Good Morning Corfu!
by David A. Ross
Good Morning Corfu! / September 25, 2006 / 'A Look Back In Time'
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"A Look Back In Time"
In 1994, I was living in Tucson, Arizona USA and was seriously contemplating leaving America to live in Greece. Eventually, I made the difficult decision to sell my house and belongings and leave my native country, but the decision was not an easy one to make, nor was it ultimately successful. In December of that year, I set out on a journey halfway across America -- from Tucson to Chicago -- where I boarded a plane on Christmas Day for London, my eventual destination being Corfu. After spending part of the winter in the UK, part in Corfu, and the remainder in Nice, France, I eventually gave up the idea of expatriation and returned to the States, quite dejected. Of course, one failed attempt has not proved telling. After spending several more years in the States, I finally did work up the courage and the resolve to move to Corfu. Recently, I found an old journal that I was keeping that details some of my thoughts and experiences just prior to that first failed attempt to move to Greece, and I found the entries to be not only interesting, but rather profetic. I thought I would share some of those mad ramblings with you now, twelve years on. But let me give fair warning; all those with a weak stomach had best stop reading here.
15 April, 1994; Tucson, Arizona USA
Forty-five years ago Henry Miller called America the "Ait-conditioned Nightmare". In my opinion, little has changed, except the images are now more sinister. The shallowness, the cultivated distractions, the political corruption -- now we are afraid of one another; there is no trust.
Yesterday in Arizona it became legal to carry a concealed weapon -- just like in the days of the Wild West! -- and I can't help wondering what it might be like to be out in public and looking over my shoulder and into the eyes of each person to try to determine potential danger. Is my neighbor so stressed out that an honest and rational decision of whether or not to shoot is still within the realm of straight forward assessment. I don't want a hole in my chest, and I don't want