime and immediately notified the authorities. It is apparent, therefore, that, regardless of what he had heard around the kitchen table growing up, Samast did not hear his parents urging him to murder Armenians.

What he heard daily at school and on the media about Turkey’s alleged “enemies,” external and, especially, internal, and their supposed threat to split up the country, is another matter. There is no point in belaboring the obvious other than to say that the founding myths of the Turkish republic have coalesced into a cancer that, itself, is the most dangerous and direct threat to Turkey’s future. We will only add that we know something about founding myths since the defining event of the Greek national psyche in the twentieth century, the Asia Minor Disaster, was the catastrophic (and arrogant) consequence of that psyche’s egotistical compulsion in the nineteenth century: the Megalê Idea. It is one of many historical ironies in the intimate (and intimately entwined), centuries-long relationship binding Turks and Greeks that the latter’s ruin eighty-five years ago was the foundation of the former’s modern rebirth. We fear that that historical lesson of decline and rise (and decline yet again) has been lost on most of the elites in Turkey today.

It is yet another irony (do they never cease?) that Ogün Samast hails from that hotbed of Turkish nationalism, Trabzon. Yes, Trabzon, formerly Trebizond, once Trapezounta, née Trapezus, the Pontic emporion founded in the eighth century BCE by Milesian merchants. Thousands of years before there was any notion of “Turkey” (or “Greece,” for that matter), there was Trapezus, that Black Sea port—which is to say, by definition, that node of exchange, of commerce and trade, and association and intercourse, with the world beyond itself—whose rejection of insularity, and embrace of the possibilities beyond its shores, was its very reason for being (and continuing existence). It is this city—whose most important tourist sites to this day are Christian churches—that has now become a vortex of Kemalist extremism. There is nothing unusual in this, of course, as historians can attest (Thessalonikê, birthplace of Mustafa Kemal, just to name a familiar example, is the capital of Greek historical denial). Still, it is not only distressing to behold, but—as the fate of Hrant Dink proves—murderously dangerous.

As incredible as this might seem, after serving his compulsory military service, Dink actually wanted to make the Turkish armed forces his life. We quote from the last interview he gave, to the Russian news agency Novosti, two days before his death:

As we said before, those who reject facile identities are usually the most profound patriots, mostly because they understand the contradictions and internal conflicts of individual identity. Hrant Dink was never an ethnic nationalist; in fact, he was a man of the left (a Maoist in his youth). But he realized early on that the left had its own taboos and bigotries. We quote again from the Novosti interview:

Yes, it is. It is bad enough for a human being of progressive, radically liberated spirit to be shunned by organized reaction; it is especially painful when the rejection emanates from people he would otherwise consider his natural comrades and allies. Of course, in the West, the left has gone completely in the opposite direction, privileging “identity” to the point that it has effectively debased any coherent notion of what was once the revolutionary constitutional concept of “citizenship.” But somewhere between the Stalinist inheritance of the (traditional) Turkish left and the solipsistic corruption of the Western left, there must be a different, and more enlightened, path.

There is, of course, and it was broken by Hrant Dink. His wife, Rakel, asked that no political slogans or other demonstrations be made at her husband’s funeral, which was attended by over 100,000 people. “Today,” she said, “we are going to generate immense sound through our silence.” “Today,” she said, “begins the moment when the darkness of the valleys rises towards brightness.” And then: “Whoever the assassin may be, whether he was 17 or 27 years old, I know that he was once a baby. My brothers and sisters, one cannot accomplish anything without first questioning the darkness that creates an assassin from such a baby…” (translated for openDemocracy.net by Fatma Müge Göçek).

Hrant Dink was opposed to legislation that made denial of the Armenian genocide a crime. Indeed, last fall, when the French National Assembly passed such legislation, he had said that, should it be enacted into law (it hasn’t yet), he’d be the first to travel to Paris to break it. Dink felt that every democratic nation needed to confront its past and, more important, guarantee the future of the many minorities that come together in most nations, but he also felt that democracy imposed another, equally heavy, obligation: freedom of speech. Affirming the fact of the Armenian genocide in France is an empty, and fundamentally meaningless, gesture as long as Turkey itself refuses to do so. More to the point, the politically correct fashion of criminalizing speech—even the most abhorrent speech, including denial of the Holocaust—is not only fraught with danger, but completely ignores the crux of the issue of democratic citizenship: Rakel Dink’s plea to question, and combat, the darkness that creates assassins out of babies.

In the wake of Hrant Dink’s assassination, Haluk Şahin, a Turkish colleague and supporter (who has also been prosecuted under the notorious Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code that proscribes “insulting Turkishness”), went to the heart of the matter: “Turkish public reaction against this murder will show us where Turkey stands in the world.” The nature of this reaction is, to be charitable, far from clear at the moment. It is true that tens of thousand of people attended Dink’s funeral carrying signs reading, “We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenians.” It is also true, however, that other Turks (albeit fewer in number and usually in soccer stadiums) demonstrated with signs declaiming, “We are all Mustafa Kemal, we are all Turks.” And lest anyone think that these are just the kneejerk reactions of lumproletarians, we remind our readers of the sentiments of Prof. Hasan Ünal, which we quoted at the outset of this editorial and which represent the consensus of many hardline academics, intellectuals, and the Kemalist “secular” establishment—especially in the armed forces. Indeed, there is more than a hint here of the old, late-Ottoman division between the noble and “pure” Turkish Anatolian hinterland and “gavur İzmir.” Today, as ever in the history of Turkey, the division remains between Kemalist Ankara and “gavur İstanbul.”

Rakel Dink concluded her eulogy with an assurance to her husband (and the world): “You departed from those you loved; you departed from your children, your grandchildren. You departed from those here who came to send you off. You departed from my embrace. You did not depart from your country, my beloved.” We hope she is right about the permanence of Hrant Dink’s presence in Turkey’s future; we believe she is. We will know for certain the day when one of his grandchildren, “a good Turkish citizen” like he was, will decide to join the Turkish armed forces, pass the examinations, and be duly awarded his—or her—commission as an officer.

Balkans

A note from the editors: John Tirman contributed this analysis to greekworks.com before the tragic assassination of Hrant Dink on January 19. As events proved, the article's last sentence, warning against Turkey's “darker impulses, now riding herd again,” turned out to be sadly prophetic.

In the violent terrain of the Middle East, there is a Muslim ally of the United States that has confronted its terrorist problems with exceptional displays of military force, legal aggression, and ethnic profiling. It has done so for many years, and today remains a deeply divided society at war with its own citizens. That country is the republic of Turkey. It may provide a lesson or two for the “war on terrorism.”

Having conducted a torched-earth policy to root out a politically violent group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Turkey remains riven by fears, old and new. Led by its devoutly Muslim prime minister, whose ascent was enabled by the economic chaos and corruption created in part by the Kurdish insurgency, Turkey is lapsing into habits of political repression. Its military is mobilized. Its public mood is dark and suspicious. Much of this angst is spurred by the PKK’s renewed activity after it appeared to be defeated following a 20-year civil conflict that took 40,000 lives.

The military has mobilized some 250,000 troops along the border with Iraq, and another 100,000 on the border with Iran. Neither country has ever threatened Turkey, but Kurdish guerrilla activity is the putative reason for this extraordinary display of force. A new and harsh anti-terror law criminalizes activities that most Westerners would view as normal political discourse. Some 100 publishers, writers, and translators have been charged with thought crimes for publishing work about the Kurdish issue, the 1915 Armenian genocide, or other such matters.

While its attempt to join the European Union has forced it to reform or eliminate many of its worst practices, such as torture, Ankara is relapsing into repression of Kurdish activists and others, such as the long list of writers, who question long-held tenets of Turkish nationalism. The Turkish edition of a book I wrote, Spoils of War, which had been published in the United States in 1997, was one of those prosecuted. The charges were insulting the state, the military, Atatürk, and so on. The publisher, Fatih Taş, and two translators were finally acquitted on November 29, 2006, at a trial that had been delayed several times.

The book, which appeared in Turkish 18 months ago, criticizes the way in which the PKK insurgency was put down—most egregiously, by forcibly evacuating one to two million Kurds from their villages in a “drain-the-swamp” exercise that was by all objective accounts brutal and excessive. I also put Atatürk—a remarkable nation-builder, to be sure—in the context of contemporary statist ideologues like Mussolini, which has not gone down well in Ankara. That was salt on the wounds, however: the charges concern not only the so-called “insults” but the purported promotion of ethnic divisiveness, which virtually any in-depth report of the Kurdish plight evokes from hyper-nationalist prosecutors.

