A redneck in Athens

National Review, April 16, 1990 by D. Keith Mano

FLEW Olympic to Athens, the lady wife and me, each plane named for a Greek d or hero. (Icarus was overdue.) I admit it is kinda unsettlin' the way Greek folk applaud when you come down safe-as if this was some 50-50 proposition maybe. Scary, too, comin' across a tank parked outside Athens airport. Fact is, since Mr. Reagan said, "Don't give 'em no target, see America first," there hasn't been much U.S. tourism in Greece. I can understand it: we went Olympic so as to pass for Mediterranean-type people. Mind now, I'd die for the red, white, and blue-but I'll convert to Canadian before I squat forever in a little room listenin' at some haywire terrorist talk Allah. Nathan Hale had it easy.

Athens is sure a striking town. The airport was on strike when we got there. Cabbies, buses, and museums went out next. They even shut down the Acropolis one full day-and Athens without an Acropolis might as well be downtown Burbank at best. January, February, we was told, is strike season in Greece. Union elections come up about then, so if you're the Acropolis Local #383 shop steward and you haven't struck, you're less use than seaweed wrap on dysentery.

Truth to say, I prefer an Athens cabdriver when he is on strike. Honest boondoogle like that I can forgive. You've heard tell about wildcat strikes? A Greek cabbie will go out on wildcat employment. Roof light lit, roof light off, it don't matter, he won't stop for no sake. Unless he got four people and one mattress aboard already then, screek, he'll halt on a drachma. Of course, you could blow out your hernia patch before he'd bend down for any suitcase. And what the meter say, might be his cholesterol level or some lottery number, it sure isn't your fare. No sir, an "extra rate" is in effect just that day. Greek folk hope the 1996 Olympic to-do gets set down in their capital. After all, that first Marathon man, back around 490 B.C., was a messenger no cabbie would pull over for. Very special Olympics it is going to be.

The weather was fine, what-all we could see of her. Blue-black smog is hunkered down over Athens like five o'clock shadow on a psychotic. After one hour outside my left eye grew burning glaucoma over it. And this was in the off-peak season. Ten thousand orange trees bloom and squeeze off grey-bottomed fruit-not even homeless folk will eat it. The water supply is set to give notice. One hundred thousand more people move into Athens each year. Old Homer would've sung about the prune-juice colored ocean. It is altogether comforting when you come across such American problems abroad. A great tribute, I guess, to the Marshall Plan.

Worse yet, there is no history in Athens. Yup, you heard me. The very thing I hauled myself five thousand miles to see it don't have at all. Natch there is your strikebound Acropolis and a good museum or so (all the excavatin' done, it seems, by non-greek archaeologists). You can drive north to Delphi or south to Mycenae, both fun. But between Plato and, oh, last April, Athens is Houston, Texas. My guide book says right here: "you'll find hardly a monument to attest to the city's history for the past 18 centuries." Eighteen double 0 and nothing. Nothing since hardly Christ was born. Until about 1850 Athens was a village of five thousand people and the Parthenon. Now there are over three and a half million people and scarce one church worth visitin' other than on Sunday. This I figure's a tourist fraud of felony size, and someone should print a retraction.

O' course, the wife and me went to this guaranteed authentic folk-dance bouzoukia. (There wasn't no decent Greek coffee shop like you can find on Broadway.) We heard bouzouki plunk and saw native folk with a door knob stuck on each shoetip frolic and jump in the pleasant native way. But again we got fobbed off. This bouzoukia stuff is Anatolian and Balkan in origin, the guide book says, and only come to Athens around 1920. By that standard of ancientness Woodrow Wilson would be Moses himself Moreover, when we least expect it, zammo, out pops a belly dancer, lookin' not near as well as Mrs. Brookhiser does, I'm sure. Right in front of the women and children. Well, I hid my eyes. Nakedness I can bear: this is 1990 after all. But folk nakedness will make me blush every time. No tellin' what half-sane custom might rear up in a country where Ouzo is the national drink. Tastes as though someone come and shellacked your palate with lipstick. I will not speculate what an Ouzo hangover feels like.

Met this U.S. expatriate readin' Siddhartha near the university which was on strike. He put it all in perspective like "There is so much energy here," he said, "but no one knows what to do with it. Democracy, socialism, free market, planned economy? They have no consensus for anything. There is just constant frustration." I reckon that says it loud and clear.

Lest I get hit with an ethnic bias charge, I confess t'being Greek myself. Everyone sure thought I looked authentic. Special when my wife bought me some worry beads for my own self. This here secular rosary, so to speak, is a great invention ranking right up with Oedipus and souvlaki. You grip the doohickus in one hand and flip her around, clack-clack, like some cop with his nightstick. Better than Valium.