Essay for collection entitled

THE GENIUS OF LANGUAGE

Pantheon Books

Version of March, 2003

Growing up bi-lingual meant growing up with two cultures, two opposing identities. The Greek language was, in the first case, the language of politics, meaning the speeches of my father and grandfather. “Greece to the Greeks,” my father cried out in the mid-nineteen-sixties while, in my grandfather’s more apophthegmatic or, in today’s parlance, sound-bite Greek, “The King reigns but the people rule.”

Greek then was their language and they had a famously firm hold on it. Theirs was the language of the humble men who gathered inside our kitchen during campaigns, of modern Athenians with razor-thin ties and dark suits, of women in black with absurdly thick fingers, much thicker and stronger than my mother’s or my half-Polish grandmother’s. These women believed it was their god-given birthright to stretch what little of my flesh they could grab hold of.

Yet it was my mother’s language – Margaret Esther Chant from Elmhurst, Chicago – that ultimately won my heart. When we moved to Greece from Berkeley in the early sixties so my father could enter politics, English automatically became my refuge, a way to protect my embryonic identity. In Richard the Second, Thomas Mowbray reacts to his banishment from England: “Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue”, he says, which is “so deep a maim.” Of course my tongue was not fully imprisoned, since along with an ample supply of books, English was the in-house language.

To this identity I clung tenaciously, chiefly through books. From the British books available in Greece I learned to say “bloody ‘ell” and “Blimey!” (which I was sure derived from a British rendition of Blame Me!) and dreamt about scones and cream and tea at five. American comic-books provided me with the proper expressions when beating up my younger brother Andy. My less than Homeric blows to his small chest were accompanied by rapturous cries of “zap!”, “pow!” and, for the execution, “kablooey!” I was always delighted to discover new words – especially slang. When an American teenager asked me where the toilet was so he could “take a leak,” I was bowled over. I imagined our bodies to be like badly built ships from which water leaked out. When an American family moved in next door – I learned later the father helped put mine in jail – I learned that “man” could be thrown into a sentence just about anywhere, and that “cool” meant, well cool, man.

Yet Greek was all around. The language brought with it all the attendant cultural sidebars – priests grilled alive by Turks, women who jumped off cliffs rather than be taken by the enemy, and the Bridge of Arta, which reminded me of the story of Sisyphus: the bridge would be fixed in the day but would collapse at night, and so a virgin was built into the bridge and this successfully reversed the trend. There was also the story of the World War Two collaborator who chopped and then sold partisans’ heads to the Germans like cabbage. When the war was over the man was caught, sliced lightly all over his skin with razor blades, then buried in a sand dune in Thessaly.

I couldn’t wait to tell my friends “back home” about the lamb we had for a pet, about the sheer steepness of the Isthmus of Corinth, about the shark I saw hanging by a hook on the island of Hydra, about the taste of souvlaki with pita and the caterpillars that hung in white sacks from the branches of pine trees. It took me a few years to realize we weren’t going back to Berkeley and that there really weren’t any friends “on the other side.” That realization however did little to lessen my need to tell someone about everything that was different in Greece. It took me years to realize that the perspective of those non-existent friends living in the States was in fact my own.

But I was most impressed by the enormous crowds that came to listen to my father and my grandfather and through which I learned and imitated a rhetorical speech-making Greek. “Greece of Christian Greeks catholically protestant,” my grandfather hurled at the dictators under house arrest. Even then, at the age of eleven, I marveled at how he squeezed three religions into one, active phrase. Other sayings of his joined the pantheon of national tradition: Many a people has deposed a king; never has a king deposed the people, or All freedoms are allowed save one: the freedom to banish freedom. The rhetorical expertise of both men added pressure on me to speak Greek better than the average, a pressure so daunting that, I now realize, I soon abandoned the effort and threw myself squarely into the camp of the possible.

I remember selecting from my parent’s library the thickest book I could find, presumably because the thickest book would provide me the greatest protection, which is how I ended up reading, at the age of nine, the sorry life of an architect written by someone with an unpronounceable first name, (Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead), but quickly strayed into the adventures of Biggles and the Blyton’s Secret Five, the Hardy Boys and every single Drew Sisters book I could secure from sister, Gayle-Sophia. I refused to call her Sophia and persisted in her nicely American Gayle, after the actress Gayle Storm that my parents had apparently taken a liking to in the fifties she was born. The rest of us had solidly Greek names, Nick, Andy, George.

It was my godfather, also a George, who got me thinking more about language. Why is a spoon called a spoon, he asked. That’s silly, I recall answering, because it’s a spoon! And that’s a fork, so it’s called a fork! I hadn’t yet realized that he was a fan of Magritte’s. I liked my godfather because he looked precisely the way a godfather should look: three-piece suits, a smart tie, a hat, a cane, a well-trimmed mustache, with an distinct air of aristocracy. Do you know what your name means? he asked me when we sat in the dining room in our home in Paleo Psychiko.

“My name means… well it means Nick!”

“But in it’s full version, he offered, what does it really mean?”

“You mean Nicholas?”

“Two words in there. Can you see them?”

“No.”

“Nike and Laos, victor of the people.”

“Cow!” (I didn’t know the whole expression yet). So Greek words really did have secrets!

I was off. I easily pried apart brother George’s first name: Geo for earth and “Orgy” for the verb plough – though I had to look orgy up. George was no more nor less than a farmer. Little Andy with his blonde hair and the black tuft sprouting out from the crown who actually spoke only Greek had a name that meant simply Man, like Oriana Fallaci’s book Un Uomo, about her Greek lover. Sophia however didn’t have a synthetic name and hers meant simply “wisdom.” Names like hers were less fun because there was no puzzle, no secret.

The baker’s wife – Euphony – was fair game. When my sister once came home with a loaf of bread I shouted: “You phony! I bet you didn’t buy it from Mrs.Good-Sound!”  Alexander meant literally Man-Repellent. Thinking I was ahead of the game, I challenged my mother (who was having a harder time with Greek than I was) by demanding she tell me a word I didn’t know, in any language, that. She threw out an easy one at first  — “sludge” I think it was, which I preceded to answer, then came a far more difficult one which I still remember to this day, amazed she knew such a long word. It was the word “eleemosynary.” I admitted defeat. Look it up, she advised. I discovered, to my delight, it had a Greek root – eleimosini, meaning the quality of being charitable or charitableness.

I began to look for English words which were in fact Greek – except that you would never think they were. I made a list of such words: For example the word Cemetery, (kimitirio) simply meant a sleeping place. The word Police, familiar the world over, derived from the word polis. The word zone or “area” was the Greek word for what we wore around our waist – a belt. My all-time favorite is a word you’d never think was Greek: disaster, meaning a bad alignment of the stars.

I started to drive the family nuts by finding words that either sounded awful or made a lot of noise when you said them loudly, since I had now become the most word-infected family member:

Dad stop making all that cacophony!

Mom, that souvlaki’s really gonna hurt my esophagus!

I can’t concentrate with all the sussurus from your newspaper!

Dad sometimes you are a pompous pop!

For a brash statement like that I could get popped myself, since my father, especially on his return from America was growing less and less beholden to American child psychologists and had reverted more and more to the traditional forms of control — Ottoman law – as we called it, applied sporadically but effectively with the help of a zoni (belt) to our behinds.

Once I had worked on first names (Cleanthes – bouquet, Calliope – Beautful-faced) there appeared a whole new treasure where I least expected it: Greek surnames. With my sister, we would translate surnames to see how dumb they sounded in English: Mister Kalovelonis was Mister Goodneedle, while Mister Kalambokis was his Royal Highness Mister Corn. Our all-time favorites were the derogatory surnames like Mrs Low-Butt and Mrs Fat-butt, the famous Buttley sisters, like my mother’s high-school heroines, the Andrew Sisters. (Or is that Andrews with an ess?)

The last name of one of my father’s deputies made no sense but was certainly fun to say, if you could spit it out without stuttering: Papapanayotou. Three pa’s in a row: try them apples on for size. Our surname, with it’s double papa (our great grandfather was a priest hence the Papa) was nothing compared to Mister Papapanayotou. My gleeful rendition of his name each day caused it to be repeated by nearly all the household for no real reason. “Oh dear Mister Papapanayotou,” my mother would exclaim for no reason.

When he showed up one night, my father made a big thing of introducing him to me, then did me the awesome favor of actually adding yet another “pah” to the train. For days I savored the delightful extra – Papa -pa!-panayotou. I don’t think the owner of the surname thought twice about this delicious distortion, but I treasured it for weeks and kept seeing my father’s slight grin as he machine-gunned the whole thing into the hallway – specifically for my pleasure. In a way I was being acknowledged as the family’s linguist.

During the dictatorship (1967-1974), with father in jail, we called on our American side of the family to visit us. One such member was a medal-studded Lieutenant-Colonel who had just returned from service in Vietnam. Walking around Athens with all six-foot five of him, in full military decoration, ignoring curfew, we were able finally to stand outside Averoff prison on Alexandras’ street where my father was being held. This was not only a thrill, a small act of revenge, but reinforced the sense that that distant country of English-speakers offered more protection than this one.

We moved to Sweden in 1968 –  after my father, with the help of President Johnson who was quoted as saying, in full Texan drawl – “let that dam sunuvabitch out” –  was amnestied by the dictators. That’s where I dipped briefly but excitedly into the Englishness of that language. For a twelve-year old loosed on Stockholm, besides the blatant and unheard of pix of full-breasted vix which hung on just about every newsstand in the city, I was transfixed by certain words, like those for Entrance and Exit – the blatancy of the infart and utfart strewn all over the place. Yet my favorite from that short sojourn (one dark winter) I quickly rooted out. Adolescence is nothing if not the delight of the scatological (Greek for “study of excrement” as opposed to eschatological, the theology of death or endings). The word for constipation in Swedish was ferstoppning, which meant exactly what it said, thank you.

We ended up in Canada in the last year of the decade, under the good graces of the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who offered political asylum to my father if he wouldn’t overdo his criticism of America – a restraint my father was unable to follow.

Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, my real home, the one I thought as my real home was for many years the country of Canada. And Canadians – well they spoke pretty much like we did but to my great delight, not exactly. When I played basketball the referee might shout “Eeyoot of Boonds!” for “Out of Bounds!” Objects were “yea high,” highways had “soft shoulders,” and a decent-sized snowplow weighed “two ton” without the pluralizing ess. You could talk like you were a hardware employee showing a customer the goods and get away with it: “Well there, you’ve got your Phillips Screw and your five inch dead bolt…” The wonderful possessive your gave you instant ownership over all such male objects. There was also a machine called a “snowblower” which besides snow, would churn out pebbles, animals and, in at least one James Bond film, a couple of bad humans. Snowmobiles raced across the snow at night in the vast white space – an upgraded version of Dr Zhivago.

Going to school in rural Ontario I learned that the business end of a scythe was called a snath, that Viceroy butterflies look like Monarchs but don’t have the same flight pattern and that Lord Strathcona drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway on November 7, 1885. Swamps were called muskegs, a frozen pond thundered when you walked on it, trapped air bubbles looked like crystal balls, a hockey puck traveled up to a hundred miles an hour, a solid slapshot was as satisfying as any slam dunk, and contrary to popular wisdom, when it got really cold it didn’t snow.

Driving along Route 13 in King City one cold afternoon, we passed the small kimitirio with its snow-laden crosses sticking up like frozen spinning jacks. I turned to my mother. “Mom, when I die, this is where I want to be buried.” Not in Berkeley, not in Greece, not in Sweden but here, in King City, Ontario. I had never seen her cry before because of something I said.

It was in Canada I first heard a third but instantly recognizable language, one which I sort of knew without ever having learned it. It was the language of the English spoken by first-generation Greeks, what the community of bi-culturals like me now informally calls Gringlish.

Gringlish usually takes English verbs or even nouns and pops them directly into the sentence: Will you park the car becomes, in Gringlish, “Tha kanis park to caro?” How many blocks away do you live becomes “Posa blockya makria?”

I dislike the word Gringlish because it sounds like a combination of two evil heroes– Grendel and the Grinch. I prefer a word of my own invention, which is perhaps derogatory but more to the point: Dinerese. In the Greek diners across Route One along the East Coast, in Chicago or in Florida, beginning with perhaps the most famous Greek eatery in Astoria, the Neptune Diner, (nested neatly beneath the Triboro Bridge), you can still hear this language.

“The Greek people,” a phrase much liked and much used by my father, in Dinerese becomes “the Greek peep.” Greeks love the peep. Peeps of the world unite. Long live the peep. Fast-speaking Greeks dismiss the distance between words. Like a hut kupukuffee? No, you sumunabeets? (son of a…)

My favorite interchange occurred while in college, when a Greek-Greek who had learned English only from his law books and who worked part-time at a Greek pizza place in New Haven encountered a true-blood American. The conversation went something like this, best as I can recall:

Ordered a double cheese ‘zah, half-pep, half anch.

I am sorry. What was that?’

Half-pep half-anch, man. The full spread.

I’m sorry. I don’t speak colloquial

You don’t speak what?

Slang. That’s it. I don’t speak slang.

Who’s speaking slang? I’m speaking English.

Do you mock me, sir? Do you deride me?

C’mon man! I just want my ‘zah!

You think you’re in your home you can talk like this?

Man this ain’t no home, this is Athenian effing Pizza last time I looked. Which planet you from?

Planet is the ancient Greek word for wanderer, sir. I know precisely my origins sir, from Arta, in Western Greece, sir, where they once built the bridge.

Sheesh! Get back on that ship and return to wherever…!

