Αληθινη Athenian Democracy

Exiting the Metro slightly ahead of me today were a well-dressed, slightly-older than middle-aged couple. At the top of the escalator they made a strange movement which, when I reached the top, I decided to investigate. In the end it was the most banal, yet most optimistic, thing I had seen in a while: they had left their Metro ticket stuck to the bar at the top of the 'down' escalator, so that anyone entering could take it and use it. Athens Metro tickets have a time limit of one hour and a half so you can have unlimited travel during that period. If, of course, your journey takes ten minutes, then there is still another eighty minutes of use left on it. Moments before, I had seen such a ticket sticking out of the validation machine at the entrance to the station proper, and for the self-same reason. I had learned about this practice some days before, and ever since then I have been offering my partially-used ticket to anyone entering as I was leaving.

On the face of it are a couple of things: it is, of course, illegal. Secondly, the tickets only cost one Euro, well within the means of (almost) anyone. Thirdly, the Athens Metro system (and its associated Proastiakos (suburban) railway), is very good; new stations have been constructed sensitively around the cornucopia of ancient ruins that live underneath the Athens asphalt, many of the trains are new, run on time (...Mussolini would be very proud...), and it is being extended, in all directions, in an intelligent way. All of this takes investment and, of course, one of the ways in which that money is raised is via the sale of tickets to travelers. On the face of it, then, this practice of 'ticket sharing' is harming all of this.

On the face of it...

I've been in Greece for the last two months or so, and I have heard, first-, second- and third-hand a collection of horror stories about life in a country that has been declared "toxic" by the IMF and the EU. I know someone who has been given two choices, either to lose her job now, or to work until Christmas but only being paid every other month; an acquaintance who works so many hours (10 a.m. until 10 p.m is not uncommon for him) that he is seriously considering giving up working for a while; a friend who has been paying the loan on his car assiduously for several years but who, upon missing one payment, is telephoned by the bank continually and without respite and threatened with all sorts of legal and beaurocratic comeback; someone else was told repeatedly that he would be paid 'next month' (and this went on for four months) until, one day, he was told that the company was bankrupt and that he and his colleagues were out of a job and, of course, the promised salaries had disappeared into thin air; another acquaintance and his partner were told that their insurance policies had likewise gone up in smoke because the bank they had been paying them into all of these years went under without a trace, and without warning.

What all of these people have in common is that they belong to "Η Γενιά των 700 ευρώ", the "¢700 generation" (read more about it here http://g700.blogspot.com/) (yes, I know; it's now a "sociological phenomenon" with a label blah blah...forget that for the moment...). With the IMF (the "Troika") flying in this month to give the Greek government a pat on the back for getting down on their knees so quickly, with the "voices of reason" urging 'caution', and 'tightening the belts' and 'pragmatism' so loudly, that generation is slowly, but surely, having its own voice drowned out. For obvious and understandable reasons (riot police and, hey, summer is here after all!) the steam has gone out of the post-'Alexis' anisyxia. So...

So...you do what you can do; give away your unused Metro tickets; the people taking them are the people who most need them. But they are also the people who most appreciate them, who will see that it is not just they who understand what is happening, but that the well-dressed, slightly-older than middle-aged couple still remember what it is like to belong to the "¢700 generation."

Everything's amazing...and nobody's happy...

"Perception Is Truth..."

people often say. No, it isn't. Truth is truth, and unless your perception coincides with what is true, then your perception is, quite simply, wrong.

This phrase, "perception is truth", was the maxim of my previous boss; outwardly, and being charitable, it is a nice, liberal, inclusive, all-encompassing idea. It's like the liberal idea of tolerance...which turns out to be fundamentally ILliberal: tolerating every opinion, every viewpoint, means de facto giving them all equal weight, equal validity which, in effect, means abandoning all criteria for judging between different opinions, and becoming unable, simply, to sort out the wheat from the chaff. When it comes to opinions about mayonnaise, it doesn't really matter; however, when it comes to anything substantial, the implications are enormous. You must (logically) en up tolerating the intolerable, accepting anything...even to the point of accepting those views which seek to suppress yours and you. "How do you see things? Let's listen to you and we'll talk about it." If other people en masse 'perceive' you to be wrong, then clearly you have a problem; if they 'perceive' you to be correct, it is because you are telling people what they already believe about things they already accept.So, it turns out, only certain 'perceptions' are 'truth.'

