I have been working on putting my first survey of Byzantine history online. It is a slow process of stitching, editing, and arranging photographic material and text in what will hopefully be an appealing product. The work has already been done for my survey of middle and late Byzantine history, so with this one I would have some 1100 years of history online. Of course, it is not really a chronological narration of events that we are speaking of here. This is a thematic presentation that follows a rough chronology but otherwise explores central themes in Byzantine history.

Byzantinists will of course spot small factual mistakes and may find the lectures familiar. This is because like every other reader of history I am influenced by other people's ideas even as I develop mine. Do not be harsh on me then if one lecture reminds you of Peter Brown, while the other echoes Kaldellis' ideas. They are there because they are worth reproducing and sharing with people. Anyway, I hope you will enjoy the tour:

web.me.com/coripus/From_Constantine_to_the_End_of_the_Dark_Ages

There are odd moments when you know you belong. Unclear what to, but some sort of bond is created with a community of people and it gives you a feeling which humans only get when they are part of something larger, when they escape the vaunted self and become just a bit more than an individual. OK, let me pause. I am not to describe a grand spiritual experience, nor did I, in some fashion, participate in actions that served humanity's weakest members. I am, in fact, talking of a garden party. An event in a green house with yellow trimmings, a house that just turned a century old, somewhere close to Commercial drive, in Vancouver's east side. The event included, singing (not by me), drinking, talking, chatting and altogether doing all those things that I normally associate with summer in Greece. There was even a lady standing before a basil plant and rubbing its leaves with the accidental movements of her skirt, making the whole garden smell like some mediterranean herb-patch. What more? There was the customary tour of the house, the charm of the creaking floor boards, the sense of age and history that comes with the stuccoed ceiling, and the neon art pieces collected by the owner, Nigel. Yet, the experience speaks of some other, more somber realities. House bought in the early nineties, when a couple of professionals could afford one in Vancouver. House renovated over the years, by people more patient than most of us, people who put in their own work to make things happen. All in all, the little world created in this nice corner of Vancouver, is nearly impossible in today's economic realities. Still, the garden was nice, the bier was great, and the company fantastic.

I wish to argue that though at this stage we do not see protest and popular reaction resulting from the current economic mess, we do in fact see changes that may lead to that soon. Until just a few months ago the American Dream was still ideologically alive. All its most disgusting Friedmanite mantras were still more or less dominant in the public discourse. Till a few months ago it was possible to dismiss Edwards' focus on poverty as a joke and it was possible to still blather about a by-the-bootstraps theory of wealth-generation. That was possible because even though this had always been a hoax there was still credit. People could still put the plasma TV on credit and somehow interpret the actual material prosperity around them as a dampener of their concerns about the cost of health-care, college and the lack of public infrastructure. People could attribute their failures to personal failings and this all tied very well with the televangelist drivel about rewards that come to the worthy.

In this context the great bankers with the crazy bonuses were the facilitators of your credit excesses. You owed your plasma TV to them, you could only blame the more structural problems of your life on yourself and in any case credit allowed you to postpone the reckoning. You never interpreted your increasing work insecurity as a broader pattern. The increasing amounts of home-ownership and the easy consumerist spending made it easy to believe that all in all things are OK. The media played along and fed the myth with massaged unemployment numbers (Clinton's legacy) and promotion of ideas of reality that fit your illusion through shows like Flip that House, Desperate Housewives and other forms of suburban glorification.

That myth was exposed as the myth it was when the banks revealed the extent of their losses and when the tightening credit destroyed what remained of Detroit and the auto-industry as a symbol of American capitalism. For months it was possible to ignore foreclosures by pinning them on the poor the way that the 80s puppeteers created the infamous stories of the welfare-mama-Cadillac-drivers. As of this summer, in fact as of September, your problematic credit could be connected with a much broader picture and given that it all happened in the midst of an electoral campaign, when Obama could actually win by just pointing out the obvious, there was no way that the story would be massaged or suppressed.

The new story became the discourse. Finally millions of people in duress could connect the dots and the media fought for airtime and advertisement revenue with what they do best; the human interest story. Suddenly the people who were exceptions became a norm. The foreclosed were not a neighborhood in Toledo but rather your very own neighbors if not your friends and family. These people deserved coverage. Poverty and crisis sells advertisements and news corporations under the pressure of falling revenue were not going to resist. Only this story presented everyone with a problem: if you have victims you need criminals. Here the bankers more than obliged, behaving like Gordon Gekko without the manly appeal of Michael Douglass. It is not that they suddenly became irresponsible. They were always that, only now instead of being glorified as the pioneers of brilliant financing they appeared to be covetous, sociopaths, disconnected from society and engaging in predatory practices.

