Today, I received a visit from Dr. Vilaremetaftia Kolodaktilo. As regular readers of this Web log will recall, Dr. Kolodaktilo was once the Principal Secondary Assistant Mattachine Attaché for High Culture at the Greek Embassy here in Washington. Those readers may also recall that was several years ago, and under a different Greek government. Like all successful diplomats, however, Dr. Kolodaktilo is a consummate survivor, and today he has assumed a new position and, I might add, a new role with the recently incumbent Greek regime. His current title, still at the Greek Embassy here in Washington, is Second Primary Under Assistant Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, USA Station. This allowed him to remain inside the Beltway, a place to which he has become accustomed, and, truth be told, a place he is quite a bit more fond of than Athens, a city which no less a connoisseur of urbane habitats than Gore Vidal has pronounced decidedly dreary; not to mention impoverished, chaotic and desperate of late, also. And so it was, as the readers of this Web log are no doubt well aware, they being of the most intelligent, well-informed, erudite examples of the human species, that Dr. Kolodaktilo came to me himself a most desperate individual, seeking to save Greece from a terrible fate of penury and chaos. Not that he would, by any means, admit that.
“Tom,” he complained as he chose the chair immediately in front of my desk, “the European Union’s lack of respect for Greece has, I’m afraid, gone quite beyond the Pale lately.”
“Is it really a lack of respect?” I inquired with a studied air of skepticism.
“Of course,” he insisted, “what else could it be?”
“Well,” I offered, “look at the facts. First, Greece goes broke…”
“That wasn’t our fault!” Dr. Kolodaktilo protested. “It was the those condescending bastards in Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels! They, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, of course.”
“There’s more than enough blame to go around,” I assured him. “Whatever the causes, you must admit Greece was on the brink of default, only to be rescued by the European Union with massive bailouts in exchange for extensive economic reforms.”
“Yes, yes, all right,” he conceded while waving his hands dismissively, “sure, Greece was over a barrel, as you Americans like to say. It was like AIG and Lehman Brothers and Freddie Mac and Citibank and the rest of the Wall Street wolves preying on the home owners of America in 2007. Greece never had any more of a chance than they did!”
“Maybe,” I dryly responded, “and maybe not. Nevertheless, in return for all that money from your European Union brethren, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Greece agreed to a number of austerity measures and economic reforms. Greeks were supposed to actually start paying taxes, for example, and cut down the size of the enormous Greek black market economy, which some estimate to exceed the legal economy by an order of magnitude. You agreed to take serious measures to curb government corruption in Greece, the total proceeds of which amount to over five percent of your nation’s GDP. You agreed to curb exorbitant government employee salaries. You claimed you would reign in extravagant government employee expense account and government credit card abuses that were adding an average of sixty percent to operational overhead to Greek governmental budgets, ranging from the local sphere all the way to the national. You were going to stop double-dipping, featherbedding, patronage, nepotism and no-show government jobs. You were supposed to eliminate kickbacks in the Greek health care system. You claimed you were going to something about Greek early retirement, which generally meant getting seventy percent pay for life at the age of forty. You claimed you would reform Greek bankruptcy laws so filthy rich dead beats with bought-and-paid-for friends in high places can’t exploit them to avoid creditors and hide their ill-gotten gains as laundered dollar deposits in secret Turks and Caicos bank accounts. You signed off on comprehensive labor union reforms that guaranteed a fair deal for the Greek workers and saw to it their union dues paid for training, safety and honest representation instead of whores, cocaine and limousines. And, you said you were going to make doing business in Greece less than impossible for foreign companies, too, as I recall.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dr. Kolodaktilo shrugged, “we agreed to a lot of crazy stuff. They had a gun to our heads, so to speak. In that position, we had to say we’d go along with anything they wanted.”
“But you didn’t,” I noted.
“Of course not,” he chuckled. “What did they think we are, a bunch of blockheaded Danes?”
