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.