From what I have experienced US politics has always had a populist undertone. It is just that for years the populism was directed against economic issues towards the anti-abortion and anti-gay lynch mobs. Ironically the latte-sipping liberal elites could only exist in an environment of class envy. Only this was class envy which was directed against intellectuals and tolerance, Boston and Beverly Hills. It was however, still class envy. The moment the financial mess hit the fan this class envy was there to be manipulated. Up to now Obama has shown that he is not ready to use it. Nothing tells us, however, that angry economic populism and protest will not appear. I was listening the other day to an activist on the radio talking about rallies his group organize. Rallies of hundreds and sometimes thousands of foreclosed people picketing the houses of CEO's in rich neighborhoods, bringing the misery of this crisis to the creme de la creme. We may be getting there. We may just need to give it time. You know that the ideological substratum of the current system is dead when people start shouting: "where is my bailout." If that is not a call for European style safety-net I do not know what is. The language is already there, soon we may see the a-ha moment, when people really connect the dots and understand what they are calling for.

I was impressed. I felt it was a really good film, and then once the engagement with the story ended, I had to think of what it all meant. It occurred to me that Walt, the main hero in the film, a polish origin Korean War vet, was the face of 2008 Appalachian voters who swung for Obama. A member of the elusive group that some in the media described as "racists for Obama." When I was done with that thought, and with the mental footnote that the film was not really set in Appalachia but rather in the Detroit suburbs, I realized that for all the flaws of this story of Catholic redemption through self-sacrifice, GRan Torino is above all an eloquent answer to Spike Lee's complaints about Eastwood and his lack of engagement with the issue of race. If any film engages with issues of race, the Gran Torino is that. You can decide that you like it or not but in the end this film about white working-class decline in a post industrial world and about the immigrant hope and blight that replaces the traces of a once vibrant but homogenous and culturally sterile middle class life. We become more diverse, culturally richer, but also collectively poorer in this world. Eastwood does not offer solutions. His hero does not resolve the problems of race. He never transcends his prejudices. He just learns to cope with people by living next to them. Eastwood's is not an academic solution. It is not a political correctness imposed on bourgeois students who learn to hide their prejudices under the language of propriety, it is a coping through the forced reality of life. You could argue that the vision simplifies the problems of race, yet in a world where the scared white working class has come to see a black man as its potential savior, the message may have some resonance. Here too, the reality and pain of life forces changes of attitude that academic policing never managed to impose.

After recent events in Athens, where ideology was painfully absent, violent outbursts of popular action materializing in a manner of unscripted theater of the absurd, reading a book on renaissance Florence and the adoption of Platonism, and more specifically of Georgios Plethon's reading of Plato, by the Florentine political elite, comes as a welcome break from the painful news of more depoliticized and politics. I have only begun reading Brigite Tambrun's "Pléthon: Le Retour de Platon" and the notion of a late medieval political operator staging his presence in the world of city politics on the basis of Platonic blueprints appears reassuring, not because I espouse in any way Plethon's oligarchic vision, magnificently progressive as it was for its time, but rather because it speaks of governance that reads. Of elites that study and of sons of privilege that listen to their professors. Tambrun describes a society that cherishes knowledge and even if cynically seeking to use it for political advantage, nevertheless in the process engages with the intellectual implications of different forms of political ideas. I am not sure I see that in the Athenian riots, and I have yet to see similar engagement on the part of politicians in the left and the right in western societies. The current crisis may force us back to the drawing boards and the reading rooms where old ideas and others new or renewed will once again inspire generations of citizens. Till then I will only hope for our collective renaissance and pray that the thinking of Keynes will be our new Platonic corpus.