Strangely enough, the Greek I had learned as a kid in the “home” country, was a passport into restaurants, brought sudden connections in with others who’s surnames began with Papa or ended with opoulos, and afforded me instant, no-questions-asked entry into a distinctly raunchy world of night-clubs owned or run by Greeks, places called Mykonos, Zorba’s, or Towson Pizza. Wherever I traveled in America, I was sure to pop into a Greek restaurant or diner where I take temporary refuge from the strangeness of the world.

The burden of the Greek language continued to weigh on me even during my college years. I was now called upon to represent my father who was climbing the steps to the palace of power as chief opposition leader back in Greece, hell-bent on bringing “change.” At caucuses and fund-raisers in hard-core Greek-American communities I would blithely reel off the party’s triple objectives: “National Independence,” “Popular Rule”, and “Socialist Transformation.”

One particular location to which I was obliged to return to time and again was Crystal Palace in Astoria, Queens. The Crystal Palace was the prime location for thousands of Greek-American events over the past two to three decades: political rallies, wedding receptions, dances, baptisms, a Coppolian ethnic-American setting of sheer kitsch. Much later I realized that there once existed a real Crystal Palace, built over a hundred and fifty years ago in England, “the crystal edifice that can never be destroyed” as Dostoyevsky puts in the Underground Man. Though I am no longer enmeshed in that particular strain of ethnic America called Astoria (and though Astoria has now lost much of its Greekness), back then I culled a small bit of satisfaction from my secret knowledge of this indirect link to the Russian writer.

.***

By the age of twenty-nine I acquired yet another language. A Ph.D. in economics taught me everything there was to know about transcendental logarithmic cost functions, variance covariance matrices and three stage least squares estimators. Except for my first years in Greece, I hadn’t really spent much there, besides summers and election campaigns. With studies completed my deferment expired and in the mid eighties I returned for my military service, exactly a week after defending my doctorate in one of those movie-perfect ivy league campuses. I could have relied on my American citizenship to avoid military service altogether, but such an act would have been highly unpatriotic and second, I actually liked the idea of wearing a uniform and carrying a gun and not reading yet another economics article. There was also this: I imagined bumping into an officer who had arrested my father the night of the coup, the same one who had pointed a machine gun at my face. The thought excited me. I am sorry to report that such a meeting never occurred and that the extreme right-wing officers saluted me as I did them. There was also the added weight that my father was not only prime minister, but minister of defense. Their former enemy was no their boss.

That’s how I found myself on the island of Lemnos, in Northern Greece, inducted into the Greek Air Force. The island, the home of Poseidon, was honed of jagged volcanic rock that jutted up into the sky like broken teeth. The old women living inland looked like ghosts from the medieval age and would draw their when strangers like me passed by. Lobster, perch, bream and octopus were as plentiful as fresh bread and olive oil, and just as cheap. Thanks to Melina Mercouri, Minister of Culture, the old Venetian castle in the main town was lit up at night and from the tiny window of my barracks, it seemed to float in the sky like a fantastical spaceship.

The barracks themselves were full of raw eighteen year olds who spoke with distinct regional accents. I immediately felt like an intruder, a jokester, a false twin who would soon be discovered to be an American pretending to be the Prime Minister’s son. As the son of the highly nationalistic leader, I was supposed to be the automatic expert on all matters Greek, to know the Heroes of the Revolution, to know which minister served what post and what year, and worst of all, to make no grammatical mistakes on all the documents for which, as chief accountant for the base, I was now responsible.

Yet for all the pressure, there was one tremendous benefit for a word-infected person like me: Army slang. Greek army slang.  “With someone else’s ass it’s easy to pretend your gay,” I heard one soldier say after the commander ordered him to clean the latrines for a second time. Another soldier who stubbed his toe shouted in the middle of the night: “Screw the donkey that ate Christ’s palm fronds on the road to Nazareth!” If you dropped your rifle you would most likely think of God and shout “Screw the Virgin Mary’s Ear!” This was a reference to Immaculate Conception. I recalled hearing somewhere that certain Fathers of the Church once held that such a conception had occurred via the good Mary’s auricular orifice.

Not that the soldiers had no sense of their ancient heritage. For the changing of the guard our passwords were as follows:

Halt! Who goes!

Hercules!

Achilles!

Patroclus!

These were things the Turks, the enemy about fifty kilometers away, were supposed to have no idea about and would never answer properly.

My greatest fear at the time was to be called up in front of the thousand or so soldiers before lights out to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Because of all the back and forth between countries, I had missed the teaching of it in either language and for the life of me couldn’t remember it. Each night, standing in line with the rest of the soldiers, the commander would call out a name at random and ask the specified “grunt” to come recite the prayer. While waiting for the name to be called, I would try to remember the prayer, filling in the empty Greek parts with what I remembered in English, then translating it back into Greek. But this was a puzzle not done under pressure, next to a thousand breathing bodies. Fortunately the stars were not once in disorder. My name was never called.

***

All this was a rich linguistic pillow in which to sleep at night. When I finally decided to write, in English of course, I realized that the friction of the two languages which had caused my such anxiety had great value. I could convert the trivial cliché of one language into the metaphorically rich of the other. A clever person is an “eagle’s talon,” a tall man is a “Cypress-lad,” a piano is “tooth-mattress,” the earth is an “ant-sphere,” a boy’s erect penis is a “fakir’s flute.” “Never scowl at the lowest steps,” a saying goes, “since you need them to get to the palace.”

I discovered rhyming couplets from the island of Crete which I tried to translate:

Others shrivel up from the times, the wars and years

but me, I shrivel up with the pains and the fears.

The wind beats my clothes and the sun eats my knives

and a small little love eats up my insides

There was gold then in them thar  hills. “I can hear the smell,” a village woman once told me when the wind brought with it bits of the sea. I was shocked by the confounding of  the senses. She had just expressed what philosophers call “synaesthesia”, where one sense “leaks into” the other. (Ah, there’s that unexpected four letter word coming back at me). I came across a more literary example of a synesthete in Nabokov’s autobiography Speak Memory in which he tells of seeing colors when he hears the alphabet pronounced – a trait he refers to as “colored hearing” oraudition colorée in French which, I guess, sounds more sophisticated.

***

My Greek grandmother, Sophia Mineiko Papandreou, half-Greek and half-Polish, offered me a name of someone she once knew, a little girl named Eulaliah. The prefix ef, meaning good, is joined with the word lalia, meaning speech. It sounded the name of a Faulkner character. I did actually meet a Eulalia, on the island of Syros, with its Catholic and Orthodox churches competing for space in the crowded architecture of the city. I was presenting my first book A Crowded Heart, written in English but translated into Greek. A white-haired actor who was known for his Oedipus had been chosen to read a section from my book. His training caused him to shout paragraphs at the top of his voice, drag vowels, exaggerate questions, accentuate the full stops with anger, and turn a lowly bit of dialogue into high drama. Once the applause subsided, an applause which rivaled his efforts, he took a seat next to me. While others continued to speak about my book – the mayor, a deputy from my father’s party, a high-school teacher with two books of poetry under his belt, and god knows how many others, he struck up a loud conversation with me –  as if we weren’t sitting in full view of the public. I kept hunching down in the hope that this obvious body language would induce him to lower his voice but to no avail. Suddenly he squeezed my thigh excitedly. “See that girl there, over there, with the dark hair and those eyes? You see her? She once had a speech impediment but I corrected it with four years of lessons in orthophony(proper enunciation). Take one guess what her name is.” That’s how I met the only Eulaliah I have ever known. I even got the chance to sign her name in my book – which I did with a calligraphic flourish. She was indeed a tall, dark-haired beauty and she did indeed speak with perfect diction, the way a Eulaliah should, but nope I never saw her again.

Lalia in Greek means voice or language or tongue.  In the Swedish the word for Speak is Tala. Tala svensk? In Danish Lalle is a drunken person’s babble. When I started to learn some Spanish I thought I heard an echo of Lalia in Habla with that la at the end of it. From a Brazilian acquaintance I heard Fala for talk. Think Parler. Or parlance.

One summer, back in Greece between college years, I visited the pine-filled island of Skiathos. A fisherman took me to his favorite beach – Lalaria. Why is it called Lalaria I asked? He had an answer – when doesn’t a Greek?  “You see those rocks there?” He pointed to large round stones like ostrich eggs that formed the beach. “When the sea hits those stones they talk. La la. Close your eyes and listen.”

I think all members of my family have been partly wounded by language: Brother George, in the words of his detractors, “is our first Minister of Foreign Affairs who actually speaks a secondlanguage – Greek.” My mother doesn’t “do” television interviews because she is worried she will place a feminine pronoun to a masculine noun and this, after leading the Greek woman’s movement for decades. My sister has escaped to Canada and her little son now speaks fluent “Canadian.” For a long time, my younger brother Andreas prepared his economics classes at the university down to the last word, so that he didn’t make any grammatical mistakes. My father, burdened with the suspicion that he was too American after twenty years in the States, commanded both languages fluently. Ironically enough he was perhaps the only member who never worried that the “mistake bird” of language would sit on his shoulder.

I now treasure the full-time split. English acts as a passport into unexplored territory, the terrain of my fictional Greece, the Greece of my memory, the Greece of my childhood.

A week on Zakynthos

The night I arrived on the island of Zakynthos for Easter the Hale-Bopp comet was still visible, racing rapidly away from earth. Just the day before, I was told, great winds had carried sands from Northern Africa to Greece and the particles lent the nightsky an eerie yellow glow.

I stayed in the small mountain village of Aghious Pantes (All-Saints) about twenty kilometres inland. My hosts were farmers, an extended family complete with grandparents, parents and four children, aged three to twelve. The first morning (and every morning after that) I was woken by the rough cackle of cloistered chickens, the barking of hunting dogs and the occasional rifle shot. On this island of national poets, famous playwrights and heroic revolutionaries, Easter and hunting season had arrived at the same time.

The valley below the village was a palette of greens – the silver green of olive, the harsh green of cypress and the yellowy-green of weeping willow. The bountiful rains had given life to countless wildflowers and countless colors: daisies, bugles and all sorts of bristling thistles bent to the winds like god was blessing them.

The natural world seemed even more magical because of grandmother Aphroditi’s food. Her brick-oven saturated all meals with a wonderful burnt-wood flavour and at night when the stars joined our company, we sipped glass after glass of home-made retsina.

The youngest child, Marinos, quizzed all visiting relatives about their precise location in the family tree. Only once he knew that so-and-so was a third cousin twice removed or that this visitor was the second daughter of an aunt’s husband’s brother, then and then alone were we adults free to go one with our discussion.

Marinos called me Nikolaki as if he were the grown-up and I were the child. Once he had figured out my geneological chart (all grandparents gone, one parent surviving), he examined my head with care and wondered why, since my temples were greying, I wasn’t already dead. His grandfather — whose head was completely white — would live only if his hair turned black again.

For a few hundred drachmas I bought four blocks of fitoura – seminola fried in oil and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, something like fritters in the American south. In return for this meagre gift each child recited a poem for me – Aphroditi recited Solomos, Adamantini recited Kalvos, Marinos recited a poem that began “I’m a Greek,” and Ioannis, the eldest, sang the victory song for the Olympiakos basketball team.

We visited the family’s orange grove down in the valley. Using a long bamboo stick we sent the oranges to the ground and soon were wiping the blood-red juice from our hands and chins with blades of grass.

In the afternoon we drove a small tractor through the vineyards and tried our hand at clearing the grass with a scythe. The wild grass had grown unnaturally high from the unnatural rains and the piles of slack blades quickly reached our waists.

We came upon the remains of a mansion built back when Zakynthos had its counts, nobles, and serfs, all the accoutrements of the Italian state to which it had once belonged. The wall was of a faded clay colour. A window hung slovenly from rusted hinges and weeds pushed through cracks in the mortar. We collected giant lilies and purple-red vetches (awful name that, for such a lovely wildflower) and the girls made them into bouquets. Marinos made sure I didn’t step in any of the squat lumps of cow manure hidden inside the tall grass. The children ignored a sudden flight of ducks the way we ignore traffic. Back on the asphalt, scattered buckshot crunched beneath our feet.

While the two girls played patty-cake, Ioannis, Marinos’ twelve year old brother, listed some Zakynthean nicknames for me: Paparas, (oil-soaked bread), Katsikolos (goat-buttocks),Tzitzikas (cicada), Kontorasis (short-sighted), Klanieras (farter), Kapros (boar), and Memes (tits). On an island where over five hundred people might share the same surname, nicknames are the only way to avoid confusion. My host family’s nickname was Koloneos, taken from the name of the Italian gold coins which they had once owned in abundance.

Easter Friday the Bishop of Zakynthos blessed the four points of the horizon – a ceremony known as “Blessing the Universe.” That night we attended mass in the church of Aghious Pantes. A small wooden figure of Christ lay beneath glass, garlanded by lilies, and a vocally challenged choir boy outdid himself in the number of off-key notes he could belt out per hymnal.

Easter Sunday Marinos asked me if, when I died, I would wait for him at the “entrance.” He asked me why my father died last year. Was his hair grey? Had he lost his voice? When his grandfather thundered, “Marinos, enough!” Marinos clapped his hands and shouted: “Enough already, enough! No more talk of white hair and people who aren’t at the table!”

I left Zakynthos aboard the Ionis, carrying a jug of wine, four kilos of baby goat and a branch of rosemary to cook it with. It was twilight, the best time to see the comet, and I searched the skies for traces of its tail. Only with the help of the captain’s binoculars did the comet become visible, but just barely. As the mountains of Zakynthos grew darker and more distant, I sensed that a certain way of living was also fading fast.

