When Hillary Clinton, speaking on the recent election in Iran and the ensuing chaos, said that people have the right for their votes to be counted and that elections must reflect the will of the people, the irony struck like lightning: In our “best in the world” democracy, Bush became president with lesser votes and after the Supreme Court had to intervene on his behalf in a very Ayatollah-like manner. Eight years later, Hillary lost the Democratic nomination to Obama, although she won the popular vote!

In the recent past, not a few times has our country acquired the flavor of …an “Islamic” Republic! John David Ashcroft had the breasts of Justice covered on a painting used as his background while addressing the press, same way a few years ago Iranians at a conference in a Cyprus Hotel demanded the statues of Aphrodite and other seminude goddesses be covered (Aphrodite with burqa)! Some extremely “religious” groups in the US threatened to sue NBC because when transmitting the Athens Olympics opening ceremony, it didn’t censure the part with the goddesses parading topless! Prior to the war in Iraq, the incarnation of failure, Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Ayatollah instead of Secretary of Defense, would send memos to President Bush on the planning of the invasion accompanied with Biblical verse (perhaps the first case of official “religious” doping in the government of a western country – too bad the International Olympic Committee had no jurisdiction on US politics!) the very moment the US was supposedly fighting the incited by various mullahs terrorism against us! Was (mullah) Rumsfeld different from those mullahs that cite similar verse when they send their youth to commit crimes against …infidels?

Watching the movie “Recount” once more, a few nights ago, then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris appeared to believe that she somehow had become the reincarnation of Queen Ruth from the Biblical story, destined to …save the American people even if she had to perish along the way. Unfortunately for the American people, she didn’t perish, instead she helped the country to almost perish by assuring that the presidency would go to Bush (she was later awarded a congressional seat for that – well, not a Ruth-like status, but not bad either, since perishing was out of the question!)

The list could go on for ever, but I know there is so much we can all have if reminded of what we let our “leaders” put us through, of all those “miraculous” deeds that brought us to where we are now. Hopefully we are also reaching the limit in the amount of bullshit we can take from our country’s leadership and start reacting when our intelligence gets insulted in such a clear-cut way.

Speaking of intelligence and bullshit, I was recently asked by a publication to contribute a piece on what I think Hellenism is about! The problem is that Hellenism cannot be thought about; it’s something that requires apophaticism; going beyond what the linguistic, and by extension, intellectual, capabilities of ours can express; in other words, we must enter the ambit of experience and there we might attempt to make some sense of what that outer space will wordlessly proclaim. Besides, when you talk about Hellenism in English it is true that the first thing that comes to mind is ….Hell! Last December’s riots in Athens and other major cities and the havoc they created seemed to verify that approach.

I don’t know, but we Hellenes, of all generations and epochs, have managed to make history – not just write it – both in times of glory and during our falls. It seems as if triumph and failure, happiness and tragedy, were not just happening, as is life’s norm. In our case they were sought after, sometimes with the same fervor (it sounds masochistic, but again, words are not what they seem once you go beyond them). Traces of this “trend” can be found everywhere, at the recent riots, the seemingly hopeless repetition of rituals in the form of traditions, the spark of the eye besides the perfect naiveté displayed on the surface, the beauty and the beast of our entrepreneurial spirit!

What I feel about Hellenism is a hopefully-desperate optimism which transcends reality by negating the current state of things as superficial, fake, and even too good to be true. It’s a Sisyphean practice that draws its faith to success by the fact that it’s taking place not in the underworld, but in real time, providing this reality is seen beyond the very word’s mundane overuses.

Happy summer to all!

DEMETRIOS RHOMPOTIS
dondemetrio@neomagazine.com

P.S. I ‘m not sure it was a good idea for the Greek authorities to deliberately highlight the dispute with the Brits for the stolen Parthenon Marbles at the inauguration of the New Acropolis Museum. I believe it took much from the event itself, while projecting the country again as a Balkan noisemaker, asking for things others took from her, etc. The event was a first-class opportunity for Greece to show a confident, powerful, self-assured, culturally leading image similar to that she displayed at the 2004 Olympic Games (imagine if they would use the Games to talk about the Cyprus issue, the Turkish threats in the Aegean, FYROM or the stolen Parthenon Marbles). When you are complaining, nagging about things even in moments of glory, people get the wrong impression and they get tired of you. Let the international media raise the issue (as they did without Greece’s help) by pointing to the empty space where the stolen marbles would have been placed, had Britain done the right thing and returned them to Greece.