Fire is Photogenic: The Riots in Athens and the Illusion of Revolution

Here is the URL of an article to which the following posting is an answer:

http://www.counterpunch.org/petrou12182008.html


Would we not all want to relive the heady days of 68, smell the scent of rebellion and experience the feeling of endless possibility? Would we not all hope to look deep into the gaze of a youth full of idealism? Would we not hope for a stirring in the souls of young men and women all around the world, a stirring that would articulate, in a voice loud and clear, the discontent, no, the frustration and anger we all feel in the face of the current economic meltdown? These days the answer to this question is increasingly a resounding YES coming from all sorts of corners and in no way restricted to responses from the select readership of Counterpunch. Yet even as we may romantically long for this awakening, Athens is not the new Paris. The riots in the Greek capital are likely not the hopeful stirrings of something new. In a recent article by a contributor from Greece the readers of Counterpunch were presented with images of a motivated Greek youth, mad at the reality of unemployment and frustrated with the failures of Government. There were familiar villains in the piece, a Conservative government of neoliberal bent, a social democrat sellout, Le Pen-like reactionaries, and a communist party so flexible in its morality that it embraced the right wing in its condemnation of the Athenian uprising. There was also a hero, or a few heroes if you want. SYRIZA, the kaleidoscopic agglomeration of Euro-communists (its nobler component), ecologists, radical street fighters, and anti-globalization activists, along with allies from the broader left was rather unambiguously declared the main motive force behind this noble rebellion against police “oppression” and conservative privatization of education. Next to SYRIZA, the Greek youth was cast into the role of David slinging stones against a Goliath of globalized proportions. The story was simple: villains on the one side, clearly defined and recognizable heroes on the other. There was even a peppering of elite media bias at work vilifying the hooded looters and calling for law and order. Was it this way, however?

I have been trying to get an impression of developments in Greece from far away. Snowy Vancouver is a far cry from the grime of Athenian riots with their pungent smell of tear gas and burnt consumer goods. I talked to friends and family, I have read myriad newspaper editorials, followed TV newscasts and anarchist blogs. All I can say is that I still do not know why we saw what we saw. I can also say that the piece by Panos Petrou featured in Counterpunch the other day is exhibit A for wishful-thinking, deliberate self-delusion, and immoderate, if indirect, self-praise. The author of your piece would like you to believe that there are vibrant social movements alive in Greece. He would like to think that the groundwork for the explosion of the last few days should be sought in his actions as a member of a fringe leftist group and in the party activities of SYRIZA. He wants to see a mass movement of students fighting the government. I beg to differ. The riots of the last few days are interesting, not to say disconcerting, because they are difficult to categorize, because they do not seem to be motivated by such an easily defined cause. As for the actions of the students, they are still a mystery to me and to those Greeks who try to go beyond clichés about fear for a bleak future and the long-overdue politicization of our somnolent generation-ipod.

We begin then with what we know, first looking at the broader context and then examining the events. It is fair to say that Greece is led by the most inept government of the post-Junta period, the years after 1974 that we refer to as the Metapolitefsi. This government was elected with a promise to fight the corruption of the social democrats (don’t they all get elected this way) only to outdo the socialists in its capacity for graft and wide-spread corruption, eschewing on the way the redeeming attributes of the party and leader they replaced: relative competence, efficient stewardship of the economy, and actual, measurable, increase of living-standards (not to mention normalization of relations with Turkey, mass infrastructure improvements and purging of religion from national identity cards). In fact it is certain that the current Karamanlis government will go down in history as one of the worst in the two centuries life span of the Modern Greek state. This incompetence comes at the worst possible time on the world economic calendar even as the scandals keep lining up on the newspaper pages like unemployed workers at a depression-era soup-kitchen. The latest of those outrages involves a creative exchange of monastic farmland (allegedly held by the pious foundation on account of eleventh century Byzantine imperial decrees) with prime Athenian real-estate valued at roughly 100 million Euros. The prime-minister’s “brain,” the Greek Karl Rove, is involved in this affair and was, as a consequence, forced to resign, which may account for the chaos characterizing the government’s reaction to the events that followed the killing of the 15-year old Alexis Grigoropoulos. To top this all, not wishing to be outdone by the Americans, the Greek clones of Paulson and Bernake prepared a banking bailout plan, that would transfer 28 billion Euros to banking institutions that the media consistently portrays as financially healthy.

