The many chips on the shoulder of a past civilization (October 2003)
“Enough is enough with this September 11th business! It’s been
two years already. We’ve reached the point of saturation. It
happened. So what? To tell you the truth, it was about
time that something happened to the Americans on their own territory, with
all
the damage they’ve done in every corner of the earth.” These
were the words from the mouth of our tour guide during a recent school
trip to Greece. And to think that the conversation had begun
in a very different light. Having discovered that I was an American
from
Boston, although I was with a group of students from Italy, she was
telling me about a trip she’d taken to the States several years ago,
with particular enthusiasm for my native city and for the city of San
Francisco. She didn’t like New York at all, she said, and this is
the
point at which I intervened to say tat I had just come back from New
York and how I’d found the mood of the city very changed since
9/11. An observation that I was unable to explain because it
was at that point that I received the fore-mentioned silencing slap in
the
face.
She didn’t only have it in for the Americans. She had some odium
left over for the British as well. Wherever we went, Mycenae,
Delphi, Olympia, or Athens, she told us that we wouldn’t be able to
visit the local museum because it was closed for restoration for the
Olympics. However, even if they had been open, she let us know,
we would only have been able to see copies, because the originals
had been stolen by the English and were therefore kept in that loot
warehouse better known as the British Museum.
She didn’t have it in for the French with equal measure, because she
thought there was still some hope that they might one day decide
to give back some of what they had taken, since the Louvre would not
remain completely empty if the French were to decide to give
back the treasures of others that they’d taken. The unstated
understanding of course being that, were the British to do so, the museum
would be empty!
While my travel companions, the students and teacher assistants, managed
to remain in blissful ignorance of all of the local
misadventures surrounding us, I was able to keep up with local current
events thanks to the English language version of Kathimerini that
was distributed as an insert of the International Herald Tribune.
That’s how I learned that the ancient gods were with us! We had left
the Peloponeso the day before an earthquake occurred. The day
before we visited the Acropolis, the workers there had gone on strike.
Idem the day after our visit. And the following day after we
flew back to Italy, Olympia, the Greek airline company with whom we had
flown, went on strike as well!
I also learned that the autumnal political climate in Greece was as
hot as the climate in Italy, with multiple terrorist attacks in both
countries during the first week of October. If the attacks in
Italy were uni-directional, toward the ministry of labor, in Greece they
were
tranversal, to the point that they were defined as a “slalom”: two
local offices of the PASOK, the party in power, one office of New
Democracy, the opposition party, the home of the ND parliamentarian
Giorgos Voulgarakis and that of Giorgos Veltsos, a close friend
of Prime Minister Costas Simtis. As in Italy, in Athens they
are also discussing the crossed claims of more traditional terrorist groups
and those of newer groups of anarchists.
During one free afternoon, I happened upon a street demonstration of
students and university professors. I stopped to speak with a
group of three absolutely gorgeous young men who spoke English quite
well and asked them why they were demonstrating. In essence,
they want a free university education for everyone. What society
will do with a surplus of sociologists, they neither knew nor cared to
pose the question. As for the need for someone to redo the wiring
of their homes, or to change a faucet, or repair their shoes, or
operate the machines used to make the T-shirts they were wearing, they
had absolutely no perception. “We are communists!” they
proudly claimed. And when I mentioned the failure of that economic
system, the deaths it had produced, and the social and economic
backwardness in which entire populations were held prisoner, they were
only willing to admit “a few” errors of the past. On the other
hand, they knew their lesson well when it came to reciting the reverse
reality of that terrible place known as the United States. They
couldn’t explain, however, why so many people who tried to escape from
their paradises wanted most of all to go to precisely that hell!
Getting back to our tourist guide, it’s clear that I couldn’t be polemical
with a person that we were going to have to spend the next six
days with. But neither would I bend my head and say nothing
to someone who had such a rich cultural backround, but was capable of
saying so many gravely outrageous things. So I asked her how
she could speak that way. In reply, she lent me a book that she was
reading, “Stupid White Men,” written by the American, Michael Moore.
It’s an absolutely blasphemous book. Between the front and
back covers, I’m sure there are many sacrosanct facts. However,
when someone tells you in all seriousness that he has written to Kofi
Annan and to NATO headquarters pleading with them to send an international
army to liberate the United States under siege, how can
you take seriously anything else that he has written?
In Italy these days, there is a very heated political debate about whether
or not immigrants should be given the right to vote. When you
read the kind of statements that come from the mouths of America’s
Moores, or Vidals, or Chomskies, it makes you wonder if we
shouldn’t remove the voting rights of some of our citizens who use
their liberties so badly that they put everybody else’s at risk.
As for a little amusing local color, I found it funny to see these sophisticated
words, with either a scientific or an epic connotation (at
least to the ear of an American), used in the most banal of circumstances,
like “Stasis” for the bus stops or “Exodos” for the exit from
the subway station!
As delighted as I am to have seen Greece, I must confess that my desire
to quench my thirst for the air of antiquity has remained
unsatisfied. Leaving aside our guide’s political commentaries,
she certainly knew everything there was to know about the classical
monuments we visited. However, between her non-stop recounting,
the ever-present scaffolding, and the swarms of tourist from every
part of the world, that atmosphere of antique spirituality that I expected
to savor remains well protected in my own imagination.
Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi is an American commentator from Boston.
She teaches Law and Economics in Turin, Italy. She also
writes for the Roman daily, L'Opinione della Libertà and
was awarded the Mario Soldati Prize for Journalism and Criticism
for 2002
and the Mario Pannunzio Award for 2003.
giogia@giogia.com
Return to List
Return to home page