Census Day in Greece

Sunday, March 18, 2001

Nick Papandreou

1

Today is the decennial census. At my living room table, below the picture of Melina Mercouri, sits the census-taker. He is a young man, tired, sleepy, perhaps uncertain why he and thousands of others took on the task. “Didn’t want to start too early,” he told me when I asked if he would finish his allotment before the sun went down. “Otherwise everybody would throw lemon rinds at us.”

I informed him of the facts: born in America, moved to Greece in 1994 to write and, (check two reasons) to re-join my family. No, I am no longer a Greek abroad, a homogene, as they are called. Size of my apartment – 140 square meters, five rooms in all, including WC. Level of educational attainment, job, et cetera.

My neighbor, Tasos Bouras, lives in a two-room shack in the back yard, under the fig tree and grape vine. He told the census-taker to write, under Profession: Maker of Dreams. On the outside wall of his shack he has hung a butterfly made from hundreds of painted eagle feathers. Tasos believes I will write my truly great work only once I’m sixty. It will take years to be rid of the habits of politics.

2

Today, the Greek government is inaugurating the supermodern Attica Highway. It’s nearly complete. What’s missing are the “off” and “on” ramps. Once you’re on the highway, you can’t get off except when you reach the airport. When it’s complete our bit of property in Corinth will be less than an hour away.

Corinth is a place never claimed by Turkey. It does not belong to any of the so-called “disputed” areas.

Sometimes I think that Greece actually needs Turkey. It’s a Cavafy sort of thing. Waiting for the Barbarian and all. Greece also needs the Single Currency. The Attica Highway. The census. Greece is populated by Greeks, so the Greeks will tell you. Who today is a Greek?

A Greek is someone who is born in Greece.

A Greek is someone who speaks Greek, even if he is Albanian, Serbian, or Georgian.

A Greek is someone who is Greek orthodox and was born in Alexandria Egypt or Alexandria, Virginia.

Maybe even in Schenectady, New York, or Kensington, London.

Or in Yemen, Kenya, the Congo, Mozambique.

To get to Corinth you have to drive by the shipyard town of Elefsina. Smoke stacks, cement factories, and hundreds and hundreds of ships make up this town. A homeless old man with a grizzled face named Pharmakis lived there. For a hat he wore his coat. You could find him in the parks, hanging around sites under construction, or along the shore, searching for ancient stones. When he found them, he would dust them with a small brush. The smaller pieces he carted to the museum yard. He is the keeper of the stones. When archeological sites were covered up by cement, he wore a black armband for weeks.

When he died, the few locals who attended his funeral called him “a true Greek.”

3

A friend of mine was buried this very morning, on census day. His epitaph says: “Here lies Andonis Tzoanakis, a man who believed in the Dream, a socialist, a true Greek.”

Today, I received the following news-flash from the Greek-American lobby, over the internet:

Come celebrate Greek Independence Day with all of your friends at DCs largest nightclub venue “The Spot.”  Straight from New York, The MYLOS ALL-STAR BAND, will provide you with the best live Greek music all night long.  Also featuring the sounds of NY legendary Greek D.J. SAVAS (Radio Seismos, World-NY) for a night of the best music from Greece! BALTIMORE GREEKS, busses will be leaving from Michaels Steak and Lobster House, to The Spot, 932 F Street, NW Washington DC.

I was once an honorary Baltimore Greek, since I used to live next door, in Washington, DC, where I worked at the World Bank. Lambis Platsis, a round-faced, happy computer scientist ran a restaurant called “Towson Pizza.” I was best man at his marriage. He decided to use his “American training” for the socialist cause. He is now head of informatics for the municipality of the island of Rhodes, serving the digital needs of the island citizenry.

His brother never claimed he was a socialist. He opened up a store in the heart of Rhodes called AMERICAN DONUTS. When NATO bombed Serbia, someone tore down the sign and broke the windows. “I’m a Greek-American,” he told me over donuts and coffee, when I visited Rhodes to take part in a Greek-Turkish women’s meeting my mother had organized. “I don’t believe in politics. But here you are.” He pointed to the broken sign.

4

My brother’s political star is rising. He is Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs. His detractors accuse him of being an American, unable to understand history. He was born in the States. One good thing, they admit, is that he speaks their language.

During the war in the Balkans, his advisor, who was born in Tanzania, (now married to a girl from Oxford, Mississippi), coordinated the Greek war relief effort.

I remember how with Andonis we raced around Athens at night, the dark pressing against our car window, popping out to paste up political posters, before the socialist government came to power. I had met him when the dream was still raw, in 1974, when I was seventeen and eager. Back then Andonis wanted me to be a full-time citizen, meaning fully active in “the cause.” Instead, I drifted away. I took up observing and writing. I had failed him. I wasn’t going out to do battle any more. No more posters, no more clashes with the “organs of the state,” no more gatherings with villagers on mountainsides to discuss the transformation of society under the protection of thick-smelling pine. Then again, those meetings had ended a decade ago. Maybe it was the right time to be a writer, now the dream had expired.

5

My brother George went to Thrace for his census, in a show of solidarity with the Greeks living close to the war-torn Balkans. His advisor from Tanzania was unable to register. He had to be in Skopje, because of the attacks of the America-backed Albanian “freedom-fighters” along the borders of Kosovo.

A hundred thousand Muslims live in Thrace, next to Turkey. Some of them call Turkey their home. None of them want to live there, however. They will be asked the relevant questions when the census takers knock on their doors.

In Greece, we’re not supposed to call the small state around the city of Skopje by the name Macedonia. That’s unpatriotic. Macedonia is Greek, the bumper-stickers say. So we call it Skopje or FYROM – as in Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. If the country implodes under the weight of the Albanian population and the terrorist Albanian “freedom-fighters,” how will we refer to it? The Former Former Republic of Macedonia?

Nearly a million Albanians come and go across the border each year. At least five hundred thousand have taken up permanent residence in Athens, Corinth, Salonika, in mountain villages abandoned by Greeks during the last thirty years, in islands like Crete, Rhodes and Amorgos.

The census will tell us how many Greeks we are. It will be unable to measure the intensity of our Greekness.

6

Strands of Greek culture seem to be getting stronger even as globalization pushes deeper. Every day, on Piraeus Street, a few kilometers south of the Andreas Papandreou Foundation, (I am responsible for the audio-visual department which means I listen to speeches by my father, when the dream was being articulated) the large building named Kortsopon, which means maiden in the Pontian dialect, becomes a danceteria, hosting folk-bands from around Greece, usually from the North. A man named Zlatanis sometimes shows up to play brass instruments. He looks sad. He has a droopy mustache. The average age of those dancing is less than thirty. Those ages used to dance only to American music. Black continues to be the favorite color. Black, tight jeans, tight T-shirts. They dance in large sweeping circles, shaking their shoulders, kicking out their legs like they were from Ireland. Like they were auditioning for a spot with the Lord of Dance.

In the cultural battle against globalization, a Greek dance is far more effective than the most fiery speech, then the most impassioned argument.

7

The census will record the movement away from the countryside and into the cities. Like my friend Thanasis, who came to Athens from a village in Pyrgos. “What this country needs,” he tells me when I ride on his motorcycle, “is a revolution. Burn the Mercedes, BMWs, burn down all those new socialist villas.”

8

Bulgarians entering Greece no longer require visas. Their socialism is nothing like what Andonis dreamt about.

9

Two friends of mine have started a land-mine removal company. They’re de-mining Bosnia-Herzegovina using unemployed former Serbian military men. They have been asked to de-mine the mountains of Grammos, where the last great battle of the Greek Civil War occurred, in 1949. They have been invited to Lebanon, and have asked me to come along. I love Lebanon. It’s almost Greek. It looks Greek.

10

Andonis carried a certain sadness about his person, though he seemed like the happiest person in the world. Being so close to the end, he said, really makes everything shine – the streets, this very tavern, the smell of grilled lamb. He reminded me of Dean Martin, with that twinkle in his eyes, a drink in his hand and an easy way about him. The taverna, in a working class district that had benefited greatly from the socialist government, was in the open. The air smelled of jasmine. The wine flowed – he drank most of it. He was fifteen years older than me, had spent most of his life on ships. He had just read my first book. I had come close to capturing “the dream”, he said, the dream of Greece, the dream he’d been searching for since he could remember. “Well, at least we managed to build a small part of that dream,” he said.

11

The census takers are ordered to stop at any building structure or site where people dwell. This includes the Gypsy tent camps.

Serb, Croat, and Muslim kids, mainly orphans, attend camps in Greece each summer, all costs paid for by the local municipalities. This is a socialist kind of thing to do.

The Kurdish refugees living in the port city of Lavrion have little choice. Their census will not be taken. They are considered transitory migrants, something like Monarch butterflies. “They are refugees, like my parents were,” Andonis said.

12

Tuesday I am going to a restaurant called Left-Right with Nikos Sifounakis, Minister of the Aegean, next to the Multi-Culti. The Minister is a tall, dark-faced man with sensuous lips and thick black hair. He was born in Rethymno, Crete. He studied Architecture in Venice.

He has recently legislated power away from the traditional centers and passed it into the hands of “true architects,” the ones who still have the vision of a better Greece, the ones who wish to preserve the “architectural integrity” of the Aegean villages.

In his company I notice things. The paint beneath an old customs building in Nisiros. The design of the aviaries in Sifnos; the thickness of a wooden door.

13

I don’t stare at Andonis’ face for long. I don’t want to notice things. Neither do I bend down to kiss him in his waxen repose. I prefer to remember him as I had last seen him, at the tavern, with a smile on his handsome tanned face, thick white hair, darting blue eyes, a glass of retsina in hand, his easy laugh. People leave his funeral rather quickly. They want to be at home when the census-taker knocks on their door, to provide solid proof of their existence.

14

The day after the beginning of the Millennium, I drove out past Sounion and gave a whole bunch of my clothes to the Kurds living in the port city of Lavrion. From the apartments they flew flags with the communist party emblem. There were also many pictures of Ocalan, the Kurdish PKK leader now in the jail in Turkey, the same jails that Trotsky once sat in decades ago. The Turks want to execute Ocalan. They also want to be part of the EC. They aren’t sure whether to go East or West.

The recently arrived Russian mafia drive mainly Mercedes. They live primarily in Glyfada. That’s where the Americans used to live when the Sixth Fleet was docked here.

15

Only small boats dock on the island of Tilos, which I visited with Nikos Sifounakis, the Minister of the Aegean. As an economist by training, and as an author unable to live off writing alone, I have been “tasked” to follow the deregulation of the Aegean seas. Come full-blown deregulation, small islands like Tilos and Nisiros, islands with little traffic, will not be profitable enough to merit stops en-route to larger islands. As if the Aegean winds weren’t enough to isolate them.

On Tilos the Minister and I are rushed around the island by the mayor-doctor, a loose, thin man in his late forties with unkempt hair. He tests the hearts of all islanders once a year. He sends sonograms to heart specialists in Athens through the internet. Nobody has died of a heart attack since he came to the island seventeen years ago. Inspired by the socialist call for decentralization, he abandoned Athens in 1982 to “serve the forgotten and ignored.”

On a lush hill, next to an overgrown chestnut tree, the mayor pulls out handfuls of sage, rosemary, thyme, and something that smelled like cilantro. “This island is a living pharmacy. I have become something of a believer in alternative medicine.”

Sifounakis takes pictures of illegally built structures, and will call out the dogs when he returns to Athens. Walking through the old part of town, he draws in his breath. He stares at the stone arch of an old entrance. “Beautiful,” he whispers, and passes his hand along the stone. “Look how they carved it.” I think he wants to kneel.

In Ethiopia my brother’s advisor from Tanzania, Alex, once saw a shipment of food, dropped from the air, squash about ten kids who wanted to get to it first. Hunger got the better of their judgment. Land-mines do the rest. Alex wants to send my de-mining friends to Ethiopia. “You wouldn’t believe how many kids are killed each day,” he tells me.

My nephew, still a kid, attended a camp for Palestinian and Israeli children called Seeds of Peace, in Maine. His father, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, wanted him to understand the world before he got into it. He is now learning Norwegian, because Norway, he says, is the closest to thing to Socialism in the living world. When my nephew says that, his eyes have that certain gleam, the same one that lit up Andonis’ when he spoke about the future.

Picking olives with me on our small plot of land in Corinth last November were five Greeks and three Albanians. When I saw one Albanian cross himself I asked him if he was Christian. “Yes,” he said, “and I am your brother. We are Greeks.” A Greek woman working the tree kept muttering under breath, “I hate Albanians. I hate Muslims. They should go back to Albania. They are pretending to be Greek. They don’t speak Greek, not really.”

16

As ship captain, Andonis traveled the world. In Shanghai, he dropped a pack of cigarettes onto a small wooden boat parked next to him. An old wizened fisherman picked up the pack, examined it, yelped, then burned the whole pack disdainfully in front of Andonis’s very eyes. To top it off, he wiped the spot where the box had landed – over and over – “to rid his deck of all foreign impurities,” according to Andonis.

My favorite subway stop in all of the world is the one at Thisio. It is an open air stop. When you emerge from the old train and look up, there it is: the Acropolis. Nothing but monument.

It was at that very subway stop a few months ago that a man standing across the train rails called to me: “Niko! Niko!” I pretended not to hear him. For all I knew he could have been calling another person with my name. “No, you, yes you, you Niko! Niko Papandreou!” He was slightly older than me, dressed in work clothes, with dirty-blonde hair and the distinctive small face and narrow eyes of someone from the area of Northern Peloponnesus.