When it comes to high-schools and universities, the laboratories for the idealistic explosion so rosily presented by your Greek contributor, Greece is facing a major crisis and what has certainly been the greatest failure of consecutive governments. Both are under-funded. Increasingly unqualified and unmotivated young men and women become the new generations of teachers at the schools, while universities are "laboratories" indeed for the greatest conspiracy to produce mediocrity ever concocted. Political factions, mostly of the left and extreme left assisted by the main-stream parties and their representatives, participate in the senates of higher education institutions and work along with a demoralized professoriate to keep demands on students at a minimal level. Professors who demand harder work are stigmatized and occasionally even singled out for attack. Staff and professors’ offices are often broken into by “professional” students who abuse the lax time-to-degree regulations, allowing for life-enrollment in university in order to build careers as petty politicos in the world of academia.[1] The vast majority of those enrolled in universities do not vote in the elections for student representation. Year after year, the vast majority of students show no interest in expressing an opinion, be it about the structural problems of higher education in Greece, or about “privatization” schemes (which are not really privatization schemes but misguided plans for a constitutional amendment, which would allow for private non-profit universities next to the state run schools). The student body was, till a few days ago, apathetic. The demonstrations against privatization that we saw in the past few years were led by a politically mobilized minority with no real plan for reform of what is indeed a broken system.

Let us now move to the events that preceded the riots. We know that a kid was shot. We know that there are witnesses arguing that the policeman fired directly at him and we also know that the less than trustworthy, or competent, Greek police published a forensic report yesterday that the bullet ricocheted before it struck the kid. In any case, in the Greek political universe the shooting will most spell life in prison for the trigger happy Zorba-Rambo. The shooting took place in Exarcheia, an area with cool bars, student life, and a reputation as the center of Greek anarchism; a “movement” of ten or twenty dozen men, mostly known to the police, who despite ceremonially performing violent outbursts of annual punctuality remain free, serving as a convenient scarecrow for petit-bourgeois fears of unrest. It was inevitable then, that after the shooting the Anarchists would attack, furnished at last with a dead hero, a kid at that. Even as the Exarcheia crowd mobilized, the police were ordered to be extra careful in their response, the government fearing that a new shooting would be enough to bring it down under an avalanche of popular outrage. In addition the “elite media” outdid one another in declaring the policeman’s actions a crime and expressing outrage at the murder. It was in fact the media that enabled further escalation by creating a level of outrage that brought more people to the streets. Your Greek contributor was right to note that the worst of the troubles started when SYRIZA failed to properly police its rally and Molotov-cocktails rained on the Athenian police force and the city center around it. In that context many youths who were part of the demonstration and had previously had no affiliation with Anarchists, banded together with the violent protesters. It was at this point that the media discovered the angry and frustrated youth that they promptly elevate into a hero (a hero indeed given the ad revenue that hours upon hours of media punditry generated for the country’s TV channels). The narrative was simple: our children could no longer take the fact that they would be a generation of privation after years of economic growth. With the narrative developed for them more and more students, very young students, high-schoolers mostly, joined in the riots. There was however, more. As the situation started getting out of control, the riot police remaining on the defensive, the Anarchists themselves reported on their blogs the appearance of new faces in the occupied University buildings (in Greece it is illegal for the police to enter a University building. As a consequence the university buildings becomes a Molotov cocktail assembly line). They argued that hooligans and criminal characters joined in the riots, men who had never in the past been seen in the Athenian street fights. All in all some 1000 to 1500 people roamed in downtown Athens burning over 4 or 5 days some 30 shops and seriously damaging and looting 400. Banks, police stations and the occasional McDonalds suffered most, but the fire touched many businesses. Like the Santa Annas in a California wildfire, the media kept inflaming the passions of those in the streets and the leaders of SYRIZA, hoping to reap future electoral benefits by tapping on the discontent of future voters, kept talking of the idealistic youth that was expressing rage for the prospect of being the first generation to experience an actual decline of their living standards (an ironic admission on the part of this party of the left, that over the past decades Greeks have actually been getting richer). As the leader of SYRIZA, Alekos Alavanos picked the chords of his revolutionary harp, Athens burned.

