Letter from Thessaloniki

Paying the bill

By Spyros Payiatakis

Main opposition PASOK leader George Papandreou emerged from several weeks of inertia looking fine. Greeks who have been asking “Is the young man slipping?” had their worst fears banished on Saturday as he addressed his party’s national council conference. It was a noteworthy speech unveiling his wide-ranging policy platform and the sources of funding his party will tap to pay for its program if elected to government.

As if it indicated a good omen of sorts, the moon that evening turned shades of yellowish-brown and pink as it passed behind the Earth’s shadow. It was the first total lunar eclipse in three years.

The next morning, Papandreou once again addressed a large rally of supporters, outlining portions of the party’s 219-proposal platform. This massive plan includes hefty spending on education, healthcare and retirees and offers monthly pensions of –550 for uninsured people.

Now, for longer than most voters can remember, one of life’s certainties has been the growth of state spending. Suddenly it seems to be stopping. It also seems that this huge aquatic monster called Leviathan has finally been tamed – in Papandreou’s mind at least. That is still too sanguine, and thus harmful, because it leads people to expect more from the state than it will be able to deliver. Why? One reason is that as people get older and have more time to get sick, government commitments to social welfare get more expensive. These commitments were made in the early 1960s when life expectancy in the countries who are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was about five years less than it is now. Nowadays a lot of people spend their golden years in hospitals, surrounded by life-prolonging, budget-stretching machines. More doctors and more nurses will be needed, and health services will have to pay more to get them.

This trend worried me as I watched the San Remo Song Festival, which took place on the Italian Riviera, though I watched it on television. I realized, bitterly, that today’s people are also increasingly vulnerable to mental illness, another problem for healthcare. Even the winning song by Simone Cristicchi referenced some kind of psychiatric malaise.

OK, maybe I’m overreacting, for mental illness has long been an undercurrent in the arts. The Freudian language of suppressed childhood traumas and case studies of hysteria are the mainsprings of the action in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Electra,” on which the lurid libretto of the Richard Strauss opera is based.

Sigmund Freud’s theories were greatly en vogue when “Electra” was written in Vienna in 1909. The composer and playwright seem to owe more to psychoanalysis than to Sophocles.

To put this in today’s context, what would a modern Electra do with herself today? How much would she have to pay her shrink, and for how long? Psychoanalysis may not be as highly voguish as it once was, but it still is quite costly. And who would pay for it?

It is not yet clear – at least for me, as I have not yet seen this production – whether the German director Michael Hampe has discovered a metaphor for our own times in this “Electra.” (The production, as an aside, was generously sponsored by Theodoros Angelopoulos and his wife, Athens 2004 Organizing Committee chief Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, for its run at the Athens Concert Hall.)

Electra has had many incarnations; one of Hampe’s colleagues, David Leveaux, revived Electra in the 1990s as a ragged Bosnian refugee. Now Hampe, one of the world’s foremost international opera producers, said in a recent press conference that Athens is not a place to “show off” and that “one has to respect the 3,000-year-old history.”

Hampe has declared that he would avoid looming psychiatric couches or shrinks’ chaises-longues while handling “a libretto which one finds hard to grasp, not to mention to translate for the stage.” The viewer can then concentrate on the music of “the most difficult work of the operatic repertoire,” in the words of publisher Christos Lambrakis, a great connoisseur of the musical theater. Richard Strauss has employed in this work an unusually large operatic orchestra, and the huge brass and woodwind instruments are known to create a “barbaric maelstrom of turbulent sound.”

So can we see a modern lesson in politics in the gentle retooling of this classic play or of its previous incarnations? Do people believe politicians at their word anymore, or have those words become a bit of performance art, emptied of their original meaning but carrying another message? And is this message relevant?

The gap between saying and doing, an all-purpose political trademark, makes ribbons of Papandreou’s weekend messages. Sure enough, voters tend to vote for politicians who promise to spend more on just about everything. PASOK would do well to watch the developments in that giant country on the other side of the Atlantic. After being out of power for 12 years, Democrats took control of US Congress recently with a wish list of new programs, including more money for college student aid, the “No Child Left Behind” schools’ initiative and Medicare prescription drug benefits – plus tax relief for middle-income Americans.

But there’s a hitch: The Democrats also have promised to restore fiscal responsibility and not increase the federal deficit.

So how will liberals in Congress make this happen? Well, we shall follow, doing the same.