Yanis told you so: "How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history."

As we've observed here in New Albany at a grassroots level, breaking free from the tentacles of business as usual is a daunting task. As an example, there are too many beak-wetting imperatives to justify local government perpetually spending money on shoddy annual repaving projects rather than examining the realities of car-centrism and alternatives to it -- and if you believe against all prevailing evidence that "leaders" like Bob Caesar have any interest in learning new tricks, think again. They're too busy nuzzling the effete pants legs of oligarchy-drunk entities like One Southern Indiana, hoping they might be tossed a tattered bone.

Where was I?

Oh yes, Greece.

In an essay at New Statesman, Yanis Varoufakis explains the invariable result when the Left, forever unwilling to stand by the veracity of its own political principles, caves to the Right -- itself forever willing to seize opportunity when the vacuum presents it.

How Syriza’s capitulations allowed the Greek right to escape the dustbin of history

The left-wing party’s embrace of austerity created the conditions for a parasitic and cruel oligarchy to return.

 ... What the people of Greece had said to us, their government, in that 2015 referendum, made perfect sense: “We don’t want to leave the euro or to clash with the European Union. But, if the European Union is demanding of you, of our government, the intensification of the austerity-insolvency doom loop that forces our youngsters to emigrate and the expropriation of what is left of our public assets, don’t you dare surrender — even if Grexit is the price we must pay.”

That night, while our people were out on the streets celebrating their remarkable victory, the political representatives of Greece’s oligarchy were in tatters. The leader of New Democracy resigned, the party’s cadres wallowed in deep despair, the oligarchy they represented was in a state of panic. Alas, they worried unnecessarily. For at the same time, a coup against the people was being hatched in the office of my colleague, the prime minister.

I want to go where it's WARM: From The Durrells in Corfu to Spirit of Place -- Lawrence Durrell's Greece.

The missus has been watching a series on public television.

The Durrells (also known as The Durrells in Corfu on American television) is a British comedy-drama series based on Gerald Durrell's three autobiographical books about his family's four years (1935–1939) on the Greek Island of Corfu, which began airing on 3 April 2016.

The series begins in 1935, when Louisa Durrell suddenly announces that she and her four children will move from Bournemouth to the Greek island of Corfu. Her husband has died some years earlier and the family is experiencing financial problems. A Homeric battle ensues as the family adapts to life on the island which, despite a lack of electricity, proves that Corfu is cheap and an earthly paradise.

A degree of artistic licence is employed: in the TV series, the family move to Corfu together, whereas in real life Lawrence Durrell, the eldest child (23 years of age in 1935), had already moved to the island earlier the same year with his wife.

At some point during the period of her viewing, I wandered into the room and was stunned by the scenery. Location shooting for the series takes place on the island of Corfu, where I haven't set foot -- although I've had glimpses of it by boat and from Albania, across the straits.

As is my habit, catching up meant finding a documentary (above) rather than binge-watching the series.

Spirit of Place Lawrence Durrell's Greece (1976)

Wonderful BBC Arts documentary from 1976 taking Lawrence Durrell back to Greece.

Both Lawrence and Gerald Durrell became noted writers ...

THE REAL DURRELLS Who were the real Durrell family, when did author Gerald Durrell die and when was the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust founded?

THE Durrells has returned to TV and with it comes a brand new batch of hilarious stories about the adorable family. But who were the real-life Durrells that inspired this wonderful show? We have the lowdown.

 ... and there are those who say the family's idyllic life on Corfu wasn't exactly as either of them depicted.

In My Family And Other Animals, the author Gerald Durrell gives the impression that his family went to Corfu in 1935 almost on a whim, selling their English house and sailing into the unknown to escape rainy summer days and stuffed-up noses. They laughed and wrote beautifully of their island idyll, but nobody in the family talked about what had really brought them to the island – the sudden death of their father in India, the devastating effect it had on their mother, and the yearning to restore something lost.

Gerald's career isn't as familiar to me, but I've been hearing Lawrence's name ever since I first resolved to travel.

The Real Life Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence “Larry”, the eldest of the Durrell siblings, is portrayed in MASTERPIECE’S The Durrell’s in Corfu, as a struggling writer, his every mood dictated, often hilariously so, by the associated highs and lows of his chosen trade. Self-important and more than a little pompous, he has an affinity for Bohemianism, as well as a budding friendship with Henry Miller.

The connection obviously is Miller, as the two became good friends.