“So instead,” I continued, “you elected a new government, headed by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, a red-diaper baby straight out of the Communist Youth League, who got elected to the Greek Parliament running as a candidate of the Coalition of the Radical Left.”
“True,” Dr. Kolodaktilo sniffed. “Circumstance and fate can make for strange bedfellows. But in politics, as well as economics, one must be… pragmatic.”
“And Tsipras,” I pressed on, “drunk with power and intoxicated by the approving roar of the mob, immediately thumbed his nose at the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF. He told them to fold their reforms until they were all corners and put them where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“And the Greek people love him for it!” Dr. Kolodaktilo proudly proclaimed.
“At least the ones,” I shot back, “who work for the government, trade in the black market, deal in corruption, exploit the working class, game the bankruptcy system to escape debts run up in shady business deals, smuggle, steal, commit fraud, malinger and evade paying their taxes.”
“Correct,” he smirked, “just like here in America. Everybody has their own definition of success.”
“Except,” I pointed out, “that Prime Minister Tsipras’ strategy of pushing his admiring constituents to party on with ever greater excess while simultaneously showing his arse to his nation’s creditors has left Greece about to completely run out of money in approximately three weeks.”
“Yes,” Dr. Kolodaktilo, suddenly less sanguine, agreed. “Which is why he went to see Putin.”
“And we both know how that went,” I reminded him.
“Putin,” he sighed, “turned his pockets inside out and told Tsipras that, no matter how much fun it might be for Russia to stick a thumb in the West’s eye, because of the Ukraine sanctions and the oil price crash he has no money to lend us.”
“And consequently,” I observed, “the next thing he does is tell Germany it owes Greece three hundred billion dollars in reparations for World War II.”
“What else could he do?” Dr. Kolodaktilo asked in his best rhetorical tone. “And in fact, that’s why I’m here. The Germans replied that they finished paying off all the World War II reparations they owed to Greece in 1960 and that the Greek demand is totally stupid.”
“And you want me to do what?” I asked.
“I want you,” Dr. Kolodaktilo confided with a conspiratorial snicker, “to give me some ideas on how to get the Germans to shut up and pay up.”
“Because if they do,” I inquired, “that two hundred and eighty billion Euros will just about cover the bill you Greeks ran up riding the gravy train to the poorhouse, huh?”
“A pleasant coincidence,” he allowed, “although I wouldn’t put it quite that way, exactly. So – what should we do?”
“Well, first of all,” I began, “you need to grab ten or twenty million dollars out of your… um… back pocket… and start a motion picture production company in Hollywood. Staff it with the best Greek movie producers you have and tell them to start accepting pitches for Nazi scripts with a Greek angle.”
“A Greek angle?” Dr. Kolodaktilo wondered. “What do you mean by that?”
“Stuff like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin for instance,” I explained. “It’s got Nazis, it happens in Greece, and it’s about World War II. It’s a perfect example of a typical Christmas Nazi movie with a Greek angle.”
“Christmas Nazi movie?” Dr. Kolodaktilo stared at me, uncomprehending.
“Sure,” I elaborated, “Americans love Nazi movies for Christmas. They eat them up like hot salted popcorn drenched in coconut oil flavored with butyric acid.”
“Popcorn? Butyric acid?” Dr. Kolodaltilo’s expression let me know he was completely confused.
“American movie theater popcorn,” I informed him, “gets its unique flavor and mouth feel from using an artificial butter substitute made from coconut oil and butyric acid. And there’s nothing Americans like better than pigging out on it while watching a good Nazi movie at Christmas time.”
“That is an aspect of American culture,” he confessed, “of which I was previously unaware.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I reminded him. “You get a Greek production company in Hollywood going and buy a half dozen options on Nazi movies with a Greek angle, and I guarantee, the Germans will defecate bricks – gold bullion bricks – because they know from experience what Jews like Steven Spielberg did to them with Nazi movies.”