“I’m from Patras,” he shouted, confirming my prejudice. “How old are you Niko? Forty-three right? You’re exactly forty-three, no?” I nodded, still not saying a word. “It’s time you enter politics. You’re father was forty-three when he entered politics too!” An old woman in black came up to me and brought a finger to her gray forehead. “You see,” she said, “you have no choice.”

Greece is a country of fractals. Look at its jagged coast, its endless turns and curves. The closer you look, the more cragged it appears. Can the coast line be represented mathematically? What would be the mathematical equation expressing Greekness? An integral with an imaginary solution?

Christie’s New York auctioned off a book by Archimedes for approximately $2 million. Rumor had it that Bill Gates bought it, besting the Greek government’s offer by $250,000, plus tax and commission.

Greece’s national poet, Dionysios Solomos, spoke Italian better than Greek. He paid someone to teach him a new Greek word each day.

Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis. Vangelis.

Souvlaki, gyro, moussaka.

Holland took Greece to the European court. Feta cheese is a generic term, it claimed, hence not patentable. They don’t want Greece to be able to label its feta as “Greek” feta. Greece blew the legal arguments and lost. Thanks to the Dutch, you don’t know where your feta is from.

When the Germans asked a Greek to lower the Greek flag over the Acropolis and raise the Swastika, he lowered the Greek flag as ordered, then wrapped himself in it and jumped off the Parthenon. He died in the stones below. So goes the national myth.

The restoration of the Acropolis is run by an architectural genius named Kores. He has made miniature models of the cranes, pulleys, and other construction machinery used by the ancients to build the Acropolis. His home looks like a Lego factory. Even today’s most sophisticated laser technology can’t slice marble as closely – to the thousandth – as did the ancients. When Kores took apart the ancient columns, the workers found graffiti carved into the faces of the marble drums. “Theocles was here.”

My grandfather raised the flag over the Acropolis when the Germans left Greece. The son of a priest, he had a flair for aphorisms: “The people have deposed many a king, but never has a king deposed the people,” he used to say in the sixties, when he was doing battle against Constantine, the twenty-one year old monarch.

When a Greek says “I am Greek,” and he is speaking to a foreigner, he means it with pride. If he’s speaking to one of his own, he uses it as an excuse.

In Greek the word Greek is Hellene.

Andonis and I watched a student leader named Gabriel on television that last night of ours together. Gabriel is the heart of a high school movement that momentarily threatened to take down the socialist government. His hair is long, his face is smooth, he has thick eyebrows and a certain nonchalance that makes him attractive. He keeps his hands folded in front of him and he speaks without too much excess motion, unlike so many others. He is protesting the introduction of multiple-choice testing in final exams. “Multiple-choice is a sign of the penetration of capitalist education. We are not automatons, built for the global work-place.”

Many Greeks consider themselves poets. This might have to do with how easy it is to make words rhyme. Beginning poets send me their stuff with titles like “Lonely.” “Loneliness.” “Alone.”

When Caucescu visited my father in 1982, accepting an invitation on the part of the previous administration, he was confronted with a rare dilemma. Lying on the steps leading to my father’s home was Leon, a fifteen year-old mutt known mainly for his active laziness. He also had a skin rash and would bark loudly if touched. My father loved the dog to no end. His security people knew they were not to disturb the dog, under any circumstance.

One of Caucescu’s bodyguards tried to kick the beast off the stairs. He was pinned back by four Greeks almost before he lifted his foot. An altercation ensued. The Greeks refused to move the dog. Caucescu, who had brought with him two ambulances, three doctors and two food-tasters, and who had booked two floors of the Grande Bretagne to make sure nobody else was nearby, was now forced to step over the dog. The dog was accorded more respect than he’d ever shown to his own countrymen. At lunch his son, Nicolai, rolled bread into little balls and flicked them at the Rumanian ambassador.

On the way back from Tilos, a man in a shiny lame suit came up to me. “You’re Nikos, no? You’re the writer, no?” He put out his hand. “Please come see me! I have lots of stories for you!” He was a ship-captain being taken to court for the illegal transportation of Kurds from Turkey into the Greek islands.

In Porto Heli, a summer resort where my girlfriend’s from, the local women have formed an association to win their husbands back from the imported females that dance at the Babylon Club. “Women against Imports,” they had thought of calling it, until one of them pointed out that it sounded too much like an anti-globalization movement, and they weren’t against that, were they? Their association remained untitled. Titled or not, they have succeeded in getting a few husbands back.

A slave, recently freed, inspired by the Greek revolution, crossed the Atlantic in the 1820s to fight on the Greek side against the Turks. He ended up being a cook for a platoon of Greek revolutionaries. I can just imagine the Greeks waking to the smell of home-fries, chitlins and a song from the deep south. The cook and a few other of his compatriots who fought in Greece are honored with a memorial in Athens.

In an old village square on the island of Astipalaia, a local builder built an enormous memorial plaque during the dictatorship, but there are no names and there is no war memorialized because the builder had used the memorial as an excuse to filch government funds. The local administration is keeping it intact. At some point, they say, they will have a reason to add new names.

A memorial waiting for a memory.

The Turks no longer refer to the ancient ruins as Greek ruins, but as belonging to the Ionian Civilization. They do not want to remind tourists of who was there first. There are some Albanians who want a decent chunk of Northern Greece. A few Slavo-Macedonians want a chunk of Thessaloniki.

I fear the empty memorial plaque in Astypalaia will be put to use all too soon.

Over five hundred people attended Andonis’ funeral in the church of Nea Erithrea. Erithrea is the name of a Greek city in Asia Minor that was “vanished” after the exchange of populations in 1923. The Greeks who left Turkey for Greece and the Turks who left Greece for Turkey are all called “exchangeables.”

The Turks have lots of battle experience – from fighting the Kurds. Lots of Turkish soldiers know what it is like to pull the trigger and kill. No Greek soldiers have that kind of knowledge. The first time in battle the Greeks will hesitate to pull the trigger. Maybe that’s a good thing.

News-flash from the Greek-American lobby:

Again we expect the United States Senate to pass, for the 16^th year in row, a resolution commemorating March 25 as “Greek Independence Day — A National Celebration of Greek and American Democracy.” As he has in all previous years, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) introduced this legislation in the U.S. Senate and is spearheading efforts for its adoption.

American-style self-help programs in Greece barely exist. Therapy is an insult to manhood. But a recent song by the great Parios has introduced a rather shocking idea that sounds rather like a twelve-step program:

I will be good to myself

and send myself a letter

telling myself “I Love You.”

The Peloponnesus Beauty Fair was held not far from Corinth so, after that day of olive-picking, I decided to drop in. Andonis would have approved. He liked to look at beautiful women, and if the occasion arose, he would take advantage of whatever was offered him. He was a working-class socialist. He believed in the future, but he also believed in the present.

In person I saw the slightly anorexic Miss Star. The sixteen year old Miss Young looked younger than her age. Miss Former Peloponnesus had long chestnut hair and thick legs. Miss Playmate 2001 didn’t show and the crowd booed at her absence. Miss Aegean, from the island of Kos, was the emcee for the afternoon. She looked like she’d just stepped out of the shimmering blue sea. Her hair glistened and her blue-white swim-suit was see-through, exposing large dark nipples. Kos! Kos! shouted the crowd.

Kemal Attaturk, Turkey’s hero, the father of their nation, was born in Greece. It is not enough to be born in Greece to be a Greek.

I wish Andonis had made it to census day, had made in into this century, so I could see his Dean Martin smile once more, so we could sit at the tavern and inhale the jasmine. “Jasmine is the smell of socialism,” he once told me.

Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt.

My brother George, registered in Sapphes, Thrace.

Lambis Platsis in Rhodes.

Nikos Sifounakis on the island of Lemnos.

Me, in Athens.

The census, the first of the millennium, will tell us how many we are.

It won’t tell us who we are.

That’s for us to figure out.

Imagined Countries

by

Nick Papandreou

Athens Greece

As a bilingual hyphenated American writer now living in Greece, I am constantly comparing cultures. I fear I can see only with a double vision. What would they think of this back home, I hear myself saying half the time, when I encounter something extremely Greek. Prime time television Saturday night is mainly taken up with a dance-and-song fest. Singers, actors, politicians, and the emcee get together to drink, eat and dance in front of a live Greek band. On one of the shows, a boy who must be no older than fourteen serves the food, plays the bouzouki and occasionally dances.

My otherwise thoroughly modern Greek girlfriend insisted, when we were breaking up, on taking me to church in the poor area of Elefsina, south of Athens, to meet a special priest who uses the “alternative bible” to exorcise the evil eye that had been cast upon my person and so caused me to leave her. Four or five gypsies hesitated before getting on the brand-new escalator in the shiny new subway, built in time for the 2004 summer Olympics. I realized suddenly they were adults who’d never seen an escalator before. Worried that their feet might get caught in the metal teeth, they way I used to worry when I was a kid, they jumped onto it from a distance, then gathered strength to jump off at the end. Two of them took the stairs, sticking to tradition. None of this activity made the smallest impact on the non-hyphenated Greeks going up and down the escalator, the so-called Greek-Greeks who found nothing of value in the scene.

I am exposed to such Kulture Klashes every day. Let me offer a more literary example. Through Amazon dot com, my gateway to the States, I recently ordered a book by a relatively well-known author named Charles Baxter. When I received the cardboard box, book inside wrapped with inflated plastic, I considered his last name: “Baxter.” A solid sounding name with hints of a hardware-like background and hours spent with the boys swigging beer and watching Monday night football, the equivalent of Wednesday night soccer in Greece. The picture on the backsleeve shows him in the typical American writers’ pose: no suit and tie, no obvious effort to look neat. The picture itself appears as if it was taken by his wife with a cheap throw-away camera. And not surprisingly, when I strained to read the sidebar credit, I found the name Martha Baxter, probably the author’s wife or daughter. Something democratic and low-cost about the backsleeve production, another indication of causal class-free America. Greek books rarely include the author’s picture and when they do there is certainly no photographer’s accreditation.

Baxter’s sleeves are partly rolled up, a beard hides his chin, his hair is uncombed, and behind him, in the distance, you can make out a mountain range. Thoreau would be delighted. Already then, from the very book-cover itself, my generalized notions of America have been reinforced. The author as the loner, somewhere in a log cabin churning out his masterpiece. The Greek male author is more likely to be smoking in a dinky café in the heart of the city, speaking loudly to anyone willing to listen about the awful state of Greek literature and cultivates the raffish bohemian look, you know the one — the tortured artist who is always two days behind on his shave.

Baxter is in many ways a great writer. He is capable of depicting the strange silences and stiff gestures that are part of white American friendship. He has dialogue and inflection down so well that when I read his work I feel like I’ve been transported across the Atlantic. He captures the culture from within the culture, no mean feat, without reference to other cultures. That is why reading him in Greece is such a jolting experience. Though he lives in America, he also “imagines” America.

I read part of Baxter while on the old subway line that runs between Kifissia (the equivalent say of Great Neck, Long Island) and Omonia, (the equivalent of New York’s 42nd Street). My mental space was Baxter’s America; my physical space was as Greek as Greek could be. The old subway line is primarily made up of working class people. A young gypsy boy, no older than eight or nine, entered the car with an instrument called a baglama, which is like a miniature guitar. In a tremendously loud voice he sang that he didn’t have a “dime” for a “souvlaki” or a “joint.” A young man with his right arm missing had hung a sign from his neck saying he was Serbian, a sure drawing card in Greece, and that he’d been injured in the wars in Yugoslavia; a well-dressed woman in her fifties, looking like a high-school marm, sang a Bulgarian folk song. Refugee overload means their cups pretty much stay empty.

Between songs and plaints, I managed to complete a story called Reincarnation. The story ends when a man cries in front of another man at a dinner party among friends. The other man touches one cheek and so has the benefit of actually feeling the tears. Perhaps this is an image of communion or perhaps it is the ultimate act of male bonding. The cause of the crying is not abundantly clear, and for our purposes, not important. The point is not that the man is crying, it is that his friend is sensitive enough to appreciate his pain.

To end a story with a man crying in silence after a dinner party and then for another male to touch his tears, and to hold this up as the defining moment in the story – what literature professors sometimes call the epiphany – is all fine and well and quite moving, in a subtle understated way. But I immediately wonder at the cultural connotations. Would it work for a Greek reader? And more to the point, would it work in a Greek setting where men of all classes hug and kiss and cry during a political rally or a soccer games? Where you can’t say goodbye without kissing each shaveable cheek?

When I arrived at Omonia Square and walked into the sun, surrounded by dozens of Albanians come to buy their local newspapers, it struck me that it was truly strange to be riding the old subway while reading a modern American short-story from a Michigan writer. Reincarnation would be completely untranslatable, not because of the technical difficulties but because of the freight of culture embedded in the story. Unless you had some sense of America, you’d be in trouble. In the States, relationships and particularly the writing about them has been greatly influenced by both the women’s and so-called men’s movement. I think this fine-tuned awareness concerning the politics of relationships is not part of modern Greek consciousness yet, so the subtlety of Baxter’s “male bonding” epiphany would probably be lost on the modern Greek. And even in the States of twenty years ago the meaning of a story about how men reveal intimacy might have been lost. I mean it took us the better part of three decades to go from Midnight Cowboy to Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Cowboys and on one level the two movies are similar. However the first was a cult movie and you probably wouldn’t invite either of the characters into your living room, while the second made it into the heart of middle (and multiplex) America. That’s where the difference can be charted – American society has become far more mature and highly aware of all sorts of prejudice than ever before.