One realizes immediately that theirs is much more than a literary friendship when watching the easiness with which the two men treat each other. There is the familiarity of shared assumptions and experiences. But still, Miller and Durrell are as distinct from each other as their writing. Miller's talk is unadorned, always quizzical and avoiding the subject of literature. His face is made more austere by the skullcap he wears at his writing desk; his age evident only in the way his tallness is equivocated by a stoop at the shoulders. Durrell seems all torso -- and one's first impression of him is a flow of bright, brittle language, an English accent laced with French words for emphasis.

All that's left for me now is to read one of Larry Durrell's books.

More about Patrick Leigh Fermor, travel writing and a lost European world.

This documentary about travel writing on BBC Four is Travellers' Century, Episode Three: Patrick Leigh Fermor, with Benedict Allen. Previous episodes were devoted to Laurie Lee and Eric Newby.

The ostensible aim of this 2008 segment is to recall Leigh Fermor's walk across Europe as a teen and the books he wrote about it, but there's ample biographical information as well -- and at the time of filming, Leigh Fermor was still very much alive.

If you read this week's column, you know why I'm here.

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

... Hence my current serendipitous choice of reading: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor. My friend Ken loaned me two of Leigh Fermor’s travel accounts some months back, and last week my internal alarm clock serendipitously reminded me it was time to begin, Gdansk or no Gdansk.

Regular readers will recall that Greece was a prime motivation for my first trip to Europe in 1985 ...

For further exploration of Leigh Fermor's colorful life, there remains a blog devoted to him.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

He drank from a different fountain

The purpose of my blog is to bring the life and work of Paddy, and his many friends and colleagues, to the attention of a wider audience, and to create an archive of on-line material that can be used for research and enjoyment. He and his friends deserve to be recognised and remembered in a world that changed much during their lives, but would be the poorer without them.

For more on Leigh Fermor's home in Greece on the mysterious Mani Peninsula, there's this.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: The legendary writer and his Greek hideaway, by Stav Dimitropoulos (Adventure)

 ... Leigh Fermor was the consummate wordsmith. “His favorite activity was forming phrases and cutting them into pieces, a process lasting for hours,” recalls Elpida Belogianni, Leigh Fermor’s long-standing housekeeper.

Belogianni is showing me around, six years after the author left his beloved home for the last time. I imagine him as a tall, dapper gentleman, seeking inspiration gazing at the Ionian waters, chatting with Joan over tea, mingling with socialite guests, or even dancing ‘zeibekiko’ [Greek folk dance] with local builders on the terrace.

Finally, a 2005 article in the London Review of Books goes considerably deeper into cultural attitudes about travel, with the author concluding that when reading Leigh Fermor's accounts, first appearances can be deceptive. Note that his Roumeli also is in my possession, and I'll tackle it next, after Mani.

Don’t forget your pith helmet, by Mary Beard

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Words of Mercury by Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Artemis Cooper

... What we are dealing with, in other words, is one aspect of the power struggle – or at least the complex negotiation – between visitor and visited.

This is clear enough in what now seems the quaintly old-fashioned advice given to travellers of a century or so ago. We find it harder to see how it works in contemporary tourism and the writing associated with it, from the cheapest guidebooks to travel literature of higher pretensions. Here, the legendary Greek hospitality – with its roots that supposedly go back to the Homeric world – provides a revealing and complicated case ...

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In less than two months, the Confidentials will travel to Gdansk, Poland for a long overdue appointment with my bucket list. It’s sweet of the missus to indulge me.

In 1980, the Solidarity trade union was established at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards, an act made provocative by the fact that Communist doctrine of the time in Poland precluded such an independent challenge to orthodoxy.

In theory, the Polish Communist government already was protecting the interests of workers, and for Solidarity to suggest this stewardship was deficient plainly represented a threat to the established order.

Unfortunately for the party bosses, it wasn’t their only problem. The Soviet Union had imposed communism on the devastated territory of a revamped Polish state following World War II, but the indigenous Polish variety of red star rule was capable neither of collectivizing agriculture nor curbing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Smallholders and clerics remained as obstacles to "enlightenment." 

In combination with these obvious resistance sources, Solidarity proved to be a mortal contagion. Nine tumultuous years after the trade union emerged, Communism collapsed both in Poland and across the “East Bloc,” a demise attributable to socio-economic pressures from within as well as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s calculated gamble of jettisoning the USSR’s vassal buffer states to buy time for an ultimately doomed effort to reform his homeland.

