{"id":12095,"date":"2011-11-17T07:54:59","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T12:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12095"},"modified":"2018-01-15T18:07:05","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:07:05","slug":"snapshots-from-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/11\/17\/snapshots-from-greece\/","title":{"rendered":"Snapshots from Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> has a few snippets from Athens:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018Prime ministers should be chosen by us, not Angela Merkel,\u2019 says the taxi driver taking me to the Acropolis. Taxi drivers here love talking politics, and they love hating Merkel. She\u2019s treated as the arch villain of this tragedy. Magazine covers show a massive Merkel playing with Greek politicians as if they were dolls. Graffiti invites her to do things that are probably anatomically impossible. My advice to her is to avoid visiting Greece for the duration of The 100 Days. Probably longer.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n

The taxi driver also tells me he can\u2019t relate to Papademos. \u2018He\u2019s not a man of the people\u2019. But it\u2019s precisely Papademos\u2019s lack of experience in dealing with the grubby, demanding demos that endears him to the EU elite, which fought tooth-and-catapult to have him installed as PM. As one European economist put it: for Brussels the great thing about Papademos is that he \u2018speaks the language and shares the philosophy of [the] EU and ECB\u2019 and that he \u2018comes in without officially representing a party\u2019. That is, he\u2019s apolitical, unchosen, boring and bureaucratic — just the kind of politician the EU likes. It\u2019s already a clich\u00e9, but that doesn\u2019t stop it being true: Athens is now both the birthplace and graveyard of European democracy. <\/p>\n

\u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n

Yet the graffiti expresses exasperation as well as anger — a deep disappointment with Greek workers. Commonly scrawled phrases are \u2018Wake up!\u2019 and \u2018Stop being slaves!\u2019 You get the impression that the Greek left, which is rowdier and noisier than its western European counterpart, is as annoyed with the masses as it is with Merkel. In Syntagma Square, nothing much remains of the radical protest camp that so excited outside observers earlier this year and which provided the template for the global \u2018Occupy\u2019 movement. There is just a memorial tree, with political paraphernalia attached to it in remembrance of the camp. It\u2019s like one of those shrines that pops up on roadsides where someone has been killed by a speeding car, only it is adorned, not with wreaths, but with balaclavas, goggles and batteries (which were thrown at the police). It has the unwitting whiff of being a gravestone not only for the Greek left, but for Greek politics itself. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill has a few snippets from Athens: \u2018Prime ministers should be chosen by us, not Angela Merkel,\u2019 says the taxi driver taking me to the Acropolis. Taxi drivers here love talking politics, and they love hating Merkel. She\u2019s treated as the arch villain of this tragedy. Magazine covers show a massive Merkel playing with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,62,1118,1526,28,53],"tags":[337,720],"class_list":["post-12095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-europe","category-germany","category-greece","category-media","category-politics","tag-eu","tag-protest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-395","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12096,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12095\/revisions\/12096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}