I arrived at Venizelos Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a Greek friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I could see that he was talking to himself, excitedly. In a moment I realized he had a Bluetooth wireless phone clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation.
When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt and he pointed toward the exit, still talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” “Of course,” he barked gruffly, and he went back to talking on the phone.
Once in the car, I saw he had a TV news broadcast playing on the screen in the dashboard---the panel that usually displays the GPS map. Between his incessant talking and the blaring newscast, I could barely concentrate. Unfortunately, you see, I was stuck in the cramped back seat trying to finish a column on my iBook Pro. I wrote what little I could, then I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album as we sped through the Athens suburbs, past block after block of boarded-up storefronts, trash-strewn streets, and walls littered with communist graffiti.
After a few minutes, I reflected on our trip: Between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my iBook and listening to my iPod: Everything but talking to each other, exchanging ideas and information to better bridge the cultural gap dividing the philosophies underlying the strained and inefficient welfare states of Europe and the vibrant, emerging, technologically driven dynamos of the Far East such as China and Singapore.
Finally, I leaned over the front seatback and asked him, "What are you watching?"
"The end of our world," he snapped, pointing at the screen, which was filled with images of angry protestors flooding the streets of downtown Athens. "What do you care?"
I explained to him my position as a columnist at Brainiac Conspiracy, how I'd been assigned to cover the ongoing Greek debt crisis and this weekend's coming elections. Back home in the States, I continued, many serious policy analysts were viewing the vote as a referendum on the fate of the Eurozone, and perhaps of Europe itself.
"Our fate is already sealed," he muttered, followed by an expletive that can't be published here.
His name was Alexi, an English-speaking Thessalonian. He'd been forced to move back in with his parents at age 40 after seeing his wages collapse 75 percent during the crisis. His older brother, who has also returned home, has been unemployed for a year, and his 70-year-old mother was recently diagnosed with cancer. "That's who I was talking to on the phone," he noted. "She's asking me to swing past the pharmacy to see if any of her meds have come in yet. They've been out of her drugs for the past week because the government hasn't paid the drug companies in three months, and she's feeling a lot sicker today. And now, they want to cut her pension in half!" He banged the dashboard in frustration.
I tried to console him, reminding him that times of great crisis also present great opportunities for workers to re-invent themselves in an ever-shifting marketplace by acquiring new skills that will make them more valuable to employers than a computer, a robot, or a telemarketing worker in Mumbai.
"What planet are you from? I thought you said you were an American," he said angrily. "There are no jobs, period. Not even for robots."
I asked him which party he intended to vote for this weekend.
"Tsipras and Syriza," he proclaimed, referring to the leader of the far-left opposition party that has threatened extreme retaliatory measures against the ECB, such as nationalizing Greece's banks and curbing the current austerity measures that were imposed by the previous government. "They're the only party that reflects the popular will."
Popular will or no, I asked him if he wasn't worried how a Syriza victory might be interpreted outside Greece's borders. Markets would be roiled, and investor confidence shaken.
"I don't give a [expletive] about those people, and neither should anyone else. Some of us would rather start over and rebuild the nation from scratch than live on our knees as slaves to the Germans. We lived through this once before, it wasn't pretty."
I tried to reason with him, but he was adamant. Any solution that asserted Greek sovereignty, no matter how disastrous for international bond markets, would be preferable to confronting the harsh reality of Greece's bloated public sector and unsustainable entitlements, no matter how necessary it might be to ensure the nation's future.
After I arrived and checked in at the Intercontinental Marriott, a few blocks away from Syntagma Square---the focal point of all the protest rallies---I settled into the hotel bar, opened up my iBook, and ordered a plate of lamb moussaka and a glass of retsina. Attempting to retrieve voice messages on my iPhone 4G, I had trouble finding a reliable connection.
"You and everyone else," my bartender said. "The government ran out of money to pay most of the wireless providers last week, so they've cut off most of the cell towers."Reflecting on my cab driver and his seeming frustration at the state of Greek politics, I felt an immediate sense of connection to my own country, which is likewise caught in a vise of deep divisions and partisan distrust. Yet Greece's problems, like ours, are not insoluble---far from it. More moderate leadership, such as the kind exerted in our own country by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would be a prudent first step, followed a long-range budget plan that combined sensible revenue raising and smart deficit reduction---call it a Greek Simpson-Bowles, if you will. The solution would not be totally painless, and would necessitate some amount of belt-tightening from all sectors of the economy, but it would place Greece's government, as it would our own, on a solid path to fiscal sustainability.
I finished my retsina and closed up my laptop. My cell phone dropped another call. A brick smashed through the window of the hotel bar.
---Vitelius
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