Amateur hour
«In Greece, everyone is what they say they are,» Yiannis Tsarouchis, one of the country’s greatest artists in the 20th century, once said, in one of the many pearls for which he is known. This comment summed up neatly a time when Greeks were rapidly defining themselves, when people could claim to be experts in one field or another, when someone fresh in town from his village could proclaim that he was a plumber, or, say, a dilettante could pass himself off as an artist. Despite the far more specialized demands of our time, too many Greeks are still getting away with being something other than what they were trained – or not trained – to be. And all too often they are getting away with doing what they do badly. The plumber will charge an exorbitant fee and the tap will still leak after he leaves, the taxi driver will not provide the service that a taxi driver should, the waiter will act as if he was born for better things than to waste his time with you. Because people can get away with passing themselves off as something that they are not, they can also get away with not doing what they are paid to do. The other side of the coin is that, because no one knows what he is doing, everyone is an expert at everyone else’s job. Everyone, in other words, is qualified to be a journalist. So it was only a matter of time before the quintessential Greek politician, PASOK General Secretary Costas Laliotis (who never completed his dentistry studies), should acknowledge as much. The ruling party, slipping in the polls and sliding around in the effort to come up with a policy that will put a brake on this, obviously feels that its achievements are not being presented appropriately by the press. So the party, instead of producing politics, will now produce press releases, in the understanding that it cannot trust the press to understand what it, the party, is doing. Laliotis, who is to run the new agitprop committee along with Prime Minister Costas Simitis, informed the media on Thursday that PASOK’s communications policy will focus on the following: «What, why, when, how, whom and whence.» These, of course, are the basics of news writing. It will be fascinating to see if Laliotis, who has proved to be pretty adept at political machinations, will be able to present government policy in a way that cadet reporters in their first week at work are expected to do at a serious newspaper. But in Greece, as we said, everyone is an expert. So journalists do not need to put down the facts, they just need to impart their opinion to a crowd of readers or listeners who already know all the facts somehow (especially if they heard something in passing on television, or, even better, the friend of a friend heard about it) and all they need is to have their strongly held views reinforced. Like an unrequited lover, the government feels that it is misunderstood. Whatever it does – such as presenting proposals for crucial reforms to the social security and tax systems – the news media (and after them the opposition parties and trade unions) begin to explode with objections. Furthermore, opinion polls have been showing the conservative New Democracy party leading PASOK by about 8 percent. This is a difficult time for Simitis’s government, as halfway through its four-year mandate it is stuck between those who will oppose it whatever it does and those who feel that it isn’t doing enough. Instead of fighting its way forward with policies that will make things better for Greece’s citizens, in accordance with Simitis’s vow to bring living standards closer to those in the rest of the European Union, it has gone into a defensive crouch. Declaring that it has to make changes that will help make Greece more competitive, it winds up making big noises and then doing very little. Insofar as those who are opposed to any change at all are very vocal and those who would like to see some progress toward meeting the country’s challenges are getting fed up by the government’s lack of courage, PASOK’s standing in the polls can only keep falling. Simitis, who continues to be buffeted by various forces inside his party, seems unable to take greater risks by pushing reforms that he believes necessary. He has relied more and more on Laliotis to provide strategy as to how to make the government seem, in the public’s eye, like the socialist movement of old that was related to Castro’s Cuba, the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and Muammar Khadhafi’s Libya. It is almost as if Simitis – Greece’s designated adult – has to hang out with the streetfighters in his party in order to stay in power and so keep moving Greece toward the mainstream of European countries. It is, of course (like much in these generalizations), unfair to depict PASOK or Greece as being so out of tune with the present, but it so often seems as if the ruling party’s heart really still belongs to the late Andreas Papandreou. As for the public, it is genuinely at a loss as it stands at the crossroads between East and West, between the present and the past, between the complex, interdependent world in which Greeks have always excelled when they slipped the bounds of their provincialism and that narrow mentality which never tires of complaining about the present but fights every effort to bring about change. Opinion polls can show people simultaneously holding strong convictions that place it, in one instance, in the «progressive» camp (as when the majority would like to see an electoral system giving smaller parties the power to be kingmakers), and in the other, the highly conservative one, in which the vast majority is opposed to allowing Muslims a place of worship in Athens. Trade unions can hold strikes because they don’t want the government to tamper with the social security system, whereas the whole nation should be in the streets demanding that measures are taken to make sure the pension system will still be viable in the future. We seem to demand solutions without any pain. It’s nice when you can get away with it, but when some day the EU funding dries up, we will have to begin to choose our priorities and work toward them. Since 1974, when this wonderful democracy that we are now enjoying was established as a military dictatorship fell away, a whole generation has grown up knowing nothing of the wars, coups, famines and other plagues that were never far from Greece. It would be tragic if, having grown fat in this luxury, it should grow old only to find that it will have to deal with a bankrupt social security system at the end of its days. So perhaps PASOK has stumbled onto something that might be of lasting benefit. Perhaps if everyone focuses on the «what, why, where, when» and so on of what is going on, both those making policy and those judging it will focus their thinking. That will be a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. If we concentrate on the issues, we can only demand solutions. Then we can judge the opinions that dominate debate today. If we can’t do better, let’s all be journalists. But let’s be good journalists.