I walked up Panepistimiou Street and made my way to a Ministry where I had an appointment with a bright young lawyer on the fifth floor. Having just read Baxter, my American side had been properly alerted, which meant that I was embarrassingly polite, it meant I didn’t stare at the women, and that I said sorry and excuse me whenever I bumped into someone, and most of all, I let lots and lots of people get in front of me at the red light. This is a generalization but these are the characteristics that represent the countries of my imagination, these are the ideas that which I must work with or against when I construct my fictional worlds – American or Greek.

The Ministry building was new so because of its modernity, when I rode the elevator I was not jolted out of my Americanness. Then I reached Petros’ office. The “coffee-boy,” a short man in his fifties wearing a white short-sleeve shirt, was arguing about last night’s soccer match with Petros. I had barely entered the office when I was asked my opinion about the Olympiakos soccer team. I disappointed them by saying I had none. Not having grown up in Greece I possess none of the cultural markers, though my Greek is fluent even in its slang. I’m like the German spy who when arrested by the GIs can speak English perfectly but doesn’t know who Mickey Mantle is and thinks that the expression “Pleased as Punch” is the term for a satisfying drink. The coffee-boy took my order for a freshly squeezed orange juice and bowed out. Coffee-boy. I don’t think that word exists in English but I just automatically translated it from Greek. (There is something demeaning about it.) I don’t think in the States we have men in their fifties or sixties whose full-time job is to run up and down office floors taking chump orders. We have “delivery boys” who usually quit after a month.

Before getting down to business I knew we would have to spend at least fifteen minutes to half an hour on other topics. Petros informed me that he was the only male on the floor, except for another one who didn’t count because of his particular sexual proclivities. So, he said, the two of us had free reign.

Three of the women in the legal department, he informed me, were “available” but had not yet gone so far as to cheat on their husbands. It would take an outsider from the ministry, someone like me, he implied, for them to yield. A buxom dark-haired woman dressed in an elegant deep blue came in to drop off some papers. We were introduced. She was a lawyer working on human rights. She spoke very proper Greek and seemed to have gone to all the right schools.

As soon as she left the room, Petros went into excruciating detail about what he wanted to do to her sexually, going so far as to demonstrate a certain position on the desk, only partly reminiscent of what Jack Nicholson does to Jessica Lange in The Postman Only Rings Twice. Suddenly, in the middle of these theatrics, the woman returned, saw Petros in a prone position, turned beet red and hurried out of the office without a further word.

My mother’s feminist training kicked in. I was embarrassed. I wanted to apologize because though I was not the instigator, I had certainly not stopped Petros and this made me an accessory to the crime. I told Petros that in the States his behavior would have gotten him fired for overt sexual harassment. It’s not that some men don’t talk like that about women – it’s that in professional circles they’ve learned to be quite careful about it. I told him about the rather strict rules about teacher-student relations when I was a teaching assistant in the economics department at Princeton.

Petros raised his hands into the air like his team had just scored a goal and shouted, “He’s crazy, he’s crazy! Petros the bald is crazy!”

I stared at him. “Why don’t you go tell the woman you’re sorry.”

“Sorry? About what?”

“About.. you know.”

“Aw, c’mon. They like it!”

“Right.”

“Okay,” he said finally, “let’s go together.”

When we entered the woman’s office, Petros said,

“Have we offended you?”

“What?”

“My friend here thinks I’ve offended you.”

“Oh,” she said, turning slightly red.

“Hasn’t he?” I said.

“No,” she said, finally acknowledging what she had seen. “That’s just the way Petros is. Everybody knows it.”

“You see,” Petros said triumphantly. “This is Greece!” I threw up my hands.

My stereotypes had once again been confirmed.

Returning to another Baxter story on my way back up to Kifissia, (the Greek subway serves to carry us forward in this essay) I found relief in the absence of such Petros-like directness in Baxter’s work. What at first had seemed as castrated dialogue between the men and women of Baxter’s universe now struck me as the apogee of civilized discourse.

I discussed the issue of sexual harassment with a friend of mine who, like me, returned recently to Greece. He used to work in a prestigious D.C. law firm. He e-mailed me the following comment: “Let me assure you that the bantering that went on in my law office in D.C. and the discussions male lawyers had among themselves in the privacy of their offices could get much rowdier than the Greek example of Petros that you gave.” But the point is that the male lawyers in my friend’s law firm dared speak rowdily only in private. My dear Petros, however, had no fear about letting the women in on his doings. There was no fear of reprisal. In today’s corporate America you’d probably face a goodly number of sexual harassment lawsuits and the men have become far more careful. In Greece, the first successful sexual harassment lawsuit was won only three years ago by a woman working in a super-market in the port city of Patras. Things are still way behind in that department, I’m afraid.

Put a Greek in an American setting and you get trouble. Louis, A Greek friend of mine who was teaching “poli sci” at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and who had grown up on one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Aegean (he would boast about how many tourists he had bedded per summer starting from the age of fourteen), was taken to court by one of his students on the charge of sexual harassment. (He was so out of sync with the moral police that when I visited to teach one of his classes he entered the classroom holding hands with two of his students…) He had only kissed her on both cheeks, he argued, because it had been her birthday. “That’s what we do in Greece.” She claimed he had ejaculated in his pants when he kissed her and that this implied an attempt at rape. His main line of defense was not one to go over well with the female judge – he had been with many women and she was not attractive enough to merit harassment, certainly not stunning enough to cause such an ejaculation. “Who does she think she is,” he told the female judge, “Marilyn Monroe?” Since there was no Monica-like proof of such exertions on either his pants or hers, the judge sent the case for internal review to the University itself where he was summarily fired. A few months later, the student became his girlfriend. Greek lover loses job, runs the headline, but gets the girl. One more stereotype confirmed – and more grist for my fictional mill.

But lets return to our trip on the old subway. Being early afternoon, the train car, built in Rumania, was relatively empty. (I will leave it up to you to imagine the trip, especially the overground part with the olive trees and old shacks along the way, the sun blazing on the windows, a shepherd grazing sheep next to the new Olympic Stadium). A young boy with black glasses had his face stuck in a book. He got off at my stop. He seemed rather uncoordinated. His books kept slipping from his grip and seemed ready to crash to the ground. I liked him. For one thing, he was actually carrying books. For another he was exceedingly clumsy, and who can resist that? In America we would have called him a “nerd.”

It has often struck me that a further crucial difference between Greece and America is the existence in America of that bearer of maximum awkwardness, the “nerd.” In Greece the nerd is a rather rare species. In any American gathering, especially academia, you can find varying degrees of awkwardness – ranging from full-blown nerd to semi-nerd to total cool to Cary Grant – a man who increased his sophistication by adopting that strange Brahmin-British accent of his. Only in a European gathering of course, will you find a perfect ten: someone, say, like Sean Connery.

(I can’t prove any of the above statistically, of course. Nor is any of what I’m saying footnoted. Not by accident did Montaigne call his pieces of writing “essays” meaning “attempts.”)

The reasons for relative “nerdlessness” in Greece are clear: rarely is anyone left alone long enough to enter his private nerd-like space and lose himself in total dorkiness. That ubiquitous social apparition, “the Group” to which so many teenagers attach themselves provides both solace and serious training in social skills. Teenagers do everything in large groups. In Greece you don’t date, you rarely have to go up to a girl and ask her out, as I had to do when I was sixteen, after planning my opening lines for a month. (In the end I winged it because her obsessively jealous father showed up just as I was retrieving my tickets to a King Crimson concert). This process, painful yet maturing, is taken care of in Greece by the girl’s friends who let your male friends know that she is interested in you, and then you end up sitting next to each other, along with twenty others, in a public space. From then on in, it’s god’s will, mixed with hormones. The group acts as a psychological support cushion for the rest of your life, right up until the final moments, the equivalent of our twelve step programs or one on one therapy. I often think the reason that the suicide rate is so low in Greece is because the potential suicidee is not left alone long enough to write his note… The door bangs in his room – it’s his mom visiting, it’s his friend wondering, it’s his neighbor asking, it’s the “group” demanding… It is inconceivable that two sixteen year olds could live in their own world for half a year a lá Columbine, without speaking to another person except themselves, staring at their Heavy Metal posters all day and dressing up like Satanists before blowing away eleven students in the cafeteria. The extended family, the omnipresent group would notice the signs before they’d painted the first circles around their eyes, before wearing their Clint Eastwood overcoats to school each day. It might be worth mentioning that in Greek there is no word for “privacy.” The closest to privacy in Greek is the word “idiot” which in ancient Greek did not have the modern connotations of dumbness but applied to the citizen who did not actively participate in the City’s affairs. One benefit of privacy is the ability to concentrate for long periods of time and thus to be more creative. I often think that that’s why Greece has two Nobel prize winners in Poetry, Elytis and Seferis, since poems require short periods of isolation and no Nobel prize novelists, since a novel requires longer periods. America on the other hand is full of inventors and writers who can nerd-out as long as they wish. Think of those writing programs where you can hole up in your room and have the food left at your door. The socially-trained Greek wouldn’t last a day and would liken his lot to the imprisoned Count of Monte Cristo. The American craves that pain and turns it into something productive.

I am exaggerating the differences between the two cultures, yes. I am pontificating. I am drawing dangerous caricatures of two separate cultures, yes. The Greece of my imagination, my fictional Greece is low on nerd population and high on socially adept people who tend to be full of life and exude Zorba-like wisdom; the America of my imagination is full of achievers and creative individuals to be sure, but also more important to my literary agenda, awkward moments, embarrassing situations, knotty discussions with members of the socially challenged who are at the top of their class in everything but discussion.

***

Awkwardness seems to characterize America, the America I’m talking about at least. The Americans that inhabit Baxter’s stories are awkward; I myself feel awkward almost as soon as I land back in the States and drift through customs at Kennedy Airport, reduced to more sorries and excuse me’s than you’ll find in granny’s book on manners.

The last piece in the Baxter collection is called Believers. Here, just at the end, Baxter pulls a no-no. In Believers, a naive mid-western couple visits pre-war Germany and become enthusiastic about the Nazis and embraces the Third Reich. Heartland America and Nazi Germany are suddenly compared.

Why, I asked myself, did an author as good as Baxter need to get away from the accurate portrayal of America that had carried us along so well in his previous stories and take us into the imagined heart of pre-war Germany? (Why did Ron Hansen, another good American writer, feel the urge to write something called Hitler’s niece?)

I think I know why.

I think you know why. Relevance. The pressure of Europe’s tragedies on the American imagination. A need to take on matters beyond a small insular galaxy. A need to contend with historical events that have shaped our world. A need to bring separate worlds together.

But the story fails. It doesn’t convince. It’s a version of the evil-in-the-American-heartland story. Perhaps you need to read it to believe me but let me give an example. Baxter’s piece has as its crowning point a scene where the American heroine, a certain Mrs Jordan, is in Berlin with her husband. She is so overwhelmed by the men in their uniforms that she jumps onto the sideboard of Goebbel’s convertible. Is that possible? The sick head of Hitler’s propaganda machine being accosted by a naïve American? What about all those black-leathered Storm Troopers running along side? Nonetheless she talks to him. The conversation of this fictitious encounter is not recorded. Perhaps Baxter wrote the conversation in one of his drafts and decided to scrap it later on. (I can imagine: “Oh, Mister Goebbels, what an honor. Lots of Germans in Michigan, you know? Maybe we could invite you to the Rotary? What? Drinks? Can I bring my husband? Mahvelous, just mahvelous.”)

So here we have it. The shrewd Baxter mind, the one capable of concocting great stories, illuminating the subtle dealings of men, women and even children, fails to convince. His double vision becomes singular.

The reason is awkwardness. The awkwardness of comparing two completely different worlds and two completely different sensibilities. The awkwardness an American feels in the face of European history, the awkwardness when confronted with individuals whose sense of history defines them as much as its absence defines the American.

It’s not that America does not have its own history; god knows, more history being made by the minute in New York or El Paso than most other places in a decade. But to make a sweeping generalization, it is that Americans in general seem to lack a sense of history or wish to ignore it, perhaps in a ‘we’re still young’ spirit of things. That is not a criticism. In fact, perhaps it is artistic endeavour’s good fortune to always start with a clean slate. I can imagine what would have happened if Walt Disney had been born in Greece and not in Chicago, back in 1901, where his mother, sister and brother encouraged him to keep selling his art, let alone the quality of the McKinley High School. His imaginary Greek parents would discourage him from wasting his time with silly drawings of cats and ducks and remind him that they had starved in World War Two and that he has to grow up and get serious about his life if he wanted to survive…

Yet it is hard not to agree about the lack of a sense of history. The sixties has been trivialized as a drugged free-love sexfest, while many people at that period of time lived urgently. In Greece the urgent times are rarely forgotten (for better and for worse) because they are still close. I am guessing that if you haven’t lived in what we call “urgent” times and sensed that urgency in your veins, if political and historical events haven’t crowded out your individual needs, if, in short, you have grown up in a society where the collective unconscious does not include the sweep of larger all-encompassing events, meaning not only the pressure of current affairs but the images and stories and myths that are handed down from grandparents and parents to children and grandchildren, I don’t think you can imagine a world where, to use a cliché phrase, history is in the making. That’s my contention. Because you can’t acquire a historical consciousness through libraries. That’s why Baxter fails to convince. And I’m not sure Pearl Harbor or the Anthrax scare or the pain of nine eleven will invest future story tellers with a deeper sense of American history.