By all rights I should be preparing for the trip to Gdansk by learning a few words of basic Polish, like numbers, greetings and restaurant menu items, but instead I’m suddenly immersed in the Southern Peloponnese -- specifically, the Mani Peninsula, where a tangle of jagged mountains on the Greek mainland yields to the cooling breezes of the Mediterranean Sea.

As my preoccupation with Europe has been throughout the past four decades, so it continues for me in 2018. I am an unreconstructed Europhile, an enthusiastic scattershot generalist fascinated by all things European irrespective of where they’re located on the continent, and as yet stubbornly unwilling to concentrate on any one facet of Europe long enough to become an expert, whatever this word means.

Except as it pertains to beer.

The process of boning up for Pints&union led me first to the United Kingdom and readings about traditional pub culture, cask-conditioned ale and the history of Guinness in Ireland, pausing for a digression into Bavarian wheat ale, and recently followed by an overdue re-reading of Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s seminal Great Beers of Belgium, last updated shortly before the legend’s death in 2007.

Stuck somewhere in the middle of Fuller’s, Weihenstephaner and Duvel samples came The House of Government, a lengthy tome by Yuri Slezkin, which gently lured me back to previously dormant Kremlinology via the history of a 1,700-unit Stalinist apartment block built on the Moscow River embankment.

Cast against a 2018 summer’s backdrop of raging Putin paranoia in America and the World Cup successfully held in Russia, this book had me contemplating the eternal Matryoshka “Slavic enigma” dilemma all over again.

Rest assured, it has not been resolved.

---

Christianity of the Russian Eastern Orthodox persuasion connects Mother Russia to Greece by way of Byzantium -- or Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

Hence my current serendipitous choice of reading: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor. My friend Ken loaned me two of Leigh Fermor’s travel accounts some months back, and last week my internal alarm clock serendipitously reminded me it was time to begin, Gdansk or no Gdansk.

Regular readers will recall that Greece was a prime motivation for my first trip to Europe in 1985. Toying with the idea of studying in Greece, I actually was accepted into a “year in Athens” university program, but decided against it, and instead spent three weeks in the country as a tourist (including an idyll in Istanbul) before returning to Italy by boat.

I haven’t returned since, and I've no idea why.

Thanks to my cousin and mentor Don Barry’s recommendation, my lone visit 33 years ago was encouraged and prefaced by a travel book by the American novelist Henry Miller, called The Colossus of Maroussi.

Following is background from a previously published piece.

---

For someone as renowned for his bawdiness as Miller to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to some, but The Colossus of Maroussi is just that volume.

Written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as participating/liberating belligerent, it recounts Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939, a respite coming at the conclusion of his Depression-era tenure as a Parisian urban expatriate, and immediately prior to his relocation and reinvention as tree-hugging primitive in California’s Big Sur.

Ostensibly, Colossus is a travelogue about Greece as a country caught in transition during the middle of the 20th century, with one foot in the grubby present and the other very much rooted in an epic (and generally exaggerated) past. Much of Miller’s narrative focuses on a larger-than-life Greek poet and raconteur named George Katsimbalis, and therein hides a significant clue, because as readers have understood virtually since release, the book actually is all about Miller …

… For all its flaws, The Colossus of Maroussi was essential and compelling reading, and I cannot underestimate its profound influence on me during the early 1980s. Upon request in 1984, the Greek tourist office in New York had mailed a huge package of brochures and maps, and as I read Miller’s account that winter, I plotted his progress with their assistance. At the time, Ernest Hemingway meant more to me as a writer, but he hadn’t written about Greece. Spain would come much later.

There I was, finally in Greece, well aware that the intervening decades would render dated Miller’s descriptions unlikely, and this much was true. 

Many things had changed, but happily there were moments of timelessness when the pre-war mood still jibed, and when, not unlike the writer, I stood at Mycenae, Epidaurus and Delphi, brushed off the dust from the journey by bus, and felt the weight of millennia … when I’d hear a tinkling bell and see a shepherd’s profile on a hillside, and later devour tomatoes, cucumber and feta doused with oil, kick back a cool beer or tumbler of Retsina … watch the grizzled old men nursing their cloudy drams of ouzo at breakfast … and then be reminded that back at the hotel, one was officiously instructed to keep toilet paper out of the commode lest the too-narrow sewage pipes became clogged.