These prosecutions doubtlessly have sent a chill through Turkey’s intellectual circles and dampened enthusiasm for prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s reformist style. While he is different from the old kleptocrats, he is proving unwilling to reign in the prosecutors or harsher laws, unable to confront or control the military, and bent on some sort of Islamic influence, as yet unclear and resisted by Turkey’s now deeply ingrained secular society (for which we do have Atatürk to thank). Official misconduct (corruption, assassinations, and the like) is sloughed off, the prosecutions of speech are said by the government to be beyond its control, and the assertive military posture is blamed on the country’s unyielding generals—raising the question again of whether effective civilian government actually exists in Turkey.

Turkish inflexibility has renewed Kurdish nationalism, on the rise after a brief respite following the 1999 capture of Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader. Turkey grudgingly granted basic cultural rights to its 15 million Kurds, including legalizing use of the Kurdish language. But Kurds remain marginalized by electoral rules, economic discrimination, and overt intimidation. The PKK has returned to attacking Turkish troops. Kurdish youth are restless. The “deep state”—paramilitaries linked to Ankara—has been caught assassinating Kurds.

The deployment of Turkish troops along the borders with Iraq, which is meant to contain the guerrillas—who have recently called for a ceasefire—includes cross-border raids into Kurdish Iraq. This enormous show of force, however, is aimed at Kurdish leaders in Iraq rather than at the pesky but small PKK. And it is here that the issue becomes international and potentially deadly on a vast scale.

Many Turks are horrified both by the US action in Iraq and by our apparent strategy toward Iran. An independent Kurdistan in Iraq is most troubling, and Kurdish leaders there do appear to be seeking sovereignty, a goal that stirs Turkish military leaders to state flatly that they would intervene should such a fact come to pass. In Iran, reports (whose reliability is not certain) persist that the US is aiding Kurdish groups as a regime-changing strategy, another gambit that is bracing Kurdish nationalism in Turkey.

It is conceivable that the US government is not pressuring Turkey on the thought-crimes trials because it needs it to behave with respect to Iraq. There has been no public opprobrium expressed regarding these cases by President Bush or other high officials. (Quite the contrary, a junior American diplomat reportedly told Europeans recently to quiet their human-rights criticisms of Ankara.)

While the US misadventure in Iraq and confrontation with Iran are highly complicating factors, Turkey’s deeper problems are of its own making. Its refusal to embrace moderate Kurds in Turkey has backfired—strengthening, rather than diminishing, Kurdish identity—and the anti-terror campaign merely emboldens Kurdish militants. The speech prosecutions, outlawed by several treaties to which Turkey is a party, could be stopped cold by the government, but are allowed to go forward to silence dissent. (It is sometimes argued that Turkey should, in effect, be gently coaxed into Europe; in fact, it has been a member of several European bodies—the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and NATO, among them—for many years. All of these organizations prohibit the kinds of speech prosecutions that have been going on for years.) Meanwhile, anti-Americanism and a politically potent Islamism are on the rise.

If this is a textbook for the war on terror, we are in for a bumpy road, littered with unnecessary casualties for democratic values and human security. Europeans and Americans must speak out forcefully to protect Turkish intellectuals and, in fact, to protect Turkey from its darker impulses, now riding herd again.

John Tirman was Fulbright Senior Scholar in Cyprus in 1999-2000 and is editor of the Website, www.cyprus-conflict.net. Now a program director at the Social Science Research Council, he is the author, among other books, of Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade and Making the Money Sing: Private Wealth and Public Power in the Search for Peace.

Politics

While there are currently a variety of high-tech educational aids available to them, all any college teacher focusing on civil wars needs is an old-fashioned board game. Called Bullets and Ballots, it allows students to engage in role-playing, assuming the parts of competing factions in a country teetering between elections and civil war.

Five domestic groups—the incumbent government, the military, guerrillas, the “wealthy class,” workers and peasants—as well as the United States (it’s a very realistic game) attempt to extend their influence and establish a government. The game’s instructional value lies in its rules, which entail several rounds of negotiations among all parties and several policy options such as elections, voting for a particular group, supporting or opposing a military coup, or a guerrilla uprising. The United States has the option of “invading” and appointing a government of its choice. Each side’s relative weight is determined by its specific electoral strength (peasants have more votes than the wealthy class) and military power (the military has more than the guerrillas, who, however, can augment their forces thanks to support offered by the Soviet Union and Cuba).

Bullets and Ballots was developed in 1987 by the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies, was marketed as a “learning game on Central America,” and was modeled on the situation in Guatemala in 1990, when the country faced the possibility of elections bringing about the end of a long civil war. It is unlikely that anyone will be able to produce a similar game based on the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, or, at least, one that will have any educational value, let alone commercial viability.

The Guatemalan civil war was deeply rooted in the country’s social and ethnic inequalities, as well as in the arbitrary role of the US-backed military and its support of the landowning elite. The conflict’s origins, its unfolding, and the attempts to end it entailed the participation of a range of political actors, some of whom were dependent on each other. Thus, by recreating Guatemalan conditions, Bullets and Ballots allows students to learn how political actors have to weigh each move they make, and anticipate the impact on the other side in a situation in which the cost of failure will cause a breakdown of the democratic process.

In contrast, the Greek Civil War appears to have broken out because of a series of decisions made by the right-wing government and the communist leadership that disregarded both domestic and external factors. The war began at a time when most of the country was ready to overcome the divisions spawned by the clash between left and right, as Greece was emerging from wartime occupation in late 1944 and early 1945. Even the so-called right-wing “white terror” unleashed throughout 1945, in retaliation against earlier “red terror,” did not automatically trigger civil war. And neither Britain nor the Soviet Union, the two outside forces, was prepared to become deeply involved in a full-scale civil conflict in Greece.

While the ongoing “white terror” prompted the communist leadership to order the formation of a guerrilla army and launch a bid for power in late 1946, there does not appear to have been any serious negotiation or bargaining with the government—or, for that matter, with parties or social groups outside the orbit of communist influence—at the time. As for the government, it was not prepared to pause and reflect on whether any change of policies on its part might prevent the slide into civil war. There is no more telling sign of lack of popular enthusiasm for armed conflict than the situation months later, in mid-1947, when US observers noted the extremely low morale of government forces. The guerrillas might have been more motivated but their numbers were growing very slowly.

What happened in 1946 to provoke civil war is easy enough to establish. The problem lies in understanding its causes. The late Nikos Svorônos, the eminent historian whose penetrating interpretations of modern (and pre-modern) Greek history were based on a sophisticated Marxian analysis, and who spent decades in exile in France after the civil war, remarked on several occasions that, for him, the outbreak of the conflict had been “incomprehensible.” John Iatrides, a political scientist who has produced the most thorough and carefully constructed accounts of the war, has not gone much further than Svorônos in offering an explanation. Iatrides regards the outbreak of war in 1946 as a transition between “unplanned” and “planned” stages of communist insurrection. In doing so, he ascribes responsibility to the communist side, but not premeditation; indeed, he stresses how much the communists dragged their feet before taking the plunge.

Communist indecision was especially pronounced in the early summer of 1946, when there were several hundred former left-wing guerrillas who took to the mountains, armed, in order to defend themselves from roving right-wing paramilitary groups or security forces on the prowl. In Athens, Nikos Zachariadês, the head of the communist party, found himself in a political limbo partly of his own making. His party was still legal, but its supporters were being hounded. While it could also have claimed to represent a sizeable segment of the population, and use that as political leverage, it lacked any representation in parliament because Zachariadês had decided to boycott the elections earlier that year. And, since the situation never stands still in this type of confrontation, the government was calling up conscripts for the army that included supporters of the left, who were told not to resist the draft. On the other hand, the communist party approved of persecuted leftists going up in the mountains to form or join guerrilla bands.

Anyone trying to design a board game based on the Greek Civil War would have trouble including possible outcomes similar to the odd situation in which Zachariadês found himself in the summer of 1946. And even if one did anticipate such a result, whoever was playing the role of Greek communist party leader would have to reach it either by not paying attention or by adopting a self-defeating passivity.

