Ordinary Stories of (Un)Ordinary Lives

About a year ago, I was walking through downtown Athens, lovingly stepping over homeless dudes, heaps of garbage and sidestepping stones and Molotov cocktails.  Dodging a cop’s night-stick, my gaze fell on one of the gazillions of posters put up by ‘disgruntled youf’ in Greece.  By ‘disgruntled youf’ of course I mean unemployed/bored and/or slightly malcontent people between the ages of 17-30, half of whom should be at home doing their homework or actually IN their classroom, and the other half trying to find a job.  In other words, ‘neo-leftists.’  But I digress.

Looking at this poster, I realized that beyond the asinine calls for releasing some dude who had completely destroyed another dude’s corner-store in the name of liberty, fraternity and cheaper cell phone rates, this fucking poster actually had some pretty badass art going on.  Someone in this city had actually put some effort into photoshop’ing the SHIT out of the riot cop who was depicted on it smashing some person’s face in with his boom stick…  Nice!  ‘Artistic integrity’ was all over this poster.  Soon, I noticed that there were dozens of amazing posters illegally plastered all over my fair city, turning it into a potpourri or not-so-good-to-fucking-brilliant street art.  Kind of like an urban Deviant Art with less titties and more hammers and sickles liberally sprinkled into the mix.  I concluded that these were heady times and got back to my normal daily routine of talking shit about the government while doing absolutely nothing about anything other than looking for a job in another continent (which I finally found and here I am…!).

Months later, it was December of 2008, and all hell broke loose in the thrice-blessed city of Athens.  Everyone decided it was time to spring clean the downtown areas, and that paint thinner was their cleaning agent of choice.  Meanwhile the police was at their annual ‘Dazed And Confused/Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ Double-bill social mixer so apparently did not realize the enormity of the rioting situation until… the City Christmas Tree/Ent was burned down causing untold dozens shame and horror at losing something used pretty much only to keep the rain off of two homeless Somali dudes at night.

After the riots, I showed up in the fair city of Athena, trying to get my vacation on.  And boy did I.  (That’s ANOTHER blog right there…)  But I noticed that there was something missing from the street art.  THE ART.  Most posters were now just a long litany of inane horse-shit trying to get parents and other grown-ups to forget that 99% of people under the age of 30 these days simply suffer from ennui, and a good daily dose of being beaten with a wet hose while in a burlap sack would rid them of their existential angst, break their fingers so they can stop twittering and sending SMS messages, and maybe open a newspaper to get a job cause there’s a few Everests out there who need an extra pair of sweet, sweet sandwich-wrapping hands.  (Excuse the long sentence; it’s the stream of consciousness again…)  I would include myself in this group but I am in Africa trying to avoid polio, hepatitis E, hoof and mouth, cholera, collapsing buildings, falling planes and stray 7.62s.  Meaning I consider myself chastised and muted these days…  Still, if I was there, like I said, I would dutifully show up for the beatings and bring my own hose.

So the art was gone.  Gone were my photoshop’ed riot cops, quasi-Soviet monumental art of hot babes in bandanas, pine-apple grenades, and random pictures of 14 year olds wearing Palestinian scarves.  In their place were polite graffiti asking for the release of ‘political’ hostages, mathematics (1 Policeman = 1 Bullet), and naturally, lots of sports graffiti, because no matter what happens in society, 7,13,21 and 4 are just as important as health, education, law and the environment.

I am sorry that the art has gone from the posters.  It was good when anarchy was artistic.  The permeation of innovation and creativity in Greece’s left was a sign that maybe ideas would change after more than 50 years of the same crap.  I dislike the Greek political right; it’s become a bunch of small-dicked fat dudes trying to get jobs for their cousins from the village in the ‘big city.’  But the left has been hitting them over the head with ridiculous ideas and the worst of it is that while you can’t blame the leaders of the left (Papariga and the other assholes) because they’re just doing their job to get paid, the messages they pass to the ‘disgruntled youf’ were showing their age about 20 years ago.  Today they’re so old someone should be digging them up in Alberta and carbon-dating them…

I say bring the art back, and let innovation and ideas trickle back to Greece’s youth in a more constructive manner.  Because we gotta do something to make it better for all the tripped out drug-addicts downtown.  What the hell will they trip on now that the art has gone?  Pepper-spray?