---

Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was the son of a well-to-do English family, not a product of Miller’s hardscrabble, working-class Brooklyn. However, their shared obsessions with Greece are mutually evocative.

I’m chagrined to concede that until seeing Leigh Fermor’s obituary in The Economist seven years ago, he was completely unknown to me. Had I been aware of his incredible life story, perhaps a trek to the Mani Peninsula would have been in order back in the day. He’d have been 70 years young then, and still a working writer. He might have helped me with my Retsina education.

In 1933 at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor -- later described by a journalist as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" -- departed London on a journey to Istanbul by foot, first to Germany and then along the Danube into the heart of the Balkans.

In all this walk lasted almost six years, until Leigh Fermor returned home to enlist in the fight against Hitler. Later in life, he authored a trilogy of books documenting these pre-war travels; the final unfinished volume was published after his death. They’re acclaimed to this day as incredible snapshots of Europe, pre-destructive spasm.

During the war Leigh Fermor, a master linguist, was a special forces operative in Nazi-occupied Crete, where he famously orchestrated the kidnapping of a German general. Remarkably, the two soldiers became friendly owing to their shared love of antiquity, and met again two decades later on a Greek television show based on “This Is Your Life.”

Eventually Leigh Fermor settled among the Greeks in his beloved Mani with true love Joan Rayner, a photographer, in a house they built on a hillside at Kardamyli. The book I’m reading now begins with the couple trekking from Sparta with guide and mule through wild forbidding mountains into the Deep Mani, and a first glimpse of their village of destiny.

---

Such is the agony and ecstasy of the aging Hoosier hick as persistent Europhile, frustratingly wrestling for the 34th consecutive year with nagging expatriate thoughts that have been tamed in twilight, though never altogether dispensed.

Might it all have unfolded differently?

It's a stupid question, and I avoid it 98% of the time. My oft-aborted escape plan from the 1980s would have been furthered had I hailed from a wealthy family, possessed some semblance of a skill (linguistic, literary or artistic), or displayed more raw ambition.

At the same time, as crazily fortunate as I’ve been in this charmed life, it would be ridiculous to lament spilled milk. After all, I hate milk.

If there exists any such thing as a celibate expatriate, I suppose that’s me. Nothing wrong with that; a voyeur from afar, looking not touching, and scratching the itch with short trips like the one to Gdansk, and later, Munich.

Someday if we liquidate everything we own and get just a little bit lucky, a period of retirement in Europa might be an option. A collegiate classmate has done this in Ecuador, which comes recommended for affordability. She loves it there. The problem for me is an utter lack of interest in places like Ecuador. Nothing personal; I'm just a Porto kind of guy.

I’ll hold onto this pleasant retirement dream for a moment or two, until reality rudely intrudes, and then as always regroup, channeling the mad European impulse into a beer travel story from the salad days. This tale will be told at Pints&union, hopefully to someone who hasn’t heard it before.

I may still be stuck inside of NA with the Mechelen blues again, but whenever passing along the chronology, I'll at least have done my job as cantankerous wannabe expatriate.

---

Recent columns:

August 23: ON THE AVENUES: The "downfall" occurs when we all fall down.

August 20: Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

August 9: ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

August 2: ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

Grexit to Brexit, "Yanis Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time."

Our plans to seek exile in Cornwall have been muddied by Brexit, and Yanis Varoufakis is keeping me informed about it.

The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May

Two years ago Yanis Varoufakis led Greece’s failed attempt to negotiate with the EU. He explains how the Brussels establishment will do everything to frustrate and outmanoeuvre the British prime minister, using tactics ranging from truth reversal to ‘the Penelope ruse’

On the same topic, a reminder:

Superlative current events panel discussion: "Brexit: An unorthodox view," with Yanis Varoufakis, Srećko Horvat and Elif Shafak.

I consider this absolutely essential viewing for anyone interested in learning numerous themes (generally) specific to the UK and the EU, but at the same time applicable to current events in America. Yes, it's 90 minutes. I'd say it's worth an hour and a half for context alone, and recommend especially to local Democrats.

This brings us to Varoufakis's new book.

Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis review – one of the greatest political memoirs ever? by Paul Mason (The Guardian)

The leftwing Greek economist and former minister of finance tells a startling story about his encounter with Europe’s ‘deep establishment’

Yanis Varoufakis once bought me a gin and tonic. His wife once gave me a cup of tea. While dodging my questions, as finance ministers are obliged to, he never once told me an outright lie. And I’ve hosted him at two all-ticketed events. I list these transactions because of what I am about to say: that Varoufakis has written one of the greatest political memoirs of all time. It stands alongside Alan Clark’s for frankness, Denis Healey’s for attacks on former allies, and – as a manual for exploring the perils of statecraft – will probably gain the same stature as Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson.

Yet Varoufakis’s account of the crisis that has scarred Greece between 2010 and today also stands in a category of its own: it is the inside story of high politics told by an outsider. Varoufakis began on the outside – both of elite politics and the Greek far left – swerved to the inside, and then abruptly abandoned it, after he was sacked by his former ally, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, in July 2015. He dramatises his intent throughout the crisis with a telling anecdote. He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice.

In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis ...

Syriza vs. the EU: #ThisIsACoup documentary, episodes 1 - 4.

It makes for somber but necessary watching.

The Nation's text is here; episode one of the video is embedded above, with links to all four parts below.

Field of Vision:

#ThisIsACoup Episode 1 | "Angela, Suck Our Balls"

#ThisIsACoup Episode 2 | To Pay or Not To Pay

#ThisIsACoup: Episode 3 | OXI - The Greek Word for 'No'

#ThisIsACoup Episode 4 | Surrender or Die

Greece: The bailout (this is a coup) and Varoufakis's refusal to play by the rules.

Yeah, I'm up early today. This one just came over the wire.

Greece bailout agreement: the key points (The Guardian)

However, it has been pleasing to note the widespread recognition that these past few weeks have been not unlike a war between international bankers and Greek politicians, with the "collateral" damage being suffered by ordinary Greeks with no dog in the fight.

#ThisIsACoup: Germany faces backlash over tough Greece bailout demands (The Guardian)

The draconian list of demands eurozone leaders handed to the Greek government in return for a European bailout has inspired a social media backlash against Germany and its hawkish finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.

ž#ThisIsACoup was the second top trending hashtag on Twitter worldwide – and top in Germany and Greece – as eurozone leaders argued through the night to convince the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to take the deal or face bankruptcy and his country’s expulsion from the euro.

The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis departed the scene following last weekend's referendum, but to me, the following points remain significant, especially this one:

"Thinking of himself as a representative of the Greek people, he made his wishes public."

Transparency. Imagine that.

The Man Who Refused to Play by the Rules: the Real Sins of Varoufakis, by Chris Bickerton (Counterpunch)

... The negotiations didn’t break down because of an unbridgeable gap between the North and South; creditors and debtors; the German ‘Ordoliberalism’ of Schäuble and Djisselbloem and Greek-style Marxism of Varoufakis and Tsipras. This gap has never existed. They broke down because Varoufakis repeatedly breached the Eurogroup’s etiquette. In doing so, he challenged the very foundations of the eurozone’s mode of governance ...

(the non-democratic Europgroup "rules" are recapped)

... The hostility towards Varoufakis stems from his breaking of all of these rules. He refused to play the Eurogroup game. It’s not really about riding a motorbike, wearing combat trousers and being a celebrity academic-blogger — though his charisma and popularity probably created jealousies amongst the other (colourless and tie-wearing) politicians.

At the heart of the matter is how Varoufakis presented his demands. Thinking of himself as a representative of the Greek people, he made his wishes public, and when in the Eurogroup, he maintained the same stance — changes in views could not be informally agreed around a table but had to be taken back to Athens and argued for, in cabinet and with the Syriza party.

Paying attention to what's happening in Greece.

Why is it that amid the discussion of bailouts and debt and money, no one seems willing or able to explain why several million Greeks should be made to pay a price in impoverishment for the misbehavior of international bankers and wretched politicians?

Greek villagers' secret weapon: Grow your own food, by Gregory Katz (AP - The Big Story)

KARITAINA, Greece (AP) — Ilias Mathes has protection against bank closures, capital controls and the slashing of his pension: 10 goats, some hens and a vegetable patch.

If Greece's financial crisis deepens, as many believe it must, he can feed his children and grandchildren with the bounty of the land in this proud village high in the mountains of the Arcadia Peloponnese.

Happily, Bernie Sanders has had something coherent to say about Greece. Our Republicans presumably are busy searching for Bible passages.

“I applaud the people of Greece for saying ‘no’ to more austerity for the poor, the children, the sick and the elderly ... in a world of massive wealth and income inequality Europe must support Greece's efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.”

