When on book tour in the US, one of the questions I’m most
frequently asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?” I usually respond with something along the
lines of, “Since the last Woolworths closed I’ve been forced to rely on
epiphanies.”
If that doesn’t raise at least the hint of a smile somewhere
in the audience, I’m not discouraged.
Eternal optimist that I am, I take it to mean the assembly is from a
generation unfamiliar with institutions once the backbone of American life, and
not as an indictment of my sense of humor.
Before me I see an audience of fresh minds, waiting to be dazzled and
enchanted (syns: baffled and bamboozled) with surefire magic tricks, tried and
true crowd-pleaser lines, and a bit of the old soft shoe (that’s a dance).
In other words, I get to behave like a politician.
Vaudeville died out eighty years ago on the legitimate
stage, but its world of separate independent acts grouped together in a common
venue still runs strong in the political arena.
Magicians, jugglers,
impersonators, comedians (of both the intended and unintended sort) fill their
countries’ seats of power, mesmerizing audiences with more and more of the
same.
What inspired this “thought” of mine was an article written
two months ago for Greece’s newspaper of record, Ekathimerini, by Pantelelis
Boukalis titled, “Pipedreams.” I’d
dropped it on my computer desktop and forgotten all about it until today. It’s a rather sharp article suggesting “[Greeks]
are being sucked into a frenzy over how [they] can be saved” from their
financial crisis by reports of natural gas deposits capable of generating
“enough money to pay off all of Greece’s debts, as well as those of Italy,
Cyprus, Spain, Portugal and Ireland to boot.”
Mr. Boukalis point is that this sort of panacea cure for
Greece’s debt problems has come up before:
Salvation in the form of a 670 billion euros loan from Russia or a
Middle East country (never happened); salvation in the form of 600 billion
euros from a Greek American who wanted to rename Athens’ most famous square
(never happened); salvation in the form of Greek ship owners willing to buy up
a part of Greece’s debt (never happened); and salvation in the form of uranium
and other mineral deposits capable of allowing Greeks to “live in comfort and
bliss for the next 20 generations to come” (ain’t happened yet).
According to Mr, Boukalis, the gas discovery has been
heavily hyped in the media since December as Greece’s new way out—coming at the
beginning of a winter with so many Greeks unable to afford heating oil that not
a tree or spare bit of wood is safe. Even the 2,400 year-old olive tree under which Plato
is said to have lectured his pupils fell to someone’s quest for warmth.
 |
| Plato's Tree, before and after |
But to me, the most remarkable thing about the gas discovery
salvation scenario is that the gas reserves are not a new story. Those gas
deposits have been openly talked about among politicians for years. Whether
they actually exist, their extent, and to which country they belong is a
different story. And speaking of
stories, I once even considered writing a Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis mystery tied into those deposits. Hmm, perhaps it's time to pull out and dust off those old notes.
So, is all this talk of gas just the latest quick-fix
palliative dangled before an audience in desperate need of hope? Let’s hope it’s the real thing, but after a
while one can’t help but think of applying an old adage to both the tales and
their tellers: “Old wine in new bottles,” or the more modern, “Same old same
old.”
As for the audience transfixed by the song and dance, who
knows how long that state will last; after all, they’re still paying for the
price of admission to the last show.
Jeff—Saturday