I have the feeling that such efforts are blocked by a very McCarthyite self censorship, a fear of bringing politics into literature, but that is something else again. Americans fear politics in their literature. It is my sense that every American has been affected by certain unspecifiable effects of McCarthyism. The writer’s subconscious mitigates against placing ideas and those who believe them at the center of a novel. There is something “communistic” about it. Even E.L. Doctorow, who might be considered our top political novelist, seems to trivialize the emphasis on belief and action. In one scene in his acclaimed novel, Ragtime, one of his characters jerks off behind a closet, while secretly watching Emma Goldman, the anarchist who nearly brought down Germany in the early nineteen hundreds, make love with her partner. The focus is on the young man’s “jism” and how it floats in the air. Yet Emma Goldman is the one ultimately killed for her beliefs. White jism versus a bleak “ism.” Tongue-in-cheek yes; American bravado, yes. Convincing no.

The weight of history, past and present, is something the Greek has no way of escaping. It is ever present. It’s no accident that the partisans, those bands of hungry, lice-infested men who lived in the mountains fighting Germans with rags for shoes and the fever of battle and combat in their eyes, chose for their aliases names like Aristotle, Pericles, Agamemnon, Achilleas, and Ulysses. Because of the partisans, these ancient names are now vested with multiple identities and resonate from generation to generation.

This very morning, even as I revise this piece, a radio program interviewed the author of a new book. He had just published his detailed diary about being holed up in a cellar in Athens with his two brothers during the German occupation. Nothing as dramatic as Anne Frank, but powerful nonetheless. The main overriding theme? Hunger, the starvation of children, Biafra, poverty, survival. The essential themes. After hearing that program, it seemed much harder to return to the fictional world of my next book, populated as it is by largely middle-class white Americans who don’t need to worry much about where their next meal will come from.

For the imagination, the weight of history can be oppressive.

Greece’s main military threat today is Turkey. And the stories about Turkey and the Turks have been around for more than five hundred years. This certainly colors the modern Greek consciousness and by extension, the way we imagine Greece when we are in the States.

Last year I visited the Monastery of Saint Loukas in the mountains of Thebes. (The streets unfortunately have names like Oedipus and Sophocles.) A monk at the monastery showed me an emerald-studded crown of deep blue velvet, soft to the touch, worn by a bishop who fought in the liberation war against the Turks. When they caught him, the monk explained to me, they sat him on a sharp stick. For the next two or three days, the executioner “gentled” the stick deeper and deeper. With a simple touch to the man’s arm like this, the monk said and touched my arm lightly, or like this, he said and pushed my head just a little to the right, gravity was given a helping hand. The stick pierced through stomach, intestines, kidneys, very slowly, until penetrating the heart itself.

Stories like these give the Greeks pause. Turkey in particular gives modern Greeks pause: life is not all one big consumer society. Life might end. Turkey lends Greeks a sense of urgency. However, this very urgency affects my imaginings of Greece, I would say, just as its absence – at least until the Muslim fanatics penetrated our world and our consciousness, liberates the way in which I imagine America.

***

My lawyer-friend wonders why I rarely write about the Greece that is modern, the one populated by bright economists, top-notch doctors, stock marketeers, bankers, art auctioneers, computer scientists, biologists, archaeologists, and sophisticated businessmen. In short, the Greece that I sometimes hang out with. He has a point. Why don’t I? Why am I more attracted to writing about the Greek village and to exploring the possibilities of a Greek version of magical realism.

I know why. If I’m going to do a computer programmer, he’s going to work in Seattle or Silicon Valley, not in Athens Greece. The Greece my lawyer-friend is talking about very much resembles the America I knew and abandoned. But even modern Greece is not so modern, or rather it is full of examples that reinforce my stereotypes. I search for stories and anecdotes that fire my imagination and this imagination is not excited by the professional classes – the Greek doctor at the Onassis Hospital performing a delicate operation or the Greek computer scientist working for Microsoft who cleans a program from viruses and bugs.

Ultimately, I suppose I search for elements in this society that seem to reinforce my imaginary Greece, not the one I live in (the newest Starbucks is next to the Byzantine church at the foot of the Acropolis while you can find a MacDonalds near ancient Corinth) but the one just beyond the corner, hiding behind the Cypress trees, the one that is populated by heroes, brigands, shepherds, fishermen and village women who go against the grain, the Greece that is still superstitious and wondrous, closer to its rural roots than America, a Greece where logic is so often upbraided by emotion.

In an old village square on the island of Astipalaia, a local builder built a memorial during the dictatorship (1967-1974). But there are no names and there is no war memorialized. The builder simply used the memorial as an excuse to get government funds. In a country that reveres history, it was not hard to trick the government. There are no dead, there are no names, there was no war. Over thirty years have passed. The local administration is keeping the memorial intact. At some point, the mayor told me, there will be a reason to use it and they will add the names.

A memorial waiting for a memory. Would that happen in America? Somehow, I think not. A mini-mall, a condo, a villa, a parking lot, a pay per view vista of the Aegean – all would be viable cash-producing substitutes.

Since I no longer have the subway to carry the essay along, (we got off with the “nerd”) I will finish on the back of a more traditional beast, the lowly mule.

Fifteen mules were captured by Greek border police a few years ago. The beasts, unaccompanied, carried two thousand kilos of hashish and dozens of machine-guns that the war in Yugoslavia has made so conveniently available all over the Balkans. Smugglers set them loose on the Albanian side and presumably, once the beasts made their way into Greece, they would re-join the family of man and rapidly be relieved of their valuable burden.

Now that the hashish and guns had been confiscated, the problem was what to do with the mules. They were fed, housed, and scraped down – some of the policemen had mules themselves back home and knew how to care for them – but the police station was in no position to run a full-time stable. Brigitte Bardot, former actress turned into animal activist, made a stink about the plight of the donkeys. They were instantly released. (Louis of Amherst told me that when the French made stamps with Bardot’s image on them, the Frenchmen didn’t know which side to lick…)

This small story, completely true, seems so ordinary and yet so Greek. I can hear my friend shouting at me for reinforcing the stereotypes. So be it.

And so also, our short and jumbled ride ends. I have thrown at you what I consider a number of issues which hover in my mind most of the day and night. Memory, history, imagination, awkwardness. How to render fictitious worlds real.

As a writer, I must end with the mules. I can’t leave them. I imagine them on their own. At first they are at a loss and munch on whatever mules munch on. But then one of the policemen gives a strong whack to the first mule and suddenly the whole pack lurches forward.

Like the translation of cultures, the mules move back and forth between borders; sometimes they carry a dangerous load, other times they are completely free of any such freight. At that moment, almost anything goes.

They jog briskly up the jagged mountain range, inhale the fresh air, smell the cypress and pine trees, and then cross the border and return to Albania. A good jog is perhaps the American way of getting your imagination to work; but don’t forget, the mules follow those ancient and trustworthy paths.

Threepenny Review, 2009, Summer Issue

TABLE TALK

On George Papandreou, the elder

Recently I went to purchase a high-tech computer backpack at the new electronics mega-store called PUBLIC, located, appropriately enough, in the heart of Athens, Constitution Square. At the entrance of the large, refurbished nineteenth-century structure, where people sip coffee at a bar perched strategically in front of the store, stands a big bronze plaque:

From this building, on October 18, 1944, George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece, gave the Speech of Liberation that marked the end of the German occupation.

At the time he gave that speech—and in fact up until the end of his life—my grandfather lived in a house located in the area of Kastri, a suburb north of Athens. Not being a rich man (for he had been born into poverty), he built his home far from Athens, where in the 1930s real estate was dirt cheap. Back then, there were practically no other homes around. Today it is my sister’s home: my grandfather left it to her, his only granddaughter, as a dowry in his will. The neighborhood is now considered extremely upscale, and builders covet the only remaining pre-war home, with its two acres of untouched pine forest.

Each Saturday of my childhood—once we had returned to Greece from Berkeley, where I was born—our family would have lunch at the house in Kastri. The family seemed fully united, and this particular constellation, consisting of father married to mother, grandfather divorced from grandmother, and us four kids, felt engraved in granite. We were usually served chicken with rice and a bechamel sauce, while my grandfather and my father, who had decided to enter Greek politics and abandon his academic career in Berkeley, discussed the issues of the day. Some time was allotted to us kids, but the high point for me was when lunch was over. That’s when the old man would give us an allowance of a hundred drachmas, worth three dollars and thirty three cents. With this injection, on the return trip I would stop in Kifissia, at a kiosk that still exists forty years later, to buy American comic books. They went for a dollar each, which meant I could and did buy three each Saturday, saving the change for three weeks to buy yet a fourth. I amassed quite a collection in those years, but was not able to bring it with me the night we fled the country in 1968, with my father’s life in danger from the military dictatorship that had just released him from jail. We left with only a small suitcase each: comic book collections were deemed inessential, and on the scale of things, they certainly were.

At those lunches, my grandfather never failed to act the perfect gentleman, and would always offer my mother and sister a rose. He would say with some pride that he himself had planted the rosebush when he first moved in. Some days, he would walk us into the garden so that he could show us the most recent bloom; he’d bend and say, “Smell. This is life.” Here was a man, I later realized, who was in touch with his senses, was always well dressed, always aware of his image, always polishing his voice and his rhetoric, a man who even in exile found ways of loving the places where he found himself.

On the night of the 1967 coup, when most of the politicians were dragged to prison in their underwear, my father included, my grandfather asked the soldiers to do him a favor and give him a moment. If he was going to be arrested, it was going to be in style. As reported to us much later by my father, the old man arrived at the political holding ground (a way-station for the prisons) fully shaved and nicely cologned, and wearing his three-piece suit to boot. Not only that. In full display was the piece de resistance: a rose from his very own rosebush pinned to his lapel.

When he was finally released from prison, my grandfather spent his final days in that Kastri home, under house arrest, before his demise at the age of eighty. Each day, he wore his suit and tie, without fail. He could barely bend down to shine his shoes, but he wanted to look completely unruffled each morning, as if being under house arrest was a temporary condition.

In the spring of 1968, the last spring he would ever enjoy, Kastri dripped with life: the rosebush, the pine trees, the small olive grove. My grandfather wanted to smuggle out a speech to the BBC, which was broadcasting into the country, but he was being watched. He had a recording machine, which the guards had failed to notice, but how was he to use it without being discovered? He decided to play the palaverous cranky old man recalling his past. In front of the soldiers, out in the garden, he would take his walk but now he would talk to himself, sometimes quoting himself from his old speeches, other times coming up with completely new ones. At first they listened in: after all, he was considered a danger. To impress upon them his imbalance, he purposely exaggerated the old flourishes, the intonations, the pauses. Here, in the garden, surrounded by scurrilous but also some respectful soldiers and sergeants who sat beneath the tall pine trees, it didn’t take much to act as if senility had finally come to collect one more soul.

He read the actual speech into a carefully placed microphone in his office. (By then, the soldiers had given up listening in.) As the son of a village priest, he often injected religious anniversaries with political purpose and the Easter of 1968 coincided conveniently with the first anniversary of the coup. His speeches always had a certain biblical style to them, a pithiness and a tendency to aphorism, and it was with these linguistic weapons that he had forged his own unique voice. Greece of Christian Greeks, this speech began, mocking the dictator’s penchant for beginning his own speeches with those very same words. Today, the Greece of Christian Greeks is catholically protestant. Today, though we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, we mourn for the crucifixion of the Greek people.

I recently had occasion to listen to the unedited recording—apparently the BBC filtered out the extraneous sounds when it finally aired the speech. I swear I can hear bits of my own childhood in the background: the sounds of the street, a car in the distance, a lone motorcycle racing up the hills of Kastri, its single lung sputtering with intent. Perhaps it’s only my imagination, but I think I can also distinguish the hoarse cry of the paliatzis, a man who would drive through the neighborhoods on a horse-drawn cart, selling old items collected from abandoned homes.