Sanders spots the element that's usually missing as the bankers do their numbers fetish -- you know, the piece about dignity.

Greek Voters to Eurozone: We Can’t and Won’t Do This Anymore, by Maria Margaronis (The Nation)

... “We won’t be saved by Yes or No,” said a gentleman in his 80s. “It’ll be bad either way. But one thing will change: They’ll know they don’t have our agreement for what they’re doing to us. The government may have made mistakes, but the position of the Europeans has been cruel, oppressive, humiliating, shockingly inhuman. They’ll get their money. But they have to realize we need time to recover first.”

I'm looking for lessons wherever I can find them.

Greek referendum: smart response from Tsipras, but triumph may be brief, by Larry Elliott (The Guardian)

... David Marsh, of the thinktank OMFIF, said: “The failure of the creditor countries, led by Germany and the Netherlands, to recognise a central maxim of guerrilla fighting – the enemy will always surprise – provides a key reason for the Oxi win. If you’re outnumbered, practise the unorthodox. Tearing up the rules of Brussels conduct, Tspiras and Varoufakis, his finance minister-cum-field marshal, have outmanoeuvred and divided the surplus states by constantly re-engaging, over five months, from unexpected, demanding and outrageous battle positions.”

Yanis Varoufakis blogged his resignation with these important words.

I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride. We of the Left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office.

Prior to his resignation, an excerpt from Varoufakis's book provided closing context: Greece this time. Who's next?

Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push?, by Yanis Varoufakis (The Guardian)

Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American “invention”. The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone. Imagine their chagrin if the citizens of hard-hit states (eg Nevada or Ohio) had to worry about a death embrace between the debt of their state and the losses of the banks who happened to operate within the state.

Additionally, Americans were spared the need to contend with a central bank utterly shackled by inner divisions and the German central bank’s penchant for treating the worst-hit parts of the union (the eurozone, that is) as alien lands that had to be fiscally waterboarded until they ceased to obey the laws of macroeconomics.

"The vultures are circling, but Tsipras and Varoufakis tweet on."

This might be my favorite story of the week.

How Tsipras and Varoufakis turned Greek tragedy into Twitter triumph, by Hannah Jane Parkinson (The Guardian)

Politicians aren’t particularly renowned for a strong game on social media. Whether it’s falling for parody accounts, tweeting their own names, or, er, offering free owls for all, it’s not often they get it right.

Enter the Greeks. Never before has a government embroiled in one of the biggest global economic crises been so good at tweeting. We hear President Coolidge, for instance, was always screwing up his mentions.

Not so with Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Joseph Stiglitz 2: "How I would vote in the Greek referendum."

It's about to get real, isn't it?

Mistrust, anger and resignation on the streets of Athens, by Lauren Zanolli (Al Jazeera)

ATHENS — After a heated day of last-minute bailout pleas and rejections, the prospect of Greece missing its $1.7 billion loan payment to the International Monetary Fund — the subject of months of speculation and hand wringing — became a reality overnight.

As Gomer Pyle was known to exclaim, "Surprise surprise": It isn't entirely about the money, but about the power. Are millions of ordinary Greeks so very culpable in the higher level chicanery not just of Greece, but the EU overall, that they must be punished forever?

It's important to remember that the "bailout" funds constantly being referenced are not migrating to Greece, to help Greeks. They're going to banks ... to help banks. The Europeans themselves obviously don't have all the answers, and neither do I.

However, it's easy to see which are the hostages, and which the hostage takers.

Joseph Stiglitz: How I would vote in the Greek referendum, by Joseph Stiglitz (The Guardian)

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Varoufakis on Greece: “We’ve lost everything, so we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do."

Sovereignty?

Greece will say it as it is: five years on, the medicine prescribed by Germany, Europe’s paymaster, to mend the ills of run-away profligacy hasn’t worked. Instead, the nation has become an echo of its former self; its economy slashed by almost a third, one in four out of work, one in three facing the prospect of living in abject poverty.

“We’ve lost everything,” he says. “So we can speak truth to power, and it’s about time we do.”

Damned book readers.

I wonder if he knows Papa John personally?

