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.

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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.

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