In July, Zachariadês instructed Markos Vafeiadês, a senior leader of the wartime ELAS, to move to the mountain areas were the left-wing guerrillas were being based. His task was to begin coordinating their activities. It was the first of the still-cautious moves the communist leader would make over the next few months. At the same time, the head of the government, Kônstantinos Tsaldarês, was being anything but cautious. Beginning in May 1946, he had introduced the Security Commissions, government-appointed bodies that were free to order the arrest of “dangerous” individuals and to remove them to prison camps being set up on several islands. No evidence was required for the order to be issued. Meanwhile, the military trials of persons accused of being insurgents or aiding them resulted in an escalating number of death sentences.

The polarization in Greece deepened throughout August, as the Tsaldarês government prepared to hold a referendum on the monarchy in ways that would ensure the return of King George II. In the run-up to the election, the government underlined its determination to enforce a law that forbade disrespect to the person of the king or to the institution of the monarchy. The eventual outcome of what was patently a rigged affair was a landslide victory for the throne. (In its editorial of September 1, the day of the ballot, the New York Times commented that if the voters had had the freedom to choose, they would have rejected both the king and the communists.)

The conditions under which the referendum was held, and the obvious fact that the government would not cease its persecution of its opponents even after the favorable outcome, were the last straw for Zachariadês. In his study of the origins of the civil war, David Close, a historian based in Australia, provides a detailed account of what, by then, was a steady escalation by the left. (See my review of Close’s book, “Subjective Correlatives: Greece in the Postwar Period,” greekworks.com, February 17, 2003.) The party leadership gave the green light for the guerrilla war to be expanded under Vafeiadês’s guidance. Finally, the party decided to establish the Democratic Army of Greece in December 1946.

And yet, the outbreak of full-scale civil war was not inevitable at the end of 1946. The guerrilla army was poorly armed and equipped, and numbered only about ten thousand men. There were many communists and leftists who did not approve of the party leadership’s escalation of the struggle, and many were not prepared to join the Democratic Army. The Soviets and Yugoslavs seemed even less enthusiastic and were not prepared to promise supplies.

Any such round of serious military and political initiatives in the Bullets and Ballots board game would have to be followed by a series of negotiations. There would be about 15 minutes for all sides to initiate contacts with one of the other groups in an attempt to broker some sort of agreement that would avert civil war and, by extension, American intervention. Alas, in real life, it seems that it did not cross the minds of either Tsaldarês or Zachariadês to spend any time negotiating with the other side. Come to think of it, they would probably have shunned the opportunity even while playing a board game.

Arts & Letters

Continuing what has now become, almost accidentally, a series on contemporary Greek crime fiction (see this Website for my reviews of Petros Markaris’s books), I now turn to Petros Martinides’s most recent work, specifically, his trilogy, Moiraioi antikatoptrismoi (Fateful Reflections, 2003), H elpida pethainei teleutaia (Hope Dies Last, 2005), and O Theos filaei tous atheous (God Protects the Godless, 2006). Petros Martinides teaches architectural theory and criticism at the University of Thessalonikê; in addition to his publications in his field, however, he has also written books on literature, theater, and comics. Martinides’s multifaceted career is important since his novels reflect his many interests, to say the least.

The first novel in the trilogy, Moiraioi antikatoptrismoi, begins with a reference to a crime scene: the suspicious suicide of a well-known Greek poet and socialite, Maria Markatou, who was once romantically involved with the narrator’s own father, Nick Olmezoglou, a famous architect and scenic designer. Her demise is followed by that of the architect himself—likewise found dead in the bathtub of his hotel room—during a conference in Delphi whose subject is the dramatic cycle of the Atreidae. Around the same time, another murder takes place in the same area. The narrator then informs us: “I was forced to engage myself in a personal investigation about who could have directed the suicide of the poet, who tried to repeat the same scene by killing my father, and who, almost simultaneously, committed another crime next to the sacred Delphic landscape” (p. 10).

In the prologue, we are introduced to the narrator, a cultural anthropologist about to defend his doctoral dissertation who is long-estranged from his father. His academic background allows him to cite readily from literary works in order to contextualize his own experience (often with heavy irony) and reflect upon his social surroundings. This prologue provides us with an almost perfect illustration of what the reader is about to experience over the next 350-plus pages.

The first chapter of the novel takes us back to the narrator’s arrival in Delphi, where he was going to meet his father. The story is generally narrated by the young Olmezoglou, who, although not a detective or police officer, functions as one by observing and constantly analyzing the various elements and characters who appear in the story or are somehow implicated in the crimes committed. While he appears to be an outsider, he, too, is implicated in or at least partly related to the social milieu that he investigates. Critically, the plot is driven from the beginning by the narrator’s desire to understand who his father really was behind his mask of famous public figure, and to discover his own relationship with him. So the question becomes not only that of the killer’s identity but of the victim’s as well, and of the narrator’s ability to determine who his father really was, and of how his relationship to him affects his investigation. For that reason, and because of his relationship to other characters in the story, his search for meaning and order becomes increasingly complicated.

The location itself constitutes another significant element of the story. Most of the action takes place in Delphi, but at the end moves to Thessalonikê, where the crimes are solved. Besides Delphi’s obvious religious symbolism, it possesses a theatrical component as well. Not only does a violent drama (the Atreidae cycle) take place on the stage of its theater, but the crime scene itself takes on a theatrical dimension in its confinement of space and interaction of players. It is an unfamiliar location for a crime novel, and this unfamiliarity becomes indicative of the narrator’s (and, perhaps, the reader’s) estrangement from the place itself, and from the characters that inhabit it, including the narrator’s father. The narrator’s role, among other things, is to serve as a guide, to navigate us through this space and to try to identify and give meaning to its various components and elements. It is not accidental that, with the return of action to the big city (Thessalonikê, young Olmezoglou’s birthplace), the narrator is able to see things clearly and piece together the puzzle of the crimes. At the same time, the author fails to incorporate and explore the specificity of this remarkable city in his own narrative.

It is in Delphi, then, amid discussions and performances of Greek tragedy, that the author introduces a different performance. Upon his arrival, the narrator enters a different social space, one that parallels theatrical space and its performances, altogether new to him, and occupied by a hodgepodge of characters (and their performances). With a sense of detachment and a heavy dose of sarcasm, the narrator introduces us to various theater celebrities and intellectuals, and slowly provides us with more details and information about the context of Markatou’s life and death. Readers familiar with the genre will immediately recognize a common motif. More specifically, the narrator slowly introduces us to the microcosm, a plethora of characters and situations, in which he must labor to identify the person(s) responsible for the crimes. It is like a stage occupied by a number of characters that all, at least theoretically, appear to have a reason to kill. The narrative attempts, on one hand, to slowly penetrate and possibly remove the masks from the characters’ faces in order to reveal their true selves so as to “see” who would have had reason to commit the crimes. One can say a lot about the negativity involved in that kind of representation, and how it reflects on reality and the representation of a specific social group, but that is the least interesting part of the narrative. To quote from Steven Marcus’s introduction to Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op:

And yet, the central role of theater and theatricality in Martinides’s work also underlines and emphasizes the significance of vision and the gaze, both in theater and the detective novel as well. The meaning of seeing, the relationship between the object of vision and its subject, the inverse relationship between the visible and invisible, or one’s ability to see clearly, are central to both theater and detective or crime narratives. The exchange and relationship between seeing and being seen (as articulated not only in the actual story, but also in Markatou’s autobiographical book, which provides the narrator with specific clues about the murders) become central to the narrator’s ability to solve the crimes. In an era of surveillance and omnipresent cameras, the one seeing easily slips into the role of the one being seen. He becomes the object of someone else’s gaze.

In the end, the key to the murders is an anonymous note that the killer writes: “And there where everyone is called M. One who sees is seen, indeed. But one who asks a lot, dies!” (p. 29) The note addresses the question of the relationship and exchange between the one who is seen and the one who sees, or more specifically how the one who sees is also under surveillance. The note reminds the narrator of Velasquez’s painting, Las Meninas, a work of art that interrogates the act of representation itself. As Michel Foucault noted in his famous reading of this particular painting (to which Martinides briefly refers) in his remarkable work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences: “…man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator” (p. 312). The painting addresses the peculiar relationship between the subject of representation and its object. One can occupy both positions. For Foucault, there is an exchange between subject (one who observes and sees) and object (one who is observed and seen), and, quite often, it is a reversal of roles. In Martinides’s story, the entire plot and key to the murder are based upon this ambiguous relationship and reversal between object and subject. This problematic of seeing and visual representation is central, not only because of the narrative’s focus on theater, but, more important, through the very theatricality of the crime. The act (or performance) of crime is captured on tape. Further, while the narrator himself appears to be the subject that investigates and sees, he is himself under surveillance. He who sees is thus also seen. This idea determines the relationship of many characters in the story, as well as the relationship between victims and perpetrators, and, finally, between the murderer and the narrator who investigates and sees.