I can see why the anarchists poured into the streets. They do this every year and Greeks have come to expect it. I know what led football hooligans to the streets. I know what led thousands of communists and other members of the left to the streets. Despite their electoral irrelevance they maintain good organizational skills and can stage a rally like Hugh Hefner does topless parties. But I do not presume to know what got the kids to the streets. I can offer an opinion though. I think it was happenstance. One of them was shot, so they went to the rally that the parties organized. Then some people threw fire at the police and the police doused everyone in teargas. The kids were now angry and counter-attacked. Society was behind them. They had an alibi as they were fighting for their future, so everyone was saying. And in the end even if they broke a shop, the anarchists would be blamed. It was exciting. For most of the teenagers who clashed with the police, this will likely be the highlight of their lives, as they slowly slide into petit-bourgeois complacency. But then again, maybe fire bakes conscience. Maybe being told you’re a rebel with a cause will actually make you find one. The world financial implosion could be a good anvil on which a new youth movement will be forged. Allow me to doubt that, I studied next to Greek youths.

[1] The crisis of the Greek university system is not easy to describe and is very uneven in the way it strikes different departments and different institutions. There are still departments in the Greek university system that produce top notch work and I have had inspiring and intellectually stimulating professors in my days as a student of Political Science at the University of Athens. This, however, all happens DESPITE the meltdown of the system.

The tide is supposed to have turned. In the past 9 days we have been witnessing the gradual shortening of the night, and yet it is still dark by 4ish. I have decided that today is the last "vacation day" and I must say I am disappointed with the management of my time. I have been spending a lot of time before my computer, finding ways to convert mpeg2 format to mpeg4 for use on i-movie. Currently converting excerpts from what must be one of the worst documentaries ever, John Romer's Byzantium, the Lost Empire. I managed to watch only 10 minutes of it before I almost committed ritual suicide. Managed to cling to life by thinking that the images from his visual document of historical murder would be ultimately useful for something else. That is if I manage to find a frame where his narcissistic blobish persona is not standing before some majestic ancient ruin, competing with it for the Ruined Hulk Decrepitude Awards. On a positive note, the fact that this idiot savant has managed to make a career out of crackpot documentaries, may mean that there is a market for better made and historically accurate renditions of ancient drama. Meanwhile I have been reading on and off Ian Banks' most recent non-SF book. It is pretty good. He does the family drama pretty well.

This is a very first seriously flawed video. It is a synthesis of various pictures and clippings from video. It has a soundtrack, and a very fragmentary badly recorded commentary that make the sequence of images somewhat meaningful. I also fear that it may have some odd breaks filled with nothingness, the result of problematic editing. It is in short a test. To see if I can produce compressable and editable text. It took some time to produce but it was fun even if you think it is not worth much. Let us now see how it shows on the big (well... small) screen.

We're experiencing growth in the Vancouver Ann Arbor contingent. More members arrive and proper dinner part numbers have already been reached. On another front, papers have been corrected and grades will be submitted tomorrow. I can now fully dedicate myself to research and to playing with my new camera a Canon Powershop S5IS. It is fully automated as I did not feel ready for the digital SLR experience. This already has enough options to make me happy, plus 8 megapixels and a 12X zoom. I am looking forward to the summer and the archeological tour. For now however, I am ready to leave for dinner with members of the Ann Arbor contingent.

I want to write a story on stargazers; on Byzantine men looking at the stars seeking meaning. I want it to rise from the pages of one document and intertwine itself with well known stories about other book-writers their interests and their occult activity. I want it to tell us something about how those few people sought answers to the mess which they experienced, as the empire in the eleventh century collapsed around them. I want it to be compelling and funny. I want to make it into a paper, I want to present it at some conference, and then go for dinner or drinks with my colleages, talk like those Byzantine stargazers about the mess we are facing in our own world, and feel as if we maybe hold the answers to all the problems surrounding us.

Rain, endless rain. Vancouver is treating us with its finest rain. Tea time, paper correction time, film time and library visit time. We have to start, however, from the waking up time. From the hard, not nearly hang-overed, yet still nearly impossible task of getting out of bed on a day when there was no sun there to greet you. Under those conditions you deal with reality in a not particularly enthusiastic fashion. You think of things you need to do and of those you are already mechanically doing, you add to those some other things you feel that maybe you would actually love to do, things which in themselves are not truly pleasant but could potentially allow some of the things you need to do, to be done more easily, therefore relieving you, and you take a coat, you get in the car and drive to the...spaceship. You can easily miss this spaceship. It exists in a universe encased by cement and glass, yet if you ignore the modern architecture and peek in, through the square windows, windows like any other square windows, which could be leading into a world of cubicles, watercoolers and animated officetrons, then you will be rewarded with a scene from the best SF cinema. The UBC Barber Learning Centre is a storage facility from outer space. A mechanical wonder of book taxonomy. Dt from order of book to delivery on the circulation-desk counter, less than three minutes. You collect the book as well as your scatered thoughts on modernity and step out in the rain once again. Arcade fire infiltrates the scene, but this is from hours later when you are at home, sitting at the couch writing this account. The intrusion of the future in the rainy past is pleasant, the walk is to the burger joint and to marking of students' papers. The hours pass, the white pages with the inkjet-spurted wisdom aquire their small, relatively orderly marginalia and the time comes to take a break. You go to the movies and travel to Paris and to couple paranoia and reality. Good to know that Julie Delpie is actually smart. Two days in Paris packed in less than two hours. Pas mal.