—Nick Papandreou

Nick Papandreou Threepenny Review, March 2006 I am a writer in a family with an enormous historical archive, a public record that just keeps growing and growing. Sound bites from my father’s and grandfather’s speeches (both prime ministers of Greece) have been quoted and regurgitated to me by the faithful since I was a child, though now I have ended up learning them from the original. This is because I have become the family’s keeper, collecting anecdotes, stories, letters, tapes, pictures, home movies. Anecdote 1: “But old man,” someone said to a villager in Crete during an election campaign, “why vote for Papandreou again? Didn’t you hear him admit that he’s made many mistakes?” The old man smiles. “I’ll vote for him until he stops making them.” Anecdote 2: I am waiting for the bus on a busy street in Athens. A thirty-something working class woman on a moped stops at a red light. When she sees me she does a double take, then removes her helmet. “What can you do, poor soul,” she says, shaking her head in pity. “It’s not your fault all you children are failures. It’s because your father was so great. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” In an Athenian democracy only elected citizens wielded power. In modern Greece power has become an an extended family affair – the children of politicians are democratically voted into power themselves. One person has called it “The Republic of Inheritance” because today the country is run by the offspring of politicians. My older brother did his best to remove the slur of dynastic democracy when the socialist party founded by my father came into his hands just over two years ago. To deter detractors, he brought the matter to a popular vote, open to all Greeks and not just party members. He garnered over a million votes – as solid a blessing as any that he, at least, has full approval to take over where his father left off. I suppose this only reinforces the “Republic of Inheritance,” though George himself campaigns on a theme of meritocracy and equal rights. To make matters worse, things morph into dangerous Gaddafi-like terrain over on this side of the Atlantic — I am the “general secretary” of a shoe-string operation called the Andreas Papandreou Foundation, not to be confused with the near-defunct George Papandreou Foundation (grandfather and older brother’s name) or the more active “Andreas Papandreou Institute for Strategic Studies,” which is the socialist party think tank. My sister Sophia used to live on George Papandreou Street and this geographical conundrum was the reason she received hundreds of other people’s letters who lived up and down the street. Fortunately all four of siblings and my 83 year-old Gloria Steinem-like feminist mother learned early on to take a healthy distance from the cult of personality (key fobs with your father’s image, poems written in his name, people on the street welling up in tears, pictures of yourself on the eight o’clock news, et cetera) and to lead separate lives. I do admit I am sometimes tempted to scrap the high Athenian ideals and yield to elements of the “inheritance.” I dream that if Minnessota born elder brother George comes to power (pollsters predict it could happen in two years), like the hero with the wooden sword I will charge at some controversial problems, perhaps the illegal open air landfill where all of Athens dumps its un-recycled refuse, or the cancerous electric power generating smoke-stacks polluting the town of Megalopolis, or better yet take down the taverns on the beaches of Zakynthos where the endangered Caretta turtles lay their eggs. Why not make that small shift from the Republic of Inheritance to the Country of Nepotism? Using this unethically derived sibling power, why not work towards morally just causes like getting the cops to crack down on the importation of sex slaves from Eastern Europe or proffer citizenships to genocide victims from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Darfur, and Rwanda… why with brother George in power I’ll get that basketball court next to my apartment re-tarred and the nets fixed. Christ but it’s an odd temptation to have staring at you. The only way to avoid it is to hunker down to the written word, read the Threepenny Review while leaning against a pine tree next to the shores of Spetses, take notes on the texture of the bark and wait for the Hellenic version of The Truman Show to reach its odd conclusion, if ever. (We now have children too…) I recently published a short book on my father’s rhetorical style – his metaphors and similes, the theatrical dialogues he used to liven up his speeches, his use of the first person. I explored the “narrative” he invented to provide his large audience with a coherent political story. This narrative has now become the country’s unofficial history. Snapshot version: Greece- a small country, buffeted by civil war and dictators, initially subservient to the needs of America’s Cold War policy, finally finds its voice, expands the space for democracy, makes lots of noise, finally grows up and joins the ranks of nations. Like so many, I too was swept away by the intensity of his political battle, his jailing, his exile, his charm, the crowds, the speeches, the sheer passion of the thousands who clapped for him. Perhaps I should have been more careful. For too long I was trapped inside pages written by my forefathers. Maybe I still am. However I sit down each day and at least for a few hours I write myself out of their book.

University of Athens library

Friday September 14, 1999

Nicholas Papandreou, Ph.D.

Last year we were honored to hear Amartya Sen discuss Andreas Papandreou’s work at the Memorial Lecture titled The political element in economic development. Professor Sen used this title on purpose, since it was also the title for Andreas’ 1966 Wicksell lectures. I will not examine Andreas Papandreou’s conception of politics, his belief in man’s freedom or his ideas concerning democracy. I would not be able to go beyond anything that Professor Sen has already said, and furthermore, I would certainly not be able to match the good professor’s eloquence and comprehension of the underlying issues. Suffice it to say that it is clear from Professor Sen’s paper that Andreas Papandreou was extremely interested in making economic theory relevant to society and to the functioning of democracy. I would add from my recent research into Andreas’ work that this tendency is clear from early on.

For those of you interested in professor Sen’s paper — which goes far beyond it’s title and analyses some of the most philosophically exciting concepts of our day – copies are available. Furthermore the Andreas Papandreou Foundation will be publishing it in booklet form in time for the next Memorial Lecture, to be given by Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist for the World Bank, on November 15^th.

First of all, what kind of an economist was Andreas Papandreou? Most people outside the academic arena, and perhaps many within it, at least all those who are unfamiliar with his academic work, would most probably think Andreas Papandreou was a hard-core Marxist. After all, Andreas was Trotskyite in his teens and later founded and led the Socialist party. Some might have heard of his book Paternalistic Capitalism and this title certainly reinforces the conviction that he was an outsider, a critic of the system. However between his teen years and those of his political leadership there is little indication of any Marxist influence.

His academic work begins squarely within the boundaries of orthodox economics and then only slowly shifts outside it, but never completely. Let me answer the question as to what kind of economist he was. He was an orthodox economist who was not satisfied with orthodox theory and who for that reason wished to improve it. Not to get rid of it. To make it better. To borrow from the world of psychology, he was engaged in a love-hate relationship with the neo-classical model. He wanted the theory to which he was married to be perfect, and though it wasn’t, it was still the best thing around.

Andreas Papandreou arrived in the United States on the eve of World War Two, having completed his first two years in the law school of Athens University. He remained in New York, working at Columbia University’s International House, thinking of continuing an education in law. When it was suggested that it would be more wise to follow economics rather than get an American law degree, a degree which would be of little use to him if he ever returned to his own country, he switched directions. In October of 1941 he arrived at Harvard, where, at the age of 22, on the basis of his two years at law school, he was immediately admitted into the doctoral program.

The economists he was to meet and work with in Cambridge were nothing short of stellar. His professors were people like Joseph Schumpeter, Abba Lerner, and W. J. Crum; students that had either just graduated from Harvard or were still working on their doctorates were people like Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, John Galbraith, James Tobin, James Duesenberry, and Paul Sweezy.¹ Andreas was teaching assistant to James Tobin and Vassily Leontieff and taught both statistics and accounting.

Though I don’t have his Masters thesis, Andreas himself once told me that he wrote a very long masters thesis on Marxist thought and that his professor told him that because it was so long he wouldn’t read it but precisely because it was so long it was worth at least a B and that was the grade he gave him. Andreas Papandreou read his Marxism well and would return to it in later years, but his essential training was in neo-classical economics.

What books did he read? From his library, his footnotes and his Ph.D. thesis, it is clear that highly relevant to his early economic education were the works by Edward Chamberlin who had just published his The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1939), while extremely relevant to Andreas Papandreou’s thinking was the work of Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) and Schumpeter’s The Theory of Economic Development (1936). In this context I wish to mention another book by A. R. Burns, The Decline of Competition(1936) and Robert Triffin’s Monopolistic Competition and General Equilibrium Theory (1940). In the year he arrived at Harvard, Schumpeter, one of Andreas’ professors, would publish his magnificent Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. As for the previous generation, influential were Frank Knight and Maurice Dobbs and in particular Lionel Robbins, who had written hisEssay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science in 1935.

From this brief survey of what he was reading at the time, we can see that he was already interested in deviations from the neo-classical model of general equilibrium and perfectly competitive markets. For those of you who aren’t economists, let me briefly say that orthodox economics posits a world of perfectly competitive firms that can’t influence price. Andreas was concerned about a world that deviated from this assumption, a world for example, characterized by large, monopolistic firms.

He received his Ph.D. at the age of 24, in the fall of 1943, under the guidance of professor W. L. Crum. Titled The Location and Scope of the Entrepreneurial Function, it is a highly readable and accessible piece of work running about 350 pages long. Already Andreas is having doubts about the fundamental assumption of micro-economics: he is concerned about the validity of the proposition that the firm is a profit-maximizing agent.

In this work he traces the rise of the modern corporation in order to investigate an issue that occupied many economists at the time: just who exactly controls the modern corporation and what precisely is the role of the entrepreneur in a modern capitalist society.²

After a concise survey of the rise of the corporation from the middle ages onwards, he investigates the separation of ownership from entrepreneurship and looks in some detail at the various relationships between ownership and entrepreneurship that arise through holding companies and interlocking directorships. Rather than a corporation, he proposes the term “poly-corporation”, using the Greek word for the Latinate term multi because firms have now gone beyond the production of single products or participation in single markets. He classifies two hundred of the largest American firms by a novel system which accounts for the various levels of control and using a statistical technique he concludes that, in the majority of cases, at this point in time, entrepreneurship has indeed been separated from ownership, thus contributing empirical proof to the theses advanced by many economic thinkers of the time.

The shift in ownership challenges the validity of the profit-maximizing assumption. Entrepreneurial activity is, in certain cases, pursued for its own sake and thus deviates from the condition of profit-maximization.³ For the purposes of this exposition, whether this is true or not is not the point. The point is that Andreas Papandreou wanted to build his life on a theory that could be validated empirically and not on a castle of sand.

In 1943, fresh with his Ph.D., he joined America’s war effort and volunteered for the US Navy where, after serving as a male nurse at Bethesda hospital for war wounded, he was sent to California where he used the concepts of operational research to determine the optimal timing for fleet repairs.  When he returned to Harvard in 1946 he became an assistant professor (ifigitis) and in the fall of 1947 he went to Minnesota where he became associate professor in theoretical or micro-economics. (Ektaktos kathigitis)

In 1949 he published an article in the American Economic Review titled Market Structure and Monopoly Power. Here he is concerned with the power of large corporations in American society, and in particular with the fact that the legal framework for judging monopolistic behavior has not yet caught up with the new economics. The legal framework, he writes, “lacks the economist’s emphasis on consumer welfare.”⁴ From that article industrial economists coined the term the “Papandreou coefficient” which is an index of firm penetration in the market. The new element that he brought to the traditional measures of monopoly was that he included a firm’s capacity as an indication of its potential to strike back or to make life difficult for competitors by expanding supply and dropping price. He proposed an empirical method for testing his hypothesis.

In the period 1952-55 he received a grant from the Social Science Research Council to study logic and mathematics. In terms of his technical skills, set theory and topology have now come to the fore. At the same time he works as a consultant in the US justice department on anti-trust, a manifestation of his desire to marry theory to practice.

Besides the empirical work on monopolies, he pursues a parallel path of work on high theory. His concern with the relevance of economics is apparent throughout his research in the nineteen fifties. He wishes to test the basic axiom of economics. After all, what good is a theory if the assumptions on which it is constructed are false? He investigates a pillar of neo-classical economics, what is known as the theory of choice, and he does so through direct experimentation with small groups of people – something which has also come back into fashion in recent years. His paper, published in Econometrica in July of 1953, is titled An experimental test of an axiom in the Theory of Choice. Employing a stochastic (Bayesian) model, he shows that the axioms of the theory of choice cannot be rejected. In other words, he confirms one of the fundamental assumptions of neo-classical economics.⁵

This is ironic, for in the next few years he has serious doubts about the validity of the basic assumptions of neo-classical economics. In his 1952 piece, Some basic problems in the theory of the firm ⁶ he expresses reservations concerning the traditional definition of the firm – it needs improvement he says, it does not live up to the standards of theoretical rigor Andreas requires. Rather than examine the question empirically, as he did in his Ph.D. and his first published articles, he analyses the situation from a highly theoretical perspective.

What does he talk about? The neo-classical theory of the firm needs improvement, for one because it does not adequately reflect the actual way firms operate. For another, the theory of the firm as it stands is not general enough to be a real theory.

He wishes to find a universal classification of the firm. Only this will be intellectually satisfying for him. He provides a definition of the firm that encompass both the competitive firm as well as the monopolistic firm and beyond. It is not enough, in Papandreou’s mind, to define a firm by its goal or even its conduct. It is not enough to say that such and such an agent is a profit maximizer. The firm, according to him, should be treated as a specific case of the general phenomena of social organization and must include the internal decision-making process.

Under this classification, the firm becomes a system of communication and coordination, operating under a central authority. This more general definition allows for a firm that is fully competitive, but also allows for firms with large-scale management, firms with interlocking directorships, firms that are vertically integrated or even firms under a socialist system. This latter grouping, the firm under socialism, does not and I would say almost never occupies his time.

Finally, a proper theory of the firm must explain how a firm gets started, the operation of the firm itself, the functions of capital investment, expansion and external financing and how changes in direction, technological innovation and dropping and creating new products are decided upon.

For Andreas Papandreou relevance to the real world was of great concern; at the same time he believed that only a highly sophisticated theory could adequately describe the real world. In this battle between relevance and abstractedness lies an unresolvable “inner” tension which was to haunt him for the duration of his intellectual life. It is the intellectual’s desire for purity, I would say, that does not leave him alone. Again and again he turns to the question of finding a model that is generalizable enough so as to account for all systems – in which the model of perfect competition is more of a subset than the totality itself.

In short, if Papandreou is bothered by the existing approach to economics, if he is concerned about some of its fundamental assumptions, it’s not that he wants to replace or reject it and come up with a completely different paradigm and turn say to Marxism, it is that he wishes it to become a more intellectually powerful tool with greater applicability to explain the world.

One direction for economics to go, he argues as far back as 1950 (Economics and the social sciences, Economic Journal, Vol. LX, No. 240, December 1950) is to utilize the findings of other social sciences.

This procedure calls for a careful inventorying of all the tentatively valid propositions of psychology, anthropology and sociology in an effort to equip economics with the tools necessary to impose restrictions upon the relations among economic variables in order that operationally meaningful hypotheses may be formulated.

Without “reaching out” to use modern parlance, to other fields of knowledge, economics reaches an impasse.