Martinides’s novel works because he is able to take a very simple and often-used story line—a murder in a restricted environment (a hotel, a house, a train), multiple suspects, an investigator who puts things together—to intelligently address uncommon and often complex ideas about the technologies of visual representation, the interplay between different genres, and the relationship between image and language. The story takes us to different realms of investigation, sometimes criminal, sometimes esthetic or political, often linguistic. One could argue that, in the end, the meaning itself is disseminated through these different realms.

Nonetheless, in reading it, one is soon exhausted by the novel’s constant literary references and quotations, and its endless discussions of theater and anything else that crosses its author’s mind. While I often look for a detective or crime novel to build upon a central idea or motif by successfully interweaving different and heterogeneous elements or ideas, a writer should be able to employ complex ideas and keep the narrative simple at the same time. It is supposed to be a crime novel, after all. Martinides could have benefited from some editing since he is often carried away by his desire to comment on everything and a narcissistic tendency to expose the reader to his own knowledge and experience. I often felt that he was trying too hard to convince us that he had done his homework, that he could successfully write a crime novel while offering us his opinion on art, esthetics, theory, etc., at the same time. The problem is, this practice undermines the authority and reliability of Martinides’s own narrator. In reading the book, I often found myself wondering about the meaning of all those redundant and often tedious allusions and references. In the end, isn’t Martinides guilty of what he accuses some of his characters of doing? Early on in the book (p. 42), he writes, “Perhaps that is the epitome of the Greek intelligentsia: people who, in the middle of eating and drinking, mix up everything—sex and philosophy, politics and art, humor and the Bible—without any hesitation in staining the topics on which they focus in such a mixed-up fashion.” Indeed.

Apostolos Vasilakis teaches literature and philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

greekart

The exhibition, White on White (and a little gray), was held from March to September 2006 at the American Museum of Folk Art. It comprised three highly original, interesting bodies of work: whitework textiles, printwork embroideries, and marble-dust drawings, all of which, according to senior curator Stacy C. Hollander, “expressed aspects of classicism, from the Spartan to the divine.” In the show’s press notes, Hollander explained that this neoclassical impulse, seen in the three genres mentioned, had accorded with the return to the simplicity of whiteness during the nineteenth century (the show’s exhibits dated from 1796 through 1897). As Hollander sees it, this period of unrelenting whiteness, along with the grays produced by the mixture of marble dust on a dark board, not only looked back to an ideal of Greek beauty (even if only experienced through Roman copies); it also looked ahead to the monochromatic painting that began in the middle of the twentieth century—one immediately thinks of Robert Ryman—as well as to the stark white walls of both contemporary galleries and museums that make up most of the venues in which we see art today.

I think it is going a bit far, however, to connect the unconsciously ingenuous, mostly feminine, arts of America’s neoclassical nineteenth century, in the sense that there is a materialist and conceptual naiveté to many of the works in the show. Sometimes there are moments in art history when bodies of work seem to entertain influences that are in fact only random similarities of style: the purported relationship between Franz Kline’s large, black-on-white paintings—which genuinely seem to document an interest in Chinese traditional art but which, according to Kline himself, do not actually reflect this interest—is a famous example. So it may be overreaching to try to connect exquisitely made textiles and embroideries of the nineteenth century with the visual sophistication of the New York school. Indeed, the achievement of the nineteenth-century artists whose works were on display at the American Museum of Folk Art is substantial enough to be read on its own terms, rather than as some sort of bridge to contemporary abstraction. Too often, we contextualize through the use of superficial similarity alone, and there is the additional factor that the pieces on show encompassed a general notion of gendered activity. Being female in the nineteenth century was very different from being female now, and while it is important to view the exhibition’s artifacts as art in its own right, it must also be said that whatever the circumstances of the works’ making, the women who created them were engaged in traditional household arts (and performing traditional household piety), in which the esthetic achievement was not necessary to appreciate (or respect) what was beheld.

What must be emphasized, it seems to me, is the devotion behind the exquisite detail of the artworks and the fact that it was mostly women who were responsible for them. It is tempting to speculate on women’s efforts to create an art that was truly their own, but the truth is that the three groups of work, even including the marble-dust paintings, offered opportunities to show domestic, artisanal skill in the so-called minor arts. The whiteness the artists gravitated toward brilliantly reflected, as Hollander points out, “the perfect metaphor for the Age of Enlightenment.” As the color of an ethereal idealism, whiteness became a symbol of purity, resonant with classical history, which gave a center and contextualization to the extended involvement with the particular hue. Whiteness embodied all that is noble and true, and its tie to artisanal pursuits traditionally accorded to women upped the ante for a certain kind of purity that included domestic undertakings as well as paintings and architecture.

As Hollander points out in her article, whitework comes from “a long tradition of whole-cloth quilts of wood or silk.” The fact that such quilts were a single color allowed the women who were making them a free hand with the complicated needlework. Additionally, the use of special fabrics enabled the women working on them “to display a family’s wealth.” For these reasons, whitework became a dominant form of presentation, the exquisite handwork displaying a highly sophisticated understanding of geometric patterning, which was a conspicuous demonstration of compositional intelligence. As a term, whitework also differentiated handmade quilts from those made on looms, again emphasizing an esthetic preference for quilts done under the more rigorous circumstances of handwork. Special techniques included candlewicking, in which a whitework quilt was decorated “with a thick cotton roving similar to the wicks of candles.” The raised patterns brought about by this and other embroidering techniques resulted in compositions of remarkable achievement and sophistication. As a triumph of feminine skill, and a symbol of wealth, whitework became an object produced by highly skilled hands, and also emphasized the Enlightenment drive toward a beauty of both elegance and restraint.

The printwork embroideries taken up very early in the nineteenth century owed their pictorial precisionism to a specific event: the death of George Washington in 1799. Given the nation’s grief, engravings proved to be highly suitable expressions of mourning. These memorial prints “that flooded American markets were excellent sources of classical mourning iconography.” In response to the popularity of the engravings, women made mourning pieces that depicted such somber themes as graves and cemeteries, in which a family’s deceased were memorialized in art. In the case of this particular genre, the individual stitches covered an underdrawing “that might be rendered on the silk in ink or graphite.” The use of differently colored threads, black or brown, was, according to Hollander, a reference to the tonal variations of the Greek chromatic scale: dark and light, black and white. In the Fryer Family Mourning piece, a work from 1800, there is a rather lugubrious depiction of a cemetery with trees in the forefront and background; a single female mourner stands before a large gravestone with the initials E. F. and S. F., while, on the band at the bottom of the composition, we have the consoling words, “Sacred to the memory of Elizabeth Fryer & of Sarah Fryer, her granddaughter.” On the whole, the composition’s piety strikes the viewer as heavy-handed, but such sentiment was the acceptable means of expressing grief in the nineteenth century.

The final genre exhibited in White on White was a rather involved art, known as Grecian, in which sooty lampblack drawings were made on a board covered with iridescent marble dust. Hollander notes that the use of marble dust created a conceptual link with the marble of Greek sculpture, and that the shades of gray employed in constructing three-dimensional effects mimicked similar efforts by the Greeks as early as the fifth century BCE. Usually based on engravings, the marble-dust works relied on standardized images such as Mount Vernon and Washington’s tomb, seen in a piece made by an unidentified artist at some point between 1845 and 1865. This work’s shading effects, so dependent upon the materials used, are grand if slightly stilted: there is an image of Mt. Vernon and a group of trees with heavy foliage in the background; in the front of the picture we see a representation of the entrance to Washington’s tomb. The sky is mostly dark, with a few thin strips of white clouds showing through. Again, there is the suggestion of an idealized piety and a naively structured composition that emphasize proper emotional rectitude befitting so high a theme. This is not to deny that the shadings of the painting’s structure include complicated effects; it is only to say that the rigidity of the imagery’s presentation seems to emphasize proper behavior as well as maintaining a visual memory.

Despite the relatively small quarters of the American Folk Art Museum, White on White very successfully communicated both the themes and techniques of neoclassical America, a time when noble sentiment seemed to outweigh the technical abilities at hand. It would be unfair to characterize the works as minor in their accomplishments, for that would be judging the art by virtue of hindsight. What the museum has set out to do, it has largely accomplished. The presentation of these highly interesting folk arts sheds light not only on accepted art practices throughout the nineteenth century, but also illustrates the power of neoclassicism as a myth of integrity, purity, and beauty. By my own account, I don’t think that extending the art’s achievements to a connection with current art and architectural practices in white really does justice to the show. In fact, it is a tie that does not do justice to the accomplishments of either period. That said, White on White was a highly enjoyable and informative exhibition, in which a strict drive toward an absolute devotion and visual purity is illustrated with much intelligence and common sense.

Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.

Book Reviews

The two books under review could not be more unlike except that each in its own way does violence to Homeric texts in the interest, presumably, of making them in some way more accessible. This is more obvious in the case of Alessandro Baricco, who introduces the Iliad story with a discussion of his narrative strategy. Ben Ehrenreich’s allusion to The Odyssey, on the other hand, must be worked out by the reader. Given that his story is about a man who travels and a woman who stays at home, whose names are Payne and Penny, it is not too great an effort. Penny for Penelope is the giveaway. As for Payne, the reader will have to dredge his memory—assuming it contains such information—to come up with the presumed etymology of the root of the Greek form of Odysseus’ name, “to be in pain, or give pain.”

As his title indicates, Ehrenreich’s novel is a meditation on desire, more meditation than novel, because the author has left plot to his readers’ memories of The Odyssey for the shape of the story. He is more interested in language for its own sake than in its deployment for any of the traditional features of novel-writing. The reader gets a sense of this in the rich, fermented description of the hacked bodies of the suitors with which Ehrenreich’s story begins. It is a preview of the endless descriptions of sex—an awesome repertory of variation on every anatomical possibility for achieving physical pleasure—set to the counterpoint of drugging and drinking. Some would label this overwriting, but Ehrenreich is true to what ancient critics often called the garrulity of Homer, whose repeated epithets and descriptions, catalogues of names and items, and alternative expressions for the same thing, constitute the hallmarks of his narrative style. Ehrenreich plays in the same way with oral poetry’s essential stereotyping in a breathtaking series of verbal portraits of couples, as he tries to define the essential male-female relationship of his protagonists. The most powerful of these archetypes is the high-school jock and his sweetheart, which underscores Ehrenreich’s dismissal of the complexity of life among the royals in Bronze Age Greece in favor of the immediate truth of hormonal excitement in unfulfilled longing. Scholarship shows that the Homeric texts demonstrate centuries-long gestation as indicated by the historically impossible mix of language forms and artifacts described. Ehrenreich, in turn, mixes spears and bombs, chariots and cars, motels and castles, and, again, foregrounds language at the expense of what is being said. By the book’s midpoint, as a character attempts to prove through a mathematical riff his various assertions about another, mystery character that has entered the story, the reader might be tempted to think “tour de force,” “Joycean,” “Nabokovian”—or maybe just unbearably tedious, a sophomoric reaching for effect, already realized with some success by Dave Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The Suitors probably reads better stoned.

Despite feminist attempts to foreground Penelope in Homer’s narrative, and Margaret Atwood’s recent extrapolation of an active, complicit wife to a long-gone husband, the ancient text established Penelope as a patriarchal audience would have had her: passive, languishing, her most active role being tearful yearning for Odysseus. Ehrenreich has richly endowed his Penelope with the mixed emotions of sexual desire, anger, despair, and sexual fantasy, as well as guilt over all these feelings. Her portrait is drawn in the letters she writes her absent husband (appearing in the text set in the typescript of an old-fashioned manual typewriter, somehow making them more forlorn, more immediate in their inadequacy, in our age of instant communication). As counterpoint, the narrator describes Payne in italics, enclosed in parentheses, lost in his travels, seduced by twentieth-century Calypso and Circe, floating in their California pools, drink in hand, weakly contemplating his absence from home, its effect on Penny, and how he will extricate himself. Odysseus’ return disguised as a beggar is converted into the arrival of an amnesiac, a body barely alive cast up on the beach, a feast for the fantasies of the paranoid suitors as well as for the sexually needy Penny, not to mention for the reader, who, if she has stayed with the narrative to this point, has the chance to work out yet another mystery in the rich obscurity of the text. It is questionable, however, whether a reader will stay with Ehrenreich’s narrative to the end. The story is flat, and the characters are neither very interesting nor sympathetic. Only the language exerts some—although not that much—fascination.

Alessandro Baricco, whose 1997 international prize-winning bestseller, Silk, launched his career as a novelist, has taken up the idea of making The Iliad more reader-friendly. Not that every present-day reader of the poem feels this need, but Baricco thinks that the story can at least be made more compatible with what he argues are twenty-first-century tastes. He uses and adapts the contemporary prose—the medium of contemporary narrative—translation of Maria Grazia Ciani because she eschews the highly stylized manner of oral epic poetry in favor of a contemporary vocabulary and a simpler manner (which Anglophone readers get through Ann Goldstein’s own translation from the Italian). While he does not omit any scenes of the original text, Baricco dramatically changes them, first, by having the story come from the mouths of its participants rather than from the impersonal narrator created by Homer and, second (and most dramatically), by eliminating any reference to divine action as a motivator in the narrative (and then sometimes by introducing small bits in italics that smoothen the joins in his storyline).

In Homer, Baricco argues, divine action is simply an extension of human action, whereby the poet gives earthly events a transcendence that, if not simply redundant in this age of fast-paced narrative, is unacceptable in a world where science and psychology drive plots. I suppose it is true that, when Aphrodite threatens Helen with the loss of her favor if she will not immediately have sex with Paris, we can read this as a woman who, having accepted adultery into her life, realizes the grim, harsh truth of being at the mercy of her sexual charms. Thus, too, when Hector looks back to accept a sword from his brother as he engages Achilles in fatal contest but sees no one there—and, so, realizes, along with us, that he has been tricked by a god (in this case, Athena)—we can feel the masculine sense of pride, well-being, and success teetering on the abyss in the sudden knowledge of the topple into impending death. But where, then, is the malignity of the universe that those glimpses of the divine bring with them?

Without entering into the impossible quibble of what constitutes an acceptable facsimile of an original text, one may simply read Baricco’s Iliad as a story. As such, it seems thin and confusing to this reader. Consider, for instance, the voice of Chryseis with which the work begins. She describes her capture and rape, just as Homer’s narrator does in the original. But it is startling to have the victim of the act using the same neutral tones. We want her reaction. Thereafter, she describes the army assembly at which Agamemnon and Achilles have their famous quarrel. But—wait a minute—are we to imagine that a female sex slave is out there as one of the group? Sometimes Baricco is alert to this problem. When he introduces Hector’s visit to Troy, for instance, he feels compelled to have the nurse who is narrating the events admit that she heard about them from other servants in the palace (p. 42). Still, while it is true that royals live among servants always, some of the reported remarks are so personal as to beggar belief—as well as the age-old injunction, Pas devant les domestiques. Even more startling is Helen narrating the events preceding the duel of Menelaus and Paris (pp. 22-23). First, she is up on the wall describing the Achaean warriors for Priam’s benefit; then, she describes how she watched Paris going out to the battlefield; then, finally, as she quotes him from where he’s fighting, we are to understand that she has heard this from her vantage high up on the walls. Just as a film’s continuity editor makes sure that reaction shots establish the same space in each take, one needs a narrator’s voices to be in predictable places. This does not seem to be happening here, nor when Thersites describes the army racing to the ships, since it is impossible for anyone on the ground in his position—not having an eagle’s-eye view—to know such a thing (p.12).

Chryseis is at pains to describe her father as a priest of Apollo. Homer says that when Agamemnon refuses to return the girl to him, the father prays to Apollo, who visits the Achaean camp with a plague. When Calchas offers a reason for the plague, Baricco has him say, “When we offended the old man, suffering came upon us.” That doesn’t say much. If not Apollo’s wrath, then what about E. coli, cholera, malaria, or anything that gives the narrative line a little punch and strength?

In any case, Chryseis tells us that Odysseus takes her home thereafter, uttering, by the way, what must be for him the most simple-minded line ever. “Beautiful Chryseis,” is all he has to say, a dubious remark for such an arrogant, superior-feeling male to make to the roughed-up and used sex slave whom his servants are no doubt leading at that moment into the ship that he will command on the voyage to return her. Immediately after this, Chryseis seems endowed with long-distance vision as she proceeds to describe Agamemnon’s henchmen taking away Achilles’ own sex slave back on the battlefield.