Woke up after a very nice, active evening at the Vancouver Commodore. We had predrunk, twoo gin and Tonics and home over dinner and a manhattan at an overpriced dive close to Granville. Then we just went to the venue early not knowing what to expect of the place. The Commodore is a nice venue. elevated, near cinema balcony style areas with seating and the possibility of dinner and then a large center stage before the stage where groups perform. The group took its time, and of course we were early so we waited 1,3 hours for the beginning of the show. It was worth it though. The geriatric DJ was a gem and the show, once started, was great. There are caveats though. The Vancouver crowd took 45 minutes to get into the music and still significant amounts of people behaved like calvinists in a church. Still by the encores which lasted as long as the main show the crowd was happy and active. As for the group they were characteristically rampant and happy. I enjoyed it as much as the show at the Magic Stick in Detroit, though the novelty made that show more interesting.

This is an effort to support Persia. Consume its Baluchi rugs and keep its economy alive in view of the coming deluge. In other terms, keep consuming, only with the broader world as the market place. Here is the hallway in the apt and the cat. The books just make it in the mirror like like the viewer of the couple in the Arnolfini wedding. For more hedonism I add the following picture of gorgeous lamb from a dinner we had at home a few weeks ago. Just as an attempt to distract the mind from the greyness of this day and the coming political mess of September. In a few hours we will go see Gogol Bordello in downtown Vancouver. If the concert is anything like the show at the Magic Stick in Detroit it will be excellent. More to report later. Now I need to consider the logistics for the creation of a class blog for my seminar. Mouble mouble...

Mutability is good. Makes things interesting, and ultimately is a principle built-in in life. Yet mutability is one of those things that you learn to hate when living in Vancouver, when you are unable to plan a weekend because rain follows sun, pretty much with the same probability (though not certainty) that a night trails the day. So, here we are, on a Sunday I was to take off work and use for some hiking, sitting at home and looking out at what can at best be described British bleakness.

Energy is another word of interest. If I do not muster some energy I can see myself sitting on this chair and checking the news all day. I am bound to chat with some blogger on things Iranian and guaranteed to be depressed by more news of forest fires in Greece. Can we not please send them our rain? Yes the story goes that September is going to be the month for all things Iranian. I can already see the sad faces of my students and the good folk in North Van when our neighbors in the South decide that not having enough on their plate, what makes most sense is to attack Persia.
It has to be wondered whether it is power that makes people crazy, or whether this, the American Empire, is more peculiar than every other one before it. It is probably the first imperial state to be abducted by a clique of people using it solely for their own interests. Every imperial state to some extent does that. Rome expanded to offer commands and enriching opportunities to its senatorial elite, England expanded to serve a number of commercial interests and in order to provide legitimacy for a number of succesful pirates (I know history redux). You could even argue that as those states expanded, at least their populations benefited alongside the elites from the reality of empire. Yet all those empires had a sense of what their limits were and eventually, when they reached them, simply scaled down their activities. The US has reached its limits yet, it faces an interesting reality. While its influence, both economic and political is becoming increasinly limited, it still has the means to project force.