“Steven Spielberg Nazi movies?” Dr. Kolodaktilo exclaimed. “How could we possibly manage to create one of those?”
“Create?” I responded. “In my humble opinion, a more accurate word would be ‘manufacture.’ It’s crap – ah… craft… not art, okay? Just make sure the scripts you option read like a cheap comic book populated by shallow, two-dimensional characters whose portrayal by mediocre actors like Harrison Ford would insult the intelligence of a high school sophomore, and you’re gonna gross eight figures at the box office, no problem.”
“Eight figures?” Dr. Kolodaktilo suddenly perked up. “Certainly, a few hundred million dollars would be helpful, but it’s a far cry from…”
“No, no,” I interrupted, “you’re missing the point. Setting up a Greek motion picture production company to make Nazi movies would be like a filibuster in the US Senate.”
“How so?” Dr. Kolodaktilo knit his brow uncertainly.
“Before the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress,” I related, “the Democrats in the Senate would occasionally introduce some legislation or another that President Obama liked. And as soon as they saw it coming, the Senate Republicans would stop it with a filibuster. But none of them actually got up on the floor of the Senate and yakked their heads off for ten or fifteen hours, like senators used to do back in the day. No, the modern, or perhaps I should say, the contemporary filibuster consists merely of the threat to stand up on the floor of the Senate and shoot your mouth off until your eyeballs are floating and your bladder is about to burst. And that’s all Greece would have to do – threaten to produce Christmas Nazi movies with a Greek angle, because the mere threat of it will be enough to get the Germans to knuckle under and pay you three hundred billion dollars just to avoid the embarrassment.”
“Okay,” Dr. Kolodaktilo nodded, “I get it now. We Greeks set up a Nazi movie franchise in Hollywood, just like the one the Jews have had there for the last seventy-five years.”
“Except,” I emphasized, “if you play your cards right, you won’t even have to actually make any Nazi movies. Just threaten to, that’s all.”
“Excellent!” Dr. Kolodaktilo exclaimed, rubbing his hands together in a fit of excited enthusiasm. “Do you, perchance, have any other such brilliant ideas?”
“How about atrocity tourism?” I suggested. “It’s big-time business in places like Rwanda, Cambodia, and Thailand – even in the United States at places like Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Why not give popular spots like Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen some competition in Greece? Let it be known in Berlin that Greece will start offering package tours of Greek World War II German atrocity sites. And make sure you call them ‘German’ atrocity sites, instead of ‘Nazi’ atrocity sites, so you really rub their noses in it. You have plenty of material to work with, that’s for sure – the Kandanos Massacre in Crete, the Rape of Viannos, the Kalavryta Incident… why, you Greeks have more German atrocity tourism destinations than you have varieties of olives.”
“I see, I see, yes,” he fulminated. “This… this… is… extremely exciting, just to think about – what exquisite shame we can heap on the Germans if they don’t give us those reparations!”
“Then there’s the theme parks,” I embellished. “Have your government cook up a deal with Disney and Universal Studios, and hire technical advisors from the Holocaust Museum down on the Mall. ‘Get Invaded at Hitlerland in sunny Thessalonia.’ How’s that sound?”
“It sounds like the Germans coughing up three hundred billion dollars!” he exulted. “This is… fantastic! What else could I ask for?”
“How about battle re-enactments?” I said. “They’re very, very big around here you know. We’ve got Gettysburg, Williamsburg, Yorktown, War of 1812, you name it. Huge tourist attractions. Picture how red in the face the Germans will get when you stage your own re-enactments of the Greek and Yugoslav Counteroffensive, the Metaxas Campaign, the Battle of the Olympus Pass…”
“Yes! Yes!” Dr. Kolodaktilo shouted, jumping up from his seat. “That’s it! By God, Collins, you are every bit the genius they say you are! Why, we won’t even have to lift a finger to really do any of this – all we will have to do is let the Germans know we are thinking about it!”
“More or less,” I concurred. “Desperate times, after all, call for desperate measures.”