Because Baricco constructs his narrative on the translated language of The Iliad’s original text, he is trapped by the impersonality of the respective narrator’s voice when he introduces his personal narrators in each scene. In the event, Helen and Thersites come across as blank ciphers. The same happens when some narrator (it should be Chryseis, but she’s back on her island, so it’s not clear who it is) is describing Thetis in her great lamentation (p. 8). The language here is devoid of twenty-first-century emotion because it is essentially the distanced language of Homer stripped of its epithets, repetitions, and ornamentation. What we want is a Mediterranean mother. Where is the linguistic extravagance that needs to go with a mother like Thetis bewailing her son?

Baricco ends the book with a strange disquisition on war in which he tries to adjudicate among the claims of war’s beauty as opposed to other ways of valuing human existence. It is naive not to see that this beauty derives in part from the peculiar erotics of beautiful young men dying. The Iliad is not about bombing civilians, machine-gunning rows of soldiers, children afire with napalm running down the road, or whole cities flattened by hydrogen fission. Its meaning lies deep in the as-yet undiscovered realms of psychology in which youth, masculinity, and death are somehow entwined in the anatomical truth of tumescence and orgasm. The Iliad is not really about war. It is about males coming to understand their impotence. The extraordinary beauty of Homer’s language, the sensual manner of his exposition, are a defense against the physical fact of dying, the nothingness that lies before us. Baricco does not understand that it is this Trojan War, this killing field, as Homer describes it, that has seduced us over the millennia and will continue to do so even amid the carnage and wreckage of our own civilization.

Charles Rowan Beye is distinguished professor emeritus of classics at the City University of New York, a contributing editor to greekworks.com, and author, most recently, of Odysseus: A Life.

Our Opinion

This edition marks our fifth anniversary. The most significant change—and, in our belief, improvement—to this experiment has been our expansion into traditional publishing, here in the United States and, very soon, in Greece, as part of an ambitious joint venture with Estia, Greece’s oldest and most prestigious publishing house. Meanwhile, we are working continually to improve the site and to offer more services to our readers and supporters—which leads us to the most important point we want to make in this brief message, namely, that we genuinely thank everyone who has encouraged, assisted, and worked with us during the last five years. We hope you will continue to do so in what we look forward to being the many years ahead.
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The words of the Founders—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin—are so cruel to us today precisely because they indict our degraded consciences, as individuals and as a nation. The young Republic to which Washington bade farewell has finally, after 210 years, succumbed to that fury of party spirit, those mischiefs (indeed, machinations) of foreign intrigue, and, above all and most tragically and deadly, those impostures of pretended patriotism against which he so lucidly warned his fellow citizens—we repeat, fellow citizens—present and future. How did it happen, and when? Where were we all? What were we doing (besides checking the stock tables, negotiating that house sale, trying to get our three-year-olds into Harvard and Stanford) as “the spirit of encroachment” systematically subdued us and, finally, thoroughly cowed, we conceded a free country’s “habits of thinking” to the man in the flight jacket, strutting as only false (or lunatic) soldiers do, announcing “mission accomplished,” that is, the “real despotism” that is now our political providence and, shamefully, constitutional dispensation?

To be honest, we don’t know. We have no idea (or, at least, no ready-made theory) for how things went so desperately wrong, so quickly, and with such apparent unconcern on the part of those who were its primary victims: the citizens of this country. There’s that word again. We are, of course, achingly conscious of the fact that even to use it nowadays—when “consumer,” that verbal charm whose ritual incantation defines the magical artifice of twenty-first-century American “freedom”—is to provoke universal ridicule. But it may be that it tells us all we need to know about our country’s destiny, which is to say our own. Once upon a time, before we became a people, we “Americans” were, like our cousins in the Old World, subjects. Our Declaration of Independence, however, made it clear to mankind—for whose opinions we then still maintained a decent respect—that that was no longer acceptable, and that we would henceforth be subject only to ourselves. By all indications, we’ve currently chosen—under the paradoxical impulse of “individual” sovereignty—to become subjects again, albeit not to monarchs or even ruling elites this time, but, as Washington so presciently understood, to an amorphous, indefinite, but nonetheless all-encompassing and, to cite his own description of the peril, real despotism, defined principally—as all despotisms are—by fear.

It has been five years and a month since September 11, 2001. The problem with the existential tyranny with which that date has now been invested, and which accretes to it daily, is that it hides—camouflages, distorts, diminishes, erases—our history. Only now can we fully grasp the malign consequences of the perverse notion that everything changed that day. What does it mean to say that “everything changed” on September 11? Most simply, that September 10, 2001—and every day that came before it back to July 4, 1776—should be excised from our national memory and repressed from our national consciousness. It is now as clear as the sky above New York City on the morning of September 11 that whatever is left that is most valuable about and germane to the American experience resides in the facts of life, and in our expectations as a people, that we took for granted on September 10, 2001. And while to contemplate that day might soon prove more painful than to reflect on the one that followed, let us at least have the honesty, the courage, to attempt it.

What is most agonizing about the memory is that it seems like yesterday. And yet, if the past is a foreign country, our most recent past seems like another world. Think back on it and it almost takes on the dimensions of a utopian delusion, a hallucination so enticing that we waken from it all sweaty from the sheer seduction of the vision. Spare a thought for September 10, just an ever-so-brief five years ago, and the sheer ugliness of the country today hardly seems possible.

Among the more salient features of the American landscape before the “Long War” descended upon it like the premature evening of a permanent eclipse was that, among New Yorkers, Rudolph Giuliani had been written off as a failed, even a dismal, mayor and, among Americans, the man in the Oval Office had approval ratings in August 2001 ranging from the low 40s to just above fifty percent: unheard-of unpopularity for a newly installed president still in his “honeymoon” period, but understandable given the fact that he had conspicuously engineered his appointment to the office since he could not succeed at being elected to it. (By Mid-September, George Bush’s approval soared to a range of 85 percent to the low 90s—unprecedented in the history of presidential polling.) This is the least of it, however. Men and women come and go; it is nations, societies, that remain, for better or worse. What now seems truly remarkable about the country that existed a mere half-decade ago was what we can only describe as its constitutional fortitude.

It has now been forgotten—the facts have been actively suppressed by the American government, and its supporters, today—that the United States was once a critical voice in the adoption and extension of international law. An original signatory to all four Geneva Conventions, it was also, more to the point, the central force behind the Nuremberg Tribunal, which later—again supported strongly by the United States—led the United Nations to adopt the seven Nuremberg Principles in 1950. These principles state that:

I. Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

II. The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

III. The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

IV. The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

V. Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

VI. The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

i. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

ii. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

VII. Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

It is not accidental that the current government of the United States has waged such an unrelenting campaign against the International Criminal Court. Even the most peremptory reading makes clear that the US government—and everyone under its authority during the last few years—has serially violated all of the Nuremberg Principles, and is therefore liable for the consequent crimes. We will let others adjudicate the legal issues, however. It is the moral ones that concern us here. Below are two photographs. The first is little known and shows GI corpsmen paying tribute to a dead German soldier during the Battle of Normandy, in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Conventions. The second is instantly recognizable and notorious in every corner of the globe. Since there is hardly a human being on the planet who doesn’t know what this picture depicts, suffice it to say that the unfortunate victim of this appalling violation of those Conventions, Satar Jabar, was not even arrested by American troops on suspicions of being a terrorist, let alone an enemy combatant. No, he ended up as he did for an alleged carjacking (a crime, we can’t help but comment, that before the Americans arrived in Baghdad, was more common in Los Angeles than in the Iraqi capital).

But D-Day was then, and Abu Ghraib is now. And torture was once what was done to innocent people behind the “Iron Curtain”—or, at worst, what “our sons-of-bitches” did to their own people. We might have trained them at the School of the Americas in the excruciating achievement of “Libertad, Paz y Fraternidad” (to echo that institution’s Orwellian motto), but we at least tried to keep our own hands clean. But real despotism is hands-on. Not that we still don’t subcontract human indignity: extraordinary times call for extraordinary renditions, after all. But we now understand the importance of direct involvement. Fear is an extremely fungible commodity, easily exchangeable for silence, complicity, and the esprit de corps of the torture unit.

In a couple of weeks, there will be congressional elections, which the Democrats will win, or not. In either case, nothing will change, precisely because “the habits of thinking in a free country” have been conceded to the torturer—the essential concession for making a despotism real. In the nation whose parents and grandparents came to maturity believing that the only thing to fear was fear itself, fear has not only become the dominant political protocol but the very grammar of political discourse, codifying that pretended patriotism that has replaced American habits of thinking and, invariably, free—that is, fearless—speech.

