Gambling and revolutions
The TV ads are in black and white, supposedly to take us back to earlier days. That’s what they’re counting on, after all, a cute exploitation of the past and of certain iconic moments. Cynically distorting easily recognized slogans – among them even the slogan of the Polytechnic uprising – and arrogantly usurping scenes of great symbolic worth (secret meetings, slogans, a copier of illegal proclamations, demonstrations and flowers in the barrels of enemy guns), the would-be instructors of the OPAP lottery yet again are legitimizing the most frenzied gambling, on the single condition that it be state run, and are teaching us history at the same time. Namely, teaching us how to cheapen history, how to tarnish it, how to put it through the mill of our irresponsible yuppiness, so as to make propaganda spots to promote our latest game – is it the eighth? The fifteenth? And how many more will there be by the golden year of 2004? Pay attention, however: «It’s not a game, it’s a revolution,» shrieks the slogan as the rebellious rich take to the streets (along with their servants) to protect their interests. And what is threatening those interests? Not socialism, nor a charge by the underprivileged, or «Greece for the Greeks» or any other product of the political imagination. Just one danger faces them – the extra gifts of the new game. All of this lust for money is being introduced into our modernized market on the pretext of amusing lightness and with the smug footnote that the promoter, OPAP, is acting «in the service of Greek Sport and Culture.» And they are probably right to preen themselves, since this is precisely the value and culture model that the State variously honors, a model summed up by a former OPAP slogan: «stuck on winning» – whatever it is.