And here is where it gets interesting. It would be to the interest of the general population of the US for its elite to realize they are no longer an empire (call it superpower if you will) and go through a voluntary process of demobilization. In the case of the US there is no India or Rodesia to be abandoned. What should rather be mothballed, if not outright scrapped are at least half of its aircraft carriers, half of its airforce and at least half of its armed forces. The US has to become like France and England, even better, like Germany after the second world war. A country that has enough troops to send on a peace mission but no more. This would naturally create an automatic economic boom as resources waisted in non-productive investment in the wasteful defense industries, would go to fuel a services economy based on innovation, education and welfare. Yet this is a pipe dream, as the strength of the armed forces, allows the tiny plutocratic cabal ruling the country to make one last attempt at looting society before the inevitable turn towards new forms of Keynesianism shows its face.
We are dealing with a class of a few hundred men with stocks and stock options in positions of power, using the most powerful military machine ever to act on earth, to amass loot, as much loot as possible, before they are faced with some sort of popular reaction. What is interesting, in our case is that those men, the ones most wrapped in the flag of all Americans, are also the ones who will be the first to take their money and live in some Caribbean island or, as the case may be, in Southern France; a place most suited for rich retirees with a history of imperial overstretch. So the sooner we realize that we are no dealing with Americans per se, but with accummulative barbarians, the sooner we will remedy the situation and will lead this great neighbors of ours, and with it the world, to a safer path, where real concerns, from famine and human rights to the environment can be addressed.

Been a while. Have to wonder what spurs the communication bug. Is it simply lack of company? Possibly. Highly likely in fact. Anyhow. NAY approaching (New Academic Year) and things are bound to get busy. AS for me I am still escaping with bad writing in world I am sure I would not like to live in. Escape from what you ask? Who knows. Things are more or less optimal and yet Byzantine fantasies keep me occupied. Have a taste of bad prose:

The professor paused and turned to his students. It was early in the morning and a good 10 out of 17 were still in Morpheus' world, present bodily but absent in every other sense from the classroom. Two of the younger ones were looking at him with bright eyes. It was to be expected. Attaleiates’ great grandson Theodore and Psellos’ great granson Basileios Malesis sat on the front row proud to hear their professor read from the famous history of Skleros Seth, the foremost historian of his generation, still alive though impossibly old, and prolific like few others. Seth, who had been the son of a friend of their great grandfathers and one of Psellos’ last students had grown to become a sensation in Constantinopolitan letters. His Historia Leptomeres was a model of historical composition and was taught in every classroom. The professor turned to Theodore and before he could address him the 15 year old opened his mouth: "it is Thucydidean master. Seth starts with Thucydides’ staged dialogues, only he does something very interesting. This is not simply a set piece with each side presenting a dialogue to the agora. This is more novelistic. It is as if Seth wants us to know everything about the event. Clothes matter, tables and rolls of paper, even what the people felt, their hesitations. I have not seen this in Thucydides. I have not seen it in my great grand father’s work either. He cut straight to the chase. Not with Seth. He seems to have taken Achileas Tatios and the other Greek novelists and stole their techniques of detailed description. And I have to admit, he seems to have read a lot of Malesis’ great grandfather as well. All this emphasis in their inner thoughts is Psellos, it cannot be anything else." The master was once again awestruck. The young man before him was showing acumen that few mature readers, let alone students had shown in the many years of his teaching. He took another careful look at Theodore, clapped his hands to awake the two sleeping students at the end of the class and threw a reed stylus at a third who had fixed his gaze at the rear of Artemis’ statue standing at the crossroads just outside the school. He then addressed the young man with warmth that rarely escaped his body. "Theodore you’re truly right with this, and I may even argue that there is more. We are no longer in the realm of historiography. This class, by reading Skleros Seth is not just talking history. With Skleros we have politics weaved elegantly in the text. Have you noticed the configuration of the dialogue? Have you thought of the participants? Why does Skleros introduce devolution with those men and in the form of a dialogue? What does it mean that a man in a monk’s dress, known as a philosopher, a judge and ultimate authority are discussing politics? Do you see how the most important moment for the reform of our great empire’s system of governance is rooted by Seth in religion, philosophy, justice and victorious imperial power? Am I getting through to anyone of you? Does anyone other than Malesis and Theodore get it?" The silence was disappointing. The master started thinking that his classes would have to meet later in the day. The students before him were too sleepy, or simply too dumb.

Doors offer access even as they block it. In my apartment-building doors are what keeps the world outside and firedoors what creates a notion of safety inside. You see the building had suffered a fire years ago and like London post 1666 the psychosis among the natives is palpable. I buy it, I understand it, but I also, as a Greek feel odd about it. Fire hazzard drills were non-existent in Greece where cement just makes us assume a posture of hubris; that is till the forest next to us burns... Meawhile in my own abode, the logistical possibility of hosting people has just been created as my couch-bed has arrrived making my space more friendly to visitors. And even as my place is ready to be lived-in, I have to abandon it in order to play tour-guide for 29 young Canadians. Good luck to me and to them.