Which is why the systematic dissolution of public education—and the social, and even attempted legal, privileging of private education in a republic that was based on the notion that, to quote the University of Virginia’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, no “tax can be called that which we give to our children in the most valuable of all forms, that of instruction” (Note to Elementary School Act, 1817)—is such a critical element in the project to suppress democracy. And why it is part and parcel of the bizarre and perilous assault on science: an attack previously unimaginable by any president in a country that always prided itself on its innovation and practicality and empiricism, and where most men and women echo, again, Jefferson’s political insight that “Science is more important in a republican than in any other government” (Letter, 1821). But this is all of a piece: destroy public education, strike at science, and you hit at the very heart of those “habits of thinking” without which a democracy is merely a formal constitutional shell covering the actual corruption of the body politic underneath.

In his Farewell Address, Washington also warned Americans to “cherish public credit” as a “source of strength and security.” Indeed, he continued, “One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace….” He then cautioned those who were charged with the treasury to bear in mind always their responsibility to future generations by “avoiding…the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts…not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear.” George Bush inherited a nearly $6 trillion, projected 10-year, and nearly $300 billion actual, budget surplus from Bill Clinton, which, through tax cuts planned even before assuming office and barefaced manipulation of events after September 11, he immediately (and strategically, in order to carry out his designs) proceeded to turn into a $4 trillion, 10-year deficit, and actual shortfall this year of $400 billion—including the Social Security surplus that has been continually raided over the last five years to pay for, among other things, the Bush subsidies of the top 1 percent of taxpayers (a term that, in this instance, we use loosely).

The obvious, premeditated consequence of George Bush’s economic policies, and especially of his fanatical opposition to the principle of equitable taxation—on which every Republican president of the twentieth century has agreed almost as consistently as every Democrat, from Theodore Roosevelt to Mr. Bush’s own father, who famously raised taxes in order to reduce the deficit despite his campaign pledge not to do so—has been the largest deliberate redistribution of income from bottom to top in the history of the United States (and, arguably, the world). Never before in this country has such a massive flow of wealth been purposely directed by the White House from the vast majority of Americans to such a tiny fraction of a fraction. This relentless class war of the very few against the very, very many has been waged with such cynicism and audacity that it borders on sheer social vengeance. Once of its consequences—hardly unintended, in our opinion—has been a uniquely American form of ethnic cleansing. And if there are some readers who think we are wildly overstating the case, we refer them—just as one example—to the new demographic facts by which an “act of God” was transformed by the Bush administration into a policymaking tool: today, according to the New York Times (see “New Orleans Population Is Reduced Nearly 60%,” Adam Nossiter, October 7), the population of New Orleans has dropped nearly 60 percent from 454,863 to 187,525, of which whites now make up 44 percent and blacks 46 percent, as opposed to the pre-Katrina breakdown of 67 percent black and 33 percent white. An act of God, indeed.

Once upon a time, of course, Americans would have cared. They no longer do. Or, rather, they understand the concept of criminal co-conspiracy. They know that the man who brazenly sits in the White House today, after two stolen elections, murdered the United States of America that they inherited. They know that the sneers and smirks—those singular public expressions of his contempt for them, and for the country’s laws and, most of all, for its moral history and meaning—are the signs, not merely of his lack of remorse but, more to the point, of his vast self-satisfaction in how thoroughly he has implicated them in his crimes. “The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of power…has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes,” Washington counseled. While one man can murder a country, and a people, in other words, he cannot do so without countless accomplices: the very definition of a real despotism.

Politics

At least this time I was forewarned that I might be headed back soon. A nasty little war between Israel and Hezbollah had flared up at the beginning of the summer: one of those conflicts waged between the faceless fighter jets of a First World power and the shadowless guerrillas of a “non-state actor.” Fourth-generation warfare, it’s called, and it has a knack of bogging down superpowers, usually at the expense of thousands of dead civilians. Modern war is almost impossible for journalists to cover. There are no glamorous military set-pieces, no pitched battles between rival armies; just short, sharp exchanges in which concepts such as valor or strength appear increasingly outdated. The media is left to parrot the line touted by rival military establishments, and to cover the streams of refugees, produced by each conflict.

At home in Tehran, the crossfire of the international TV coverage seemed to reflect the war itself. Switching from CNN, which divided its reporting “fairly” between Haifa and Beirut even as Israel’s destruction of Lebanon became glaringly disproportional, to pro-Hezbollah al-Jazeera and Saudi-owned al-Arabiya, I always came back to the BBC’s riveting, mostly balanced coverage. Meanwhile, away from the Beirut rooftops where satellites fed a constant stream of live reports into the skies, the Lebanese were caught in lethal showers of razor-sharp shrapnel. Their country was also being tossed about on the airwaves by the cut-and-thrust of competing world-views.

Those Lebanese fluent in English and with access to the Internet also typed out their daily reality into the ether, offering unprecedented insight into the conflict. Lebanon is no sanctions-weakened Iraq, with most of its educated class having fled to the West and the rest forced by need to regress to just scraping by. A polyphony of voices eloquently described the experience of seeing one’s country ripped apart. One, from the outside, was that of Dana Kahil. A film editor and the daughter of the Arab world’s best-known political cartoonist, Kahil and her French husband had made the decision to move to Beirut and packed their bags when the war started. With Beirut Airport bombed, however, they got stuck in London and in the kind of anxious frenzy that comes from being trapped outside, rather than inside, a war-zone. Obsessed by every twist and turn of the conflict, Kahil started a blog, I WANT TO GO HOME (http://forafreelebanon.blogspot.com/2006_07_16_forafreelebanon_archive.html), to let out her nervous energy. “London 3AM on a very very early morning, still dark, very quiet but eery [sic] because the sound of the tv is projecting the noise of Beirut aching….I am in London, cannot sleep, worried, heart broken…lost…,” Kahil wrote in her first entry.

Al-Dahieh
It is hard to comprehend the scale of devastation in al-Dahieh without walking its shattered streets. I had seen the television images of Beirut’s sprawling southern suburb, which has soaked up successive waves of poor, Shi’a rural workers coming to the capital to find work over the past decades, but the reality was far more tragic. Costas Barkas, a Greek doctor on his first visit to the area, was staggered by the effect of actually being there—far stronger than any photograph or television report. Eight days after the end of hostilities, a pungent smell rose from the ruins and collapsed apartments, which locals said was a mixture of decomposing garbage, bodies buried under the concrete, and the tang of the depleted uranium-coated bombs used by warplanes to target the Hezbollah leadership’s underground bunkers. One taxi driver told me that the thriving market for scrap metal from al-Dahieh ended immediately after the ceasefire following rumors that the commodity involved was contaminated with depleted uranium.

The South
Leaving Beirut behind, I headed south. The further south, and toward the border with Israel, I progressed, the more the wreckage increased. At first, the only thing wrong with the landscape were the downed bridges, often ruined by a single death-blow delivered from on high straight through the middle. But as I left behind the Mediterranean cities of Sidon and Tyre, the evidence of chaos multiplied, until I was rolling, awestruck, through eerily empty, razed villages, upon which apparently indiscriminate violence had been perpetrated. Shrapnel bursts decorated those still-standing walls, fanning out a trail of high-pressure molten metal across their surfaces.

Next to the blasted mosque, under the decapitated minaret, lounged a trio of United Nations peacekeepers. Dug into the rubble a few meters from them was a UN flag, fluttering its pastel blue globe over a blasted landscape of lunar proportions. An overpowering aroma of putrefaction emanated from the carcass of a cow, its bones half-exposed, lying next to the tank-treads of Israeli tanks crisscrossing the heaped dust. “We’re probably the first journalists to make it here,” said Ziad, my traveling companion and cameraman, as the UN soldiers peered at us quizzically. “The Israelis only abandoned this position two days ago.” An old jeep carrying two Hezbollah cadres labored up the gutted track, rolling over the ruins strewing the remains of the road and past us. They nodded as they passed, signaling that we shouldn’t film them, while studiously ignoring the UN peacekeepers. Back in the car, we inched past a bombed graveyard, the weeds that once covered it burned to a sooty crisp. Behind it rose another mosque, also damaged in the street-to-street fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli soldiers. Heading down the hill on the way back toward Beirut, we passed another almost-erased settlement: Bint Jbeil. Tons of rubble carpeted the hill, burying cars, furniture, and the remains of humans and animals.