Note:  Some may say that I am mixing up anarchy/ists and leftism/sts.  Yup!  In my view, there is an unhealthy lack of distinction between the two in Greece among young people.  Mostly I think it’s because most young people choose a belief based mostly on an attempt to make sweet loving to that hot babe/dude who’s spouting the same shit in their University class.  And that’s fine.  Because if they didn’t do that, they wouldn’t be young people.  But that’s only cool until a certain age.  After that, it’s not prudent to not read and be able to distinguish between Marx and Bakunin.  Bakunin was scary.  Marx was just German.

For years and years, everyone’s older grandma and auntie from the ‘burbs in Greece would exclaim with horror the above, comparing Greek realities to that of Uganda in the 80’s and 90’s: Civil war, atrocities, insecurity and human suffering counted in the millions.

It seems to me after one year of living in Uganda that over the last few years, we’re trading ‘realities’ between the two countries. Gone are the days of mass unrest and war in Uganda, to be replaced with endemic, almost professional corruption in government, horrific urban sprawl, environmental degradation, geo-electoral politics and district manipulations, and monstrous down-town Kampala shopping centers calculated to fatten up a politician’s pocket, rather than input into the local economy or raise the economic indicators of a specific area. The capital city and its environs are benefiting from years of humanitarian and developmental aid, much like Greece in the 80s and 90s hijacked almost all of the European development funding for ridiculous horse-shit in Attica, leaving 95% of the country to wallow in its pig farms, dying island communities and dangerous roads. We laugh at the pace that the Ugandans have to enlarge the Kampala-Gulu road (about 300 kilometers) but that’s a mistake when we see how long it’s taken to build the Egnatia Odos in northern Greece. Difficult to complete a project when half the money is badly managed. Like a retarded child trying to finish a finger-painting while eating the paints. And like the Olympics, Uganda had its CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) in 2007. They must have had Greek advisors, because all it meant was monstrous hotels being built (which now enjoy a significant 5% occupancy rate), roads being ‘remade’ (not all pot-holed again), and, in true Greek spirit, the whole issue benefiting everyone except the citizens of Uganda. (Remember having only one lane in Athens?)

In Greece, the European funds are almost over. Patience is over, the Olympics are over, our terrorists are back, the US State Dept. actually name-drops Exarchia as a no-go area. Wow. Exarchia now has its place in history, much like Karachi, Fallujah and the Al-Halili marketplace in Egypt. Good on us! Our cops are a bunch of fat 45 year olds who were shoved into the force because their mother’s uncle’s cousin’s farming cooperative partner knew a dude in the General Directorate of Fat Uneducated Bastards Who Need Work. When they’re ‘the new breed’ of cop, they are disgruntled 22 year old rural bumpkins who are so fed up at their lack of opportunities (remember that lack of rural development?) that they’re now in the cities and ready to take their revenge, by making sure University students (that ageless caricature of an urbanite) get ‘theirs.’

Last week, the newspapers in Uganda ran an article shitting on the government for the poor quality of its health monitoring of agricultural products, which is why such a green, verdant, agro-based economy like Uganda doesn’t export didley-shit to neighboring African countries or Europe. Sound familiar, DELTA/FAGE/EVGA? When downtown marketplaces burn down, the fire service is too late, or too underfunded. Sound familiar, western Peloponnese? I don’t know how Uganda keeps following the Greek model, because our own country can’t see fit to even place an embassy in Kampala, and has to make sure The Stamp of Authority rests safely in the hands of a (admittedly) very nice, but Very African Congolese-Greek who runs a coffee factory and is gone half the year. So I want to know: where are all these Greek development advisers who seem to be telling Kampala how to make Uganda in our own image, while sending back information on how to ruin a country, destroy everything dear, and completely disembowel the political system’s legitimacy with its European neighbors, Middle Eastern partners, and closest neighbors ‘to the east.’

We’ve even got a military relationship. Just in the same way Greece half-assed its way through a ‘regional security intervention’ in Albania in the mid-90’s, so did Uganda just half-ass its way through three months of “Operation Lightning Thunder” in northern DRC, in order to finish something that started on its soil. Just in the same way Greece didn’t want to prop up Albania when it needed it, Uganda kept fucking with DRC for years, invading it and destabilizing its capital. And all of a sudden, it found it needed its support. Too late, guys! Welcome to the reality of the regional monster you created.

And, true to form, Uganda is now picking on Kenya regarding… A DISPUTED ISLAND OF ONE ACRE ON THE BORDERS BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES!

We’re not becoming like Uganda, in fact… they’re becoming like us… Poor, poor Ugandans.

Note to self: buy stocks in feta cheese… can’t be long before Uganda starts trying to market it.