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis: ‘If I weren’t scared, I’d be awfully dangerous’, by Helena Smith (Guardian)

... At 53, Varoufakis is still clear that he “understands the world better” as a result of having read Marx. But he no longer considers himself a diehard leftie, whatever others may think. Rather, he says, he is a libertarian or erratic Marxist, who can marvel at the wondrousness of capitalism but is also painfully aware of its inherent contradictions, just as he is “the awful legacy” of the left. “It is a system that produces massive wealth and massive poverty,” proclaims the economist who taught at the universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Glasgow and Sydney after gaining his doctoral degree at the University of Essex. “I don’t think you can understand capitalism until and unless you understand those contradictions and ask yourself if capitalism is the natural state. I don’t think it is. That’s why I am a leftwinger.”

More than that, Varoufakis is an iconoclast, a self-styled “contrarian” who is also an idealist, “because if you are not an idealist, you are a cynic”. And he has, he laments, lost a lot of friends on the left who believe that Grexit, Greece’s exit from the currency bloc, would be the country’s best course.

Je suis Greece.

I may be a Europhile, but underdogs come first.

Those who would say that it's just another instance of a slacker country looking to evade its debts are missing the metaphor. In a world dedicated to income equality and the preservation of the 1%, most of us are Greece, already.

Greece's leaders stun Europe with escalating defiance, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (The Telegraph)

"The euro is like a house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” says Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister

Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has spelled out the negotiating strategy of the Syriza government with crystal clarity.

“Exit from the euro does not even enter into our plans, quite simply because the euro is fragile. It is like a house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” he said.

“Do we really want Europe to break apart? Anybody who is tempted to think it possible to amputate Greece strategically from Europe should be careful. It is very dangerous. Who would be hit after us? Portugal? What would happen to Italy when it discovers that it is impossible to stay within the austerity straight-jacket?”

New Albany looks to Greece.

Photo credit: Guardian

Sort of a Salvador Allende moment for the EU, wouldn't you say?

Don't miss this comment, also in The Guardian: Greece shows what can happen when the young revolt against corrupt elites (Paul Mason).

The rise of Syriza can’t just be explained by the crisis in the eurozone: a youthful generation of professionals has had enough of tax-evading oligarchs ... From outside, Greece looks like a giant negative: but what lies beneath the rise of the radical left is the emergence of positive new values – among a layer of young people much wider than Syriza’s natural support base. These are the classic values of the networked generation: self-reliance, creativity, the willingness to treat life as a social experiment, a global outlook.

Negotiating the terms of engagement. Imagine that.

Syriza’s historic win puts Greece on collision course with Europe, by Ian Traynor and Helena Smith (Guardian)

• Voters reject EU austerity for radical alternative of far-left party
• Upstarts fall two seats short of an overall majority
• ‘Greece has turned a page,’ says 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras

European politics has been plunged into a volatile new era following a historic victory in Greece’s general election by far-left radicals committed to ending years of austerity.

More than five years into the euro crisis that started in Greece in October 2009 and raised questions about the single currency’s survival, Greek voters roundly rejected the savage spending cuts and tax rises imposed by Europe which reduced the country to penury ...

... The clock is already ticking. When the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, French president François Hollande, British prime minister David Cameron et al assemble for an EU summit in Brussels in just over a fortnight, they will be joined at Europe’s top table by (Alexis) Tsipras, probably the only man there not wearing a tie. The symbolism will be enormous. Europe’s anti-mainstream mavericks and populists are no longer just hammering on the doors.

Alexis Tsipras warns Greek crisis is also Europe's

Maybe Henry Miller really did have an inkling about the Greeks. Maybe Americans will come to have an inkling about the Europeans. Maybe I've had too much to drink.

Alexis Tsipras warns Greek crisis is also Europe's; Greece's leftwing leader tells Paris audience that other EU countries will be next if they fail to oppose radical austerity drive, by Kim Willsher (guardian.co.uk)

 ... "We are here to explain to people in Europe that we have nothing against them. We are fighting the battle in Greece not just for the Greek people but for people in France, Germany and all European countries."

"I am not here to blackmail, I am here to mobilise," he said.

"Greece gave humanity democracy and today the Greek people will bring democracy back to Europe."

ON THE AVENUES: Miller's Colossus, now and then.

ON THE AVENUES: Miller's Colossus, now and then.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The iconic American writer Henry Miller spent the last years of his long, active life portraying a theatrical version of himself, offering entertaining vignettes for an ever-eager media, and brazenly enjoying his late-blooming notoriety as only an ex-bowery urchin could.