A new day brings me closer to the departure, but also directly into a new kind of work and life arrangement as by now I am getting to test-live my new place. I have not used the bedroom yet but I am settled on my desk and dealing with the bureaucratic and research issues that constitute my life at this stage. It is not the brightest of days, which is an understatement for :it has been raining all day and I just saw a bit of light from the south east," yet it feels good listening to the Band and editing a future article. The new work area is pretty good and well positioned for Vancoveur's grey reality, just under the main living-room windows. More work to be had, not more procrastinating.

Here I am in new environs. This posting will have the mundane but necessary function of guiding you through my new abode. It starts from the middle. We skip the entry and the front door as I simply did not photograph it. Maybe a sense that the name "Oakcrest" written on the translucent door window would invite mocking comments. Or maybe just a haste to drag you into the very inards of my world. What you see here is the living room with emphasis on the windows and the Audio-visual equipment. Should you wish to escape this second picture shows you the way towards the corridor. One could argue that the breadth of this hall is space wasted. To be frank, in my previous space this hall would have made up a bedroom. Still should you wish to leave here is the door. So, you are still here. Let us then turn towards the food preparation laboratory. To reach it we have to go past the dining room. One is linked to the other and both are connected to the living room as is plainly evident from this next picture. To the left side of the dining room just before the windows there is space for a bookcase. Unfortunately it simply did not fit the stairs up to my aprtment. It patiently waits dismantling and reassembly. Glory and curses to IKEA. So you arrive to the dining room, which has pretty decent light. In fact the apartment in general has very good light, which I am afraid may mean that I will be warm in the summer. Contributions to global warming are expected as an airconditioning unit may be purchased. Smaller than my previous kitchen, this one is less kitsch and at the same time has at least as many cupboards and storage. Overall an improvement though I will miss the in-kitchen table. On our way out of the kitchen we get the opportunity to look at the living room from the very corner of the dining-space and get the full size of the windows looking on oak. I should be getting pictures of the mountains to the north-east. Yes I can see them from my windows. I lack balconies though. We move to the bedroom. This is the view from the bathroom accross the hall and into the bedroom. As you can see the light is pretty good in this area of the apartment as well. The bedroom is also used as an office and yet it does not seem as if this makes it crammed. So this is it. I may post more as paintings go up the walls and as my desk and bookcase are positioned in place. More of the bedroom will also follow. For now a break. Health.

The early morning rise has its rewards. You see a world untouched yet from the fretfulness of the day that runs on coffee. I drove N to the airport and then took the bus to campus. Some work to be done on my course and a medical kit to collect for the field -school. Even as I ride the bus I feel my self getting aggravated by the bumps on the road shaking my note-taking tablet. Even as the day grows older I feel anger seeping in me. I have to wonder whether life is mostly a process of anger management. The ones of us who do it best are the either successful or quietly irrelevant. Those who fail are incarcerated, killed in a blaze of rapid machine gun fire or simply rise to become Attila the Hun. The day however, is still young and the sun pierces the dense forest on the hill to my work. Not a bad moment even if I feel the urgent need for sleep, or maybe more coffee. I have arrived at the office and among other things I am once again facing a naked door. Someone removed my name tag from the door. It is the second time and it is a bit annoying. You assume that once you got your F you turn to self-reflection and work harder. I need to be careful however, who knows how one moves from stealing name tags to shooting the professor. Maybe this will be the next form of academic attire. Please excese the gratuitous use of sexy bullet proof vest model.

There is something reassuring in seeing an electorate learn. The French are certainly still in an existential crisis regarding the direction of their republic, they have nevertheless learned an important lesson: if you do not want the fascists in the game and if you want to have a choice between slightly different visions of the future, you need to vote. Apathy is not a political statement. With participation in the order of 80 t0 85% the French have made this Sunday a celebration of the political process, with football games on the side as a refreshment to boot. So Lyon is winning the championship for this year in France and the Sego-Sarko shootout will entertain us in two weeks time offering a true clash of distinctly different ideas rearding France's future direction. Whether we like the two clashing visions or not is another story. At least for now we can be consoled in the existence of la différence.