In Economics as a science, published in 1958, he goes beyond the issue of the firm and begins to probe the overall structure of economics itself. Using set theory and logical proofs, using the system of deduction and induction, he attempts to show, among other things, that the science of economics cannot make predictions. Economists like Samuelson and Friedman argued that it’s not so important to worry about the assumptions of the model — as long as it can make predictions. Now along comes Andreas Papandreou and argues, using elegant math, that it cannot in fact do so. If this is true, we are in very shallow water indeed. Not only is economics problematic in its assumptions, but its key claim to fame, that it is at least useful, is also problematic. In this book he also lays the foundations for a more general economic theory, one that allows for greater variety of economic behavior. Perhaps for most it is too advanced. I myself am unable to comprehend its mathematics.⁷

It is not enough for him that a model is internally consistent. Papandreou wants a theory whose basic propositions can be empirically tested and then rejected or accepted. I think that ideally he wishes to see a grand theory that would allow for all states of the world – for example a theory that could take under its wing not only capitalism but also feudalism, mercantilism, perfect competition, and monopolistic competition, or I suppose today, “globalization.” What he’s looking for, it seems to me, is the equivalent of the Unified Field Theory in physics – an overall theory that could account for the shifts in the underlying structure of the world economy.

Given this very high intellectual standard, it is no wonder that he grew increasingly frustrated with orthodox economics. From they very first he pursued the study of monopolies, a blatant contradiction to the traditional theory of perfect competition.

By the late sixties and early seventies his focus shifts, but only by a few degrees. He is now also concerned with how theories themselves come about.⁸ It is not enough to posit states of the world – a difficult task in itself. It is also of interest to examine the specific social events that lead to the development of certain theories what Andreas calls meta-economics — theory construction.

The emergence of totalitarian states in the thirties, for instance, and the experience of the second world war caused intellectuals, especially those from Europe like Debreu, to propose a theory of the economy where the agents are atomistic and highly individualistic. This emphasis on the individual is a response to the fascist and communist emphasis on collective action which relegates individual needs below the all-powerful but indeterminate “higher good.” Thus, he argues, the post-war economists who more or less determined the neo-classical model emphasized, for historical and political reasons, the atomistic model.⁹

But if this is true, then it means that theory is actually influenced by social events. In what sense can we claim that it is theory and not ideology? Schumpeter, Andreas argued, spent his life arguing that economics was not ideology but objective science. But that shows that the argument for the prosecution was not a trivial one if Schumpeter spent so much time on the side of the defense.

In one of his class lectures, (Michigan lectures, 1973) Andreas talked about Kenneth Arrow, his former colleague who was in the news because he had just been awarded the Nobel prize. ¹⁰He told his Ann Arbor graduate seminar that Arrow was an economist who believed that the traditional frame of reference was enough to solve all problems, even problems that seemed to have no place in the model, such as distribution and inequality of information. (I would add also the problems of increasing returns to scale and externalities.) For Arrow these are concerns that distort the performance of the market but which, not to worry, will be solved in due time. There is no need, therefore, to drop the original theory and work for another one.

In Andreas’ words, Arrow believes that “if we work harder and get more information, develop better theoretical tools, we’ll do better.” Andreas doesn’t buy this at all. Why doesn’t he? Andreas believed that such problems required a re-working of the fundamental assumptions. For example, economists assume a model populated by competitive firms but do not care if the world doesn’t fit that proposition and he argues that most economists have abandoned the effort to test the fundamental hypotheses of economics as a criterion for its relevance.

How was it possible, he wondered in these lectures, to be part of a profession that claimed it could model and represent society mathematically and yet it not only failed to take into account fundamental shifts in the underlying shape of the modern capitalism society but also rejected (in the extreme case of Friedman) the importance of such changes on the fundamental model of perfect competition? Does not history play any role in the field of economics?

It was now time to write his own analysis of the world as he saw it which he did in the book, Paternalistic Capitalism (1972). He wrote it during a difficult but productive time, while in exile in Canada, between making speeches against the Greek junta that had once jailed him, while teaching, running a “liberation movement” and also squeezing in ‘quality’ time for family life. ¹¹

He now fully believed that orthodox interpretations of capitalism were ideologically loaded and wished to propose his own “synthesis” as he called it, a new presentation of capitalism that differed from conventional wisdom. He begins, where else, with the problems that concerned him since his first intellectual engagement with the field of economics thirty years ago, back in 1943.

In the sixty page introduction he returns to his initial concern about the role of the firm in society and agrees with the Galbraithian analysis of the firm as being run by a “technostructure.” Technology has removed control from the owners and placed it in the hands of the industrial managers and technocrats. It is clear from our discussion how prepared Andreas Papandreou was to receive Galbraith’s ideas about the large firms that try to control the market uncertainties by eliminating the market wherever they can – either through buying out firms from which they purchase inputs or through price arrangements or, when possible, through complete control over natural resources.¹²

Baran and Sweezy’s concept of monopolistic capitalism and the role of the military-industrial state also found fertile ground in Andreas’ efforts to come up with his own analysis. He relates the managerial elite to the national security managers and shows that paternalistic capitalism – in short the capitalism as expressed by the workings of the American economy must be aggressively expansive.¹³

Yet having written Paternalistic Capitalism, is Andreas Papandreou happy? I think not. He is too much of an intellectual to be satisfied with a book that “only” describes the way the world works. What he wants, what attracts his mind, is high theory. He wants a serious model of the serious world.

In the introduction to Paternalistic Capitalism he says as much. Yes, it might be true that neo-classical economics, he says, has little to say about the behavior of modern capitalism. Yes it might be true that it is fraught with inconsistencies. But it is also true that so far at least, it’s the best thing we have. We have no other theory that is as logically coherent or as convincing to replace it. His own hypothesis, his Paternalistic Capitalism, is only a partial explanation. This is a brave admission.

This discussion is based on only  partial reading of his works. I come away with the sense that Andreas Papandreou, had he pursued his academic career to its fruition, would have made life very difficult for the pure theory economists. Not only would he have been a constant critic of neo-classical economics, using the tools of topology and calculus to take them on, but he would also have advanced the field of history of science and the epistemology and methodology of economics.

Perhaps his dream of coming up with a model where the fundamental assumptions are more realistic and empirically verifiable would not have been realized, but it would have been interesting to have seen where he would have taken it. But to have gone in that direction would have meant robbing another world from his talents. In the end he chose not only to understand the world but to change it.

Thank You

An Andreas Papandreou Bibliography

Articles

Marketing Structure and Monopoly Power
in the American Economic Review, September 1949.

Economics and the Social Sciences
in the Economic Journal, December 1950.

Types of Empirical Relevance in Modern Economics
in Economia Internazionale, May 1952.

An Experimental Test of an Axiom in the Theory of Choice
in Econometrica, July 1953.

Testing Assumptions Underlying Economic Predictions
in collaboration with O. E. Brownlee in the Business News Notes, University of Minnesota, May 1954.

A Test of a Proposition in the Theory of Choice
in Econometrica, July 1955.

Models, Comparative, Statistics, and Empirical Relevance
in Econometrica, volume 25, number 4, pages 600-601, October 1955.

Concentration and Public Policy
in the Iowa Business Digest, February 1956.

The Economic Effect of Trademarks
in the California Law Review, volume 44, number 3, pages 503-510, July 1956.

Explanation and Prediction in Economics
in Science, April 24, 1959.

Risk
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1959.

Macroeconomics Models and Economic Policy
in the Archive of Economic and Social Sciences, volume 39, pages 523-552, October-December 1959, Athens.

The American Economy and its Future (in Greek)
in Spoudes, volume 9, pages 1-7, Athens, 1959-60.

Partial Structures of Economic Regulators
in collaboration with A. A. Lazaris in Spoudes, volume 9, pages 1-8, Athens, 1959-60.

The Course of Economic Thought
in Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali, Seventh year (1960), number 4, pages 325-335.

Theory Construction and Empirical Meaning in Economics
in the American Economic Review, May 1963.

Cold-War Blocks and National Independence
in the Review of International Affairs, January 5, 1970.

Some Basic Issues in Development Planning
in The Challenge, under the auspices of the Advisory Committee of Economic Development, Winnipeg, 1971.

Greece: An American Problem
in The Massachusetts Review, pages 655-671, Autumn 1971.

Greece: Neocolonialism and Revolution
in the Monthly Review, volume 24, December 1972.

Planning and Freedom
in the Review of International Affairs, Belgrade, July 1970.

A Tradegy Without a Mask (in Italian)
in Il Ponte, March 1970.

The Multinational Corporation
in The Canadian Forum and The Journal of Finance, volume 28, number 2, May 1972.

The Multinational Corporation
in The American Economist, volume 17, number 2, pages 154-160, autumn 1973.

Multinational Corporations and Empire
in Social Praxis, volume 1, number 2, pages 105-118, 1973.

In Greece as in Cambodia
in the Monthly Review, volume 25, September 1973.

Superpower Dynamics and the Outlook for the Mediterranean
in the Information Paper No. 7. The Middle East: Five Perspectives. Proceedings of AAUG, Berkeley 1972 (published in December 1973).

The Metropolis – Periphery Polarity: A Facet of Imperialism
in Social Praxis, 2 (1-2) pages 7-23, 1974.

Greece: The November Uprising
in the Monthly Review, volume 25, pages 8-21, February 1974.

Marxism: Looking Backward and Forward
in the Monthly Review, volume 26, pages 67-71, June 1974.

Confrontation and Coexistence
in the Monthly Review, volume 29, pages 14-21, April 1978.

Books

An Introduction to Social Science: Personality, Work, Community
in collaboration with A. Naftalin, B. Nelson, M. Sibley and D. Calhoun. Lippincott, 1953 (revised editions: 1957, 1961)

Competition and its Regulation
in collaboration with J. T. Wheeler. Prentice-Hall, 1954.

Economics as a Science
Lippincott, 1958
Greek translation: By A. A. Lazaris, University School of Industry, Piraeus, 1960.

Spanish translation: (La Economica come Siencia) by J. R. Lasuen and M. Xacristan. Ediciones Ariel, 1961.
Italian translation: (L’ Economia come Scienza) by Mario Arcelli. L’ Industria, 1962.

Policy of the Economic Development of Greece (in Greek)
Centre of Economic Research, Athens, 1962. Translated into English.

Basic Principles of the Creation of Models in Macroeconomics (in Greek)
Centre of Economic Research, Athens, 1962.

Introduction to Macroeconomic Models
Centre of Economic Research, Athens, 1962.
Italian translation and comments: (Introduzione ai Modelli Macroeconomici) by C. Lunghini Instituto Nazionale per lo Studio della Congiuntura, 1967.

Democracy and National Rebirth (in Greek)
Fexis, Athens, 1966.

Toward a Totalitarian World?
Swedish translation: (Mot en Totalitar Varld?). Norstedts, Stockholm, 1969.
Norwegian translation: (Mot en Totalitaer Verden?) introduction by Finn Gystavsen, Oslo. Bax Furlag, 1969.
Finnish translation: (Hyvasti Demokratia). Kirjayhtyma, Helsinki, 1969.
Dutch translation: (Naar een Totalitaire Wereld?). Utrecht Antwerpen. A. W. Bruna & Zoon, 1970.

Man’s Freedom
Columbia University Press, New York, 1970.
Greek translation published by Agonas, 1973.

Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front
Doubleday & Co., New York, 1970.
Greek translation published by Karanassi, Athens, 1974.
Translated also into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and German. Pelican Books (Paperback).

Paternalistic Capitalism
The University of Minnesota Press, Spring 1972
Greek translation: published by Karanassi, Athens, 1974.
Italian translation: (Il Capitalismo Paternalistico). Isedi, Milan, April, 1972.
Spanish translation: (El Capitalismo Paternalista). Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1973.
German translation: (Kritik des Amerikanischen Kapitalismus). Herder & Horder, Frankfurt, 1973
Arabic translation: (Autocratic Capitalism). Al-Talia Publishing Co., Beirut, 1973

Project Selection for National Plans
in collaboration with U. Zohar. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1974.

The Impact Approach to Project Selection
in collaboration with U. Zohar.

The Method of Repercussions in Investment Selection (in Greek)
Praeger Publishers, New York, 1974.

Greece to the Greeks (in Greek)
published by Karanassi, Athens, 1976.

Imperialism and Economic Development (in Greek)
published by Nea Synora, Athens, 1975.

Transition to Socialism
published by Echme, Athens, 1977 (second edition, 1978).

Mediterranean Socialism (in Italian)
(Il Socialismo Mediterraneo). Lerici, Cosenza, 1977.

For a Socialist Society (in Greek)
published by Echme, Athens, 1977 (second edition, 1978).

Contributions to Books

Some Basic Problems in the Theory of the Firm
(A volume in the series “Survey of Contemporary Economics” published by B. F. Haley, Irwin, 1952).

An Experimental Test of Proposition in the Theory of Choice
(Consumer Behavior, New York University Press, 1954).

Linear Planning – A New Instrument of National Decisions (in Greek)
(University School of Industry, Piraeus, Athens, 1960).

Order of the Day for a Policy of Economic Development
(University School of Industry, Piraeus, Athens, 1960).

Policy of the Blocs: Intervention and Freedom of the Institutions
(Les Temps Modernes by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1969).

Introduction to a book by Norodom Sihanouk and M. Burchett
entitled My War with the CIA: Cambodia: Fight for Survival

Social Planning in a Regional Framework
(Social Issues in Regional Policy and Regional Planning, Mouton, 1977).

Essays

A Test of a Stochastic Theory of Choice
University of California, Publications of Economics, volume 16, number 1, pages 1-18, University of California Press, 1957.

Planning for the Appointment of Resources for Economic Development
Centre of Economic Studies, Athens, 1962.

The Political Element in Economic Development
Wicksell Lectures, Stockholm, 1966
Spanish translation: (El Elemento Politico en el Desarollo Economico), published by Depalma, Buenos Aires, 1973.

A New Economic Policy for Greece (in Greek)
Athens, 1965.

Economic Development, Balance of Payments and Policy of Industrialisation (in Greek)
Athens, 1965.

Economic Development – Rhetoric and Reality
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