Just before his death, wizened but with a twinkle of naughtiness still flashing in his ancient eyes, Miller appeared on camera as historical “witness” in Warren Beatty’s film “Reds”, observing that while clueless moderns had trouble believing that old rascals like him ever had sex, they most certainly did, and a lot of it, too.

For someone as renowned for his bawdiness as Miller to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to some, but “The Colossus of Maroussi” is just that volume. Written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as participating/liberating belligerent, it recounts Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939, a respite coming at the conclusion of his Depression-era tenure as Parisian urban expatriate par excellence, and immediately prior to his relocation and reinvention as tree-hugging primitive in California’s Big Sur.

Ostensibly, “Colossus” is a travelogue about Greece as a country caught in the middle in the mid-20th century, with one collective foot in the grubby present and the other very much rooted in an epic (and generally exaggerated) past. Much of the narrative focuses on a larger-than-life Greek poet and raconteur named George Katsimbalis, and therein hides a significant clue, because as readers have understood virtually since release, the book actually is all about Miller.

Miller describes Katsimbalis with a mirror’s eye view, and he imbues the entire Greek nation with his own quirky prejudices and eccentricities. Like so many Western tourists before and since, he experiences an exotic but impoverished country and rather smugly concludes that in poverty resides inner beauty and universal wisdom, when all the locals really want are dependable electricity, flush toilets and access to pre-sliced, mass-market white bread.

On the more positive side, Miller offers some of his best pure writing in Colossus, describing Greek pastoral scenes and the country’s colorful people joyfully and without guile, his trademark glee in sensuousness and eroticism deployed not to titillate readers with sex, but to provide them with the imagined means to smell the flowers, taste the moussaka and feel the ocean breeze. He thought it was his best book, and in the sense of descriptive imagery, he may have been right.

When it comes to politics, economics and mankind’s “larger” issues, Miller might safely be described as a non-participating Luddite libertarian. He has no time for society’s persistent and petty constraints on human expression, and little use whatever for “ –isms” of any sort, and yet he inhabits a time and place in which these considerations are the dominant daily theme. As such, Greece is his necessary escape, and he seems to find in it the perfect milieu to absorb his own point of view as reflected back at him.

Yet, perhaps even Miller recognizes his own exaggerations and glibness. He presciently decamps from his personalized Hellenic dream just before awakening, thus avoiding the multitudinous Greek nightmares to follow: Wartime horrors, post-war ideological battles, coups, squabbles and the wrenching upheavals and dislocations familiar to those world cultures eager to join the “modern” world he so detested.

Miller died a few years before Greece joined the European Union, its entry symbolizing the country’s belated arrival at the continent’s pageant. Michael Lewis, author of “Boomerang” (as excerpted in Vanity Fair), tells us how this particular scene is playing out in today’s Greece:

On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act … but the place (Greece) does not behave as a collective … it behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?

For all its flaws, "The Colossus of Maroussi" remains essential and compelling reading. I cannot underestimate its profound influence on me while planning my first European excursion during the early 1980’s. The Greek tourist office in New York mailed a huge package of brochures and maps, and as I read Miller’s account, I plotted his progress with their assistance.

I well knew the intervening decades would render dated descriptions unlikely, and this much was true; so many things had changed, but happily there were times of timelessness when the pre-war mood still jibed, and when not unlike the writer, I stood at Mycenae, Epidaurus and Delphi, brushed off the dust from the journey by bus, and felt the weight of millennia … when I’d hear a bell and see a shepherd’s profile on a hillside, and later devour tomatoes, cucumber and feta doused with oil, kick back a cool beer or tumbler of Retsina … watch the grizzled old men nursing their cloudy drams of ouzo at breakfast … and then be reminded that back at the hotel, one was officiously instructed to keep toilet paper out of the commode lest the too-narrow sewage pipes get clogged.

Like Henry Miller, I’ve not returned to Greece since that very first visit. I wonder why I haven't?

Today's Tribune column: "Hassan in Pithion, 1985."

We approach the 25th anniversary of my first pilgrimage to Europe, which began in early May, 1985. Vignettes like the one recounted below, some of which first appeared in different form some years back in this blogspace, will appear periodically in Tribune column form throughout summer, 2010.

BAYLOR: Hassan in Pithion, 1985

There were valuable lessons to be learned from finding myself conversing with a Syrian traveling salesman during the hot morning hours of an aimless day in a tiny border town with more rail sidings and goats than humans.