Greek government's 'democracy' is the real problem child

'The violence that spread over the past months is undermining democratic institutions." Miltiadis Papaioannou, Minister of Justice, Greece

Three guesses - this is such blatant Newspeak that you should only need one - as to whose violence the minister is referring to in this pathetic justification for a newly proposed law to more deeply monitor - and ultimately restrict - activists' internet use. According to Reuters, the law would prohibit bloggers' anonymity and even though it's not clear to me how, exactly, they can be certain of success (e.g. is Tycho Sierra a real or anonymous blogger? how would Greek government cyber spies determine that?) i say let them go ahead and try. The backlash is sure to be infintely more entertaining than watching them pull these ideas out of their debt-plagued asses. Mr. Papaioannou isn't fooling anyone with this claim about public unrest; the broad consensus i've encountered among Greeks is that if anyone is undermining democracy, it's the corrupt politicians and their business associates at the top of the financial food chain.

The EU is already at odds with Athens about proposals to its online gambling laws. Interesting, isn't it, how market liberalization is embraced at the same time that liberalism in speech is condemned? As one gaming commentor (i'll leave him as 'anonymous') wrote over a year ago, "these guys must really in trouble. they go from a total ban on electronic games to considering legalizing internet gambling in just 8 years. wow." Having now lost control of the debt to the point where their beautiful coastlines, islands and other natural resources are being sold off to private international 'developers', who better to blame for losing control of the streets than the anti-democratic hoards demanding to be heard? In all likelihood, the Ministers would say they can be heard, but only after being fingerprinted, DNA-swiped and digitally ID-ed. (Again, what does that actually mean: is the state going to assign people IP addresses? Here's an idea: let's make everyone pay for an IP license!) All i can say is that if this law does go into effect, i'll go to Gamble Greece Online (or wherever) immediately to bet in favor of more violent chaos, since that seems to be where the Greek government's competence ultimately lies. Democracy? Ain't nothin' but a word these daze - on all the Mediterranean shores.

Backpedaling in Budapest

The afternoon i arrived here, waiting for the crosstown bus to leave Keleti station, an old man oozing alcohol pheromones saw my suitcase and decided to flush out my nationality (while making pathetic attempts at slobbery hand kissing). We began with a brief exchange in Russian (unusual for an East European), then Italian, French, Deutsch - he just couldn't figure me out. He admitted not knowing any Spanish so i suggested in Hungarian that he sit down and talk with his (also quite inebriated) friend instead, which completely caught him off guard - he literally stumbled backwards and fell into a seat.

'Ah, so you are Hungarian!'

No.

'But only Hungarians know Hungarian.'

Wrong again (but thanks for the compliment on my pronunciation). 'Nem magyar vagyok.'

The bus started to move and since by then he was resigned to the fact that i wasn't going to allow any kind of welcome back foreign harlot smooching, he finally left me alone, burrowing into his friend and their dark green bottle of booze. i turned my attention to keeping my bag upright as the trolleybus rattled down Budapest's cobblestone streets and experienced a moment of light epiphany: no matter how much Hungarian i speak (that i know this language at all always seems a hilarious miracle), no matter how much time i spend here (6+ years seems like a relatively long time, for me), the truth is that i will never overcome those three simple words: Nem magyar vagyok. I'm not hungarian. How totally strange it is to have thought i was 'coming home' for a brief respite and immediately realize that home is the one thing this city - country - could never possibly be for me. Enter through the Fortress Europe Gate and epiphanies abound. Yesterday an Israeli told me, 'You don't come from an ethnic country, you'll never understand the world they way the rest of us do.'

