I get asked this too often for humor when people find out where we are going.
Riots=Greece. I think my dad might say, "What's a visit to Greece without some rioting?" He finds--what's the word?--sardonic? things to say like that. My sister and I call these slightly inappropriate, but layered-funny statements "Dadisms." Yes, it is meant to look like sadism. Not that he is always a satirical guy. He's just loves incongruity and finds convoluted ways to express it.
I think underneath all that, especially regarding culture (including American culture), is long experience with what I call 'culture clash moments': This when you simply don't get something, you need to, and you just make fun of it to keep your sanity. Also, my parents seem to have ended up in the middle of coups....a shah deposed in Kabul, Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, a disagreement on a bus in Denmark (that probably made the Copenhagen paper), IX XI in NYC...
My dad, as well-traveled as he is, can't learn languages to save himself from a riot. When we lived in Greece, all he could say was "portokolada" which he thought was "please" (parakalo). He was actually saying to innocent bystanding Greeks, "Orange soda, where is the toilet?" My mom, exceptionally good at languages, smoothed things over; she sure was fluent when driving in traffic in Thessaloniki when I was young. It was part of it; it was almost expected. You were less acceptable if you didn't yell Greek imprecations on the head of a taxi driver, or give the disgusted flick of the head. It is part of the conversation of the polis.
Riots in Greece...I do know that the Greeks let it out when they feel it, and then they move on and enjoy their leisure and their friendships. I know the youth in Greece are, of course, a frustrated lot...they see themselves as paying for the sins of their elders (like the fairy tale of a budget that simultaneously got them into the EU and hot water). What the truth is, or the complexities are, I don't really understand. I just know they have Joseph Pieper's leisure down in some way, but infrastructure? The work-a-day world? Just think opposite of the most Germanic German you can fathom. There you go.
Besides, Athens is in some way a riot everyday--at least from a Germanic/American/British perspective. Traffic laws? Signomi? Thencatalavenete. My childhood and longstanding friend who knows Greece well and is German-Austrian, explained it: "The worst traffic bungles are in countries that pride themselves on following rules. You see, they are expecting others to follow rules--and when someone doesn't? They aren't paying attention. But Athens? You have got to be paying attention every second and driving like you'd drive through a obstacle course with cliffs on either edge, because that's what you're basically doing. Everyone is extremely offensive and defensive...so the serious tangles are fewer."
Just watch a bunch of Americans queuing with a bunch of Greeks. Americans: stiff, offended cats in as straight a line as possible, wanting to punch but keeping it in to fuel the competition for top sales, and Greeks: flies buzzing around meat, having the fight outright.
I think of Euripedes' The Bacchae when I think of Athens and rioting. I think the play is really about an order that drowns out proper outlet of feeling: Dionysus, a 'new' god of feasting and--well, Mardi Gras outletting--is refused a place in the Polis because he is suspect. Law, not passion, says the ruler, only reason and not emotion--that's for the women. The ruler is punished as the god takes revenge by taking the said women out of the city and driving them mad. They rip the ruler to shreds. Thus, in the oneiric world of ancient Greek morals, those who rely too much on law and force to create order, those who banish the passions and the feasting as threats to proper traffic, are themselves ripped to shreds.
Rioting is the Bacchic spirit taking revenge on the city--something has no outlet that needs it--government has been false or oppressive, or the culture itself has become fractured and incoherent. Madness has to be occurring, somewhere. The city is mad--and multiplied laws cannot heal it.
So I grieve for Greece, as I grieve for American cities with rioting. The arts, culture, leisure, education cannot flourish in a polis like this. Better to have Dionysus somewhere within the city--a cult of renewal, proper passion (Christian Dionysus). Not sure a Dionysian government would work well, though it is an intriguing thought. It needs to be a renewal, Christ as Dionysus, a passion for truth, for the Bacchic order of Beauty and Goodness, where human beings are treated and can live as integrated emotional and rational beings with an eternal end, not cogs in large economic power structures, or used plastic bits on the rubbish heap.
I think of Greece at Easter when I think of Christian Dionysus: families would go out of the city, into the woods, and roast a lamb and celebrate the renewal of life, salvation. Baskets and families are blessed by priests cloaked for the ceremony in mystery and royalty, and then the Body of Christ is sent out to joyous reveling. I think of Christian Dionysus when I remember Greek families walking together in the evening, down the road, old mothers and young daughters like gazelles, arm-in-arm, and young men laughing and putting their arms around each other's shoulders like comrades at the end of the fray. Greeks don't have dead space between people.
Greece is much deeper than riots. These are symptoms of an infection, but not a commentary on their art of leisure and life. I intuit (might be wrong) that Greeks see the civil law as servant to the people, not people servant to it...and they don't seem to have the terrible, silent malice of a people focused on global power chess. Silence in the USSR was more frightening to me than Greece screaming at itself--at any time.
Nevertheless, I hope for everyone's sake we don't have that lesson in drama or politics (is there a difference?). Since we're going with my parents, who have a strange track record, we just might.
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