“The place to be on Saturday”
Five hours later, I was back in Beirut, showered, fed, cologned, and staring down at hundreds more human bodies. But the setting this time was Cristal, Lebanon’s premier nightspot and rumored to be expanding its franchise to New York. An exhibitionist frenzy gripped the club as lean, scantily clad male and female bodies requisitioned seats, tables, alcoves, and even the bar, gyrating to the beat. The philosophy appeared to be that the higher and more visible one was, the better. My companions for the evening—a Swedish-Syrian television producer and her blonde, American-raised Lebanese friend introduced as “the Paris Hilton of the Middle East”—clued me into the scene.

By 2 AM, Cristal was so packed it was difficult to move and the option of sitting limited only to those who had booked tables. Drinks cost an average of $12, an unreachable sum for the average Lebanese. But inside the club, situated in the exclusive Christian area of Achrafieh, dozens of bottles of Moët were being consumed. Knowing its self-promoting clientele well, the management delivered every batch of up to four, fizzler-attached bottles inside large ice-buckets, while the DJ interrupted his set to pronounce each purchaser’s name. The palpitating bodies on the Cristal dance-floor were a far cry from the flattened ruins or comatose injured of the summer war. But this has always been the contradiction that has bedeviled Lebanon since its independence in 1943.

From Riviera to citadel to rubble
A French creation, Lebanon used to be the Christian-majority part of western Syria. Because of religious ties, its population enjoyed excellent relations with the French Mandate authority that superseded the Ottoman empire after the latter’s collapse following the First World War. Since then, Lebanon’s Maronite Christian community—which publicly insists it is not Arab—has consistently sided with outsiders, notably Israel. Lebanon has thus been the ideological and actual battlefield of a host of struggles, from the superpower confrontation during the Cold War to a more local battle over Washington’s new Middle East plan, which has provoked regional resistance from Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

Back to al-Dahieh
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the rubble-strewn garden of Beit Slim in al-Dahieh. A rambling villa set in what must once have been a decadent garden, Beit Slim today is a war-damaged cultural center called Umam (Nations), covered by a pallor of dust and exhaust fumes, and hemmed in by the grim, gray apartment blocks that characterize the Shi’a quarter. The characters peopling Beit Slim are as anachronistic as the setting. Lokman Slim—unkindly described by one Lebanese bookstore owner as “the closest a Lebanese can get to being a Washington neoconservative”—heads Hayya Bina, a political movement that emerged from the ashes of the Hariri assassination and promoted an anti-Syrian, anti-Hezbollah policy that might as well have been cooked up in Washington as in Beirut. His wife is a glamorous blonde Austrian who works hard to marshal the remainders of a unique archive chronicling the Lebanese civil war. Ironically, it was largely destroyed during the recent war by an errant bomb that struck a nearby apartment block. Attending to them is Sheikh Bilal, a Sunni sheikh who hands out humanitarian aid to the neighborhood needy while puffing on his nargileh.

“We are a part of those who are paying the price of the Iranian normalization,” states Lokman, broaching the threat posed by Iran, one of his favorite subjects. “Hezbollah are claiming a divine victory at a moment when neither our ports nor our airports are under Lebanese sovereignty.” Slim has refused to sell his property to Hezbollah buyers during the last two decades, but he has watched as the neighborhood has transformed itself around him into a stronghold of the Shi’a militia. Despite believing that his political and cultural activities are monitored by it, Slim credits Hezbollah with more political savvy than to use thuggery to remove him from the area. He attributes the same sophistication to Hezbollah’s policies.

“I live here because this war took place and al-Dahieh was its epicenter, and because I had this feeling that this region is central to Lebanon and is the new political center of the country,” he said. “Centrality has moved from the so-called centers to the southern suburbs.” Beirut’s battle-scarred districts reflect this truth. The civil war between Christians and Muslims may be over but the conflict’s legacy lives on in Solidaire, the Disney-like renovation of downtown Beirut, and the series of underground tunnels and junctions that connect the now-permanently separated Christian East from Muslim West Beirut. Slim is convinced that the future of Lebanon will not be decided in Hamra, a commercial Sunni area, or Kaslik, an entertainment district full of bars and casinos that is a favorite with holidaying Gulf Arabs, or in Christian Achrafieh. “History will take place here,” he concludes, in al-Dahieh.

Iason Athanasiadis is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer currently based in Tehran. He has worked for a range of media, including the Financial Times, the BBC, and al-Jazeera.

Politics

But the site has indeed become a stage. We watched the one annual performance played upon it, and, yes, we both wept, but probably for what most Americans would consider all the wrong reasons as the roll-call of the dead went on, and on, punctuated by moving declarations of relentless sorrow and eternal love and, occasionally, blunt support for those fighting the “war on terror.” We both wept because we’d lived in Manhattan (New York being my husband’s home since childhood) for almost all of the 27 years of our marriage; wept because we lived September 11 not in front of our television sets but in the air we breathed; wept because we lived, until we no longer could, the loss of a city; wept, most of all, because we lived and live yet, now separated by an ocean, the loss of a country.

I in no way want to belittle the dead by implying that films can somehow address the meaning of their loss. Nonetheless, because the commemoration I saw this year was so orchestrated as to be repulsive, I was oddly heartened upon our return to Paris to find that World Trade Center was about to open, United 93 was still playing, and 11’09”1 was showing in a small theater in the Latin Quarter. I didn’t expect much from these films, but I did hope that, as opposed to the theater of complicity produced by George W. Bush & Co in lower Manhattan these last five years, I would not be insulted. And although I’m one of those who has more often than not turned away from footage and photographs of the attacks—since I don’t need to be reminded of the stench, the sirens, sounds, smoke, ash, dread, and horror—I kept my eyes wide open throughout all three films. It seemed fitting.

Indeed, UA 93’s hijackers are treated—bravely, I would say—with stunning neutrality. They are young. They are human. They seem intelligent. They pray, but without a hint of fanaticism, before beginning the journey. One of them leaves a last message of love on an answering machine. They are, once UA 93 is in the air, tense, in some disagreement as to which moment is the right one to act and perhaps whether to act at all. They know that if they accomplish what they have trained to do, they will die. When they finally move to take over the plane, they are as murderous as they must be. They are, thereafter, neither above doubt nor fear; indeed, the hijacker strapped into a bogus bomb and charged with keeping the passengers at bay is as frightened as his hostages. And those hostages are not unlike the hijackers, in that they eventually face the same quandary—whether, and when, to act—after learning that other hijacked planes have been flown into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Those who can, telephone their loved ones; others leave what we know will be last messages. Some people pray, none fanatically. Everyone, young and old, is frightened. Those who decide to rush the hijackers in the attempt to take back the plane doubt they can succeed but are convinced they have no choice. Tense, determined, and as murderous as they, too, must be, they do what must be done as a matter of course, and do so without exuding superhuman courage, in order to thwart death, and more destruction. Ordinary people trapped within an extraordinary circumstance, they refuse to remain passive in the face of an outcome they know will otherwise be a foregone conclusion.

World Trade Center is, like United 93, focused on a story many times told and, except for minutiae and nuance, already known. Except for initial glimpses of Manhattan the way many of us wish to remember it, as a place where a lot of different people pretty much rubbed elbows, the film restricts itself to the plight of the trapped policemen who manage to stay alive, and of their families who don’t know whether they are. Death is, as in United 93, the great equalizer, since there are no unblemished souls or fiends among the deceased: these distinctions exist only for the living, who try to justify the deaths of those they love as they celebrate the deaths of those they hate. And just as United 93 does not make saints of the hijacked, World Trade Center does not make heroes of the survivors, who, simply in the end, rejoin their lives.

It is Sean Penn, however, who directs what is arguably 11’09”1’s most provocative segment, in which Ernest Borgnine is cast as an aged, achingly lonely widower who shares his cramped, dingy apartment with a dead plant long ago deprived of sunshine. Decrepit, delusional, hermetic, Borgnine’s character refuses to acknowledge that his wife is long deceased and blunders his way through time, whose days and nights remain as barren as the plant, until the Twin Towers—in whose shadow, it turns out, he lives—collapse. He awakens to sunshine and to a plant that has suddenly, impossibly, blossomed. His joy, such as it is, is not without epiphany but happens to be devoid of reason: for though he suddenly, finally, grasps the fact that his wife is dead, he remains unconcerned with the source of light and unconscious of the larger meaning of what has taken place. He is left holding that flowerpot of weirdly colored blossoms, as though in celebration of the insane.

Melanie Wallace is a novelist and frequent contributor to greekworks.com. Her latest novel, The Housekeeper, was published by MacAdam/Cage in April.

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