The concept of backpedaling: if you're in motion, you'll keep going forward but without gaining any momentum. If you're at a standstill, the arm muscles have to work harder than the legs in order to keep the bike from falling over; you remain upright, but it can feel like a helluva lot of effort compared to just putting your feet on the ground until whomever you're with catches up and you're ready to move on. Figuratively, backpedaling is all about retracing words/ideas back to some point where you can diverge from the direction they first took and try another road of reason. i passed a guy on the street wearing a t-shirt that showed the borders of Hungary in 1914 with '100% Our Nation' written underneath - obviously an extreme, poorly reasoned form of backpedaling since it would involve taking control of 1/3 of poverty striken Romania and what currency conscious, sane Hungarian would possibly sanction that? The point here is that while it is possible to gain momentum when the backtracking involves a recast of historical time, in most cases this only happens in the realm of fanaticism - nationalist, religious, pick your poison - and leads to human behavior we'd all rather not dwell on. Better to not move at all than to push people forward by shoving them backward into a chimerical past.

Since i left last December, the government here has be engaged in a fair amount of historical backpedaling, changing place names everywhere i look. Moskva tér has been renamed after Széll Kalman, a man of mysterious origins since nobody i've asked has a clue about who he is, though they're all sure he at least wasn't a fascist (yes, one has to ask such things). Baross tér is now the 32nd ter, though again nobody's sure what event in '32 this is meant to commemorate and one friend couldn't even say for certain which century is being invoked. The new Ronnie the Raygun statue was placed in the shadow of the Soviet soldiers memorial, 1945 (a big of Bitburg backpedaling?), but the sad truth is that as political art, it really doesn't work without Iron Maiden Maggie standing by his side. There's also a newly unveiled memorial to victims of the Roma Holocaust, which is a good thing to remind Hungarians and others of, except that it's located in a place where very few people are actually going to see it. Oh well, it's the honest revisionism that really counts, right?

As it is with countries, so too is this usually the case with individual life histories. 'Starting over' only works by remembering which door got you into your personal hell the first time around. To come to Budapest and not get lost in the maze of what's workable for everyone else compared to what's workable for me remains a palpable challenge. If ever i've felt like a trapped little rat, a tightly leashed slave, it's been at intervals during the period i lived in this city of - ahem -

beautiful bridges. People can end up in places they never even knew existed for all sorts of reasons, some manage to carve out a place for themselves and others decide it's better to move on while they still can. Evidently i needed a solid dose of Greek sunlight (figuratively more than literally) to finally shake me free of all those shackles, escape my personal labyrinth of pointless existence: do not get comfortable, do not imagine you belong here. One thing that has become profoundly clear about my own story - especially after a few days here - is that i will probably never be as connected to any geographic location as i am to a somewhat specific array of chronological ones, mostly accessible vis a vis enduring friendships across many time zones and the explorations of different times/eras i've so often shared with these friends, from the Nevada Nuclear Test Site to the ash-covered streets of Pompeii, floating in the Dead Sea, drinking palm oil wine in a lantern-lit Lamu shack. Six months ago, i would have described this as a ridiculous, meaningless life; now i can (almost) comfortably say that it's just my life, for better or worse.

Channeling Tyche, Goddess of Fortune, it's easy at this moment to evanescently embrace the solitude that living on an island in the Danube affords, to standstill for a bit and catch my proverbial breath, electronic thumping of a saturday night in storybook party town wafting through the air as unintrusive as the currents swirling beneath the river's reflective surface. Budapest is, surely, a great city for any traveller to land in, particularly during the summer when the music industry goes utterly beserk and sidewalk cafes fill every bit of exterior pavement. i'll be starting off next week with Prince and ending it with Cheikh Lo -a heavy dose of momentum seems appropriate given that i've then got to get myself all the way to Ulaanbataar (GMT+11?? Facebook is definitely going to give me a hard time about that). We were listening to Gil Scott-Heron earlier today, who says that 'home is what's inside you' (or something like that) which, if true, is a great stress-reducer for someone like myself. Welcome to Planet Earth: wherever you go - forward, backward, inward, outward - there you are, along with the rest of us, pedaling along on the road to tomorrow.