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2005/percipi-est-esse/

In reality, it is a placebo, a way of inducing acceptance of the status quo. What is my perception of what is happening in Greece? In Thailand? It turns out that my perception of these events, if it doesn't accord with what economists want my perception to be, then I am somehow mis-perceiving; my viewpoint, my opinion, is still valid, of course, still welcomed, my voice is still listened to...but wrong. If, however, my perception does fall into line with what the clearing banks and the credit agencies, the IMF and the EU say, then I am seeing things clearly. John Pilger, then, must quite simply be wrong, but isn't it great that he's allowed to express his opinion. John Stuart Mill would be proud...

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/greece-pilger-britain-imf

Eons ago, the Scottish Philosopher David Hume explained what he called the 'is/ought gap': facts are facts, and values are values. Ethical principles cannot be decided by appeal to empirical reality. Morality, in short, cannot be made a slave to what actually is the state of affairs in the world. The point of ethics is to determine what OUGHT to be the case, not to reflect what IS the case; once you even begin to allow facts to determine ethical principles, then you are caught up in the same logic as that expressed above, viz., that you have to accept that whatever IS happening must, by dint of the fact that it is happening, OUGHT to happen. Simply, however, irrespective of how things are, certain things are wrong, and certain things are right. No matter how many Palestinian bodies the Israelis pile up, killing is still wrong; statistics are not going to settle the issue. One life taken or a thousand will not change the morality of the issue. What is sauce for the goose, however, is sauce for the gander: state execution (with or without a 'fair' trial) is wrong, no matter how much under pressure Hamas feels it is, no matter how many Israeli collaborators they uncover. No matter how large the debt run up by the Greek government, an office worker in Lamia is still not responsible for it. Whether that debt is one euro or a billion, "austerity measures" that 'target' this office worker are wrong.

However...all of this is just my perception. It turns out that I have been listening to the Rong Radio Station....

Beirut...with rose-tinted musical spectacles....

No Comment Needed...

For Sale...

The other day I had a Couch Surfing guest for a couple of nights. I have never Couch Surfed myself (I prefer certain comforts, especially those with four or five stars attached to them...) but I occasionally enjoy hosting visitors for a number of reasons. One of those is that you are able to see your city through their eyes for a while. This guest didn't particularly want to do much except to just be in Beirut, and so one afternoon we went for a long walk: beginning in Hamra, over to Raouche, behind Verdun, down to Downtown, across to Achrafieh, Mar Mikhael, and then back again. A good five hours of treading the pavement.

Beirut is, in short, a horrible building site. Whatever it had of any beauty is now, definitively, gone. The old building behind my house (dammit, outside the back balcony of my bedroom) is now gone, replaced by a Caterpillar crushing machine and, quite soon, non-stop construction. The noise pollution is the worst I have ever experienced it, and it's all of the same ilk - jackhammers, stone-crushers, drilling. I don't even notice the traffic noise and the ceaseless car horns any longer.

And I just know that...

THIS....











....WILL BECOME THIS....












It is said that Beirut is "booming", that it is "coming into its own" again, that it is, like a Phoenix, rising from the ashes and undergoing a renaissance. Well, so it is, and it is becoming unbearable. If you have bottomless pockets of cash, and a penchant for doing nothing other than going from identikit trendy restaurant to identikit trendy bar before rounding off the evening in an American-style shopping mall then you can, for a while, forget about all of the construction work defacing the city.

This choice is, however, Sophie's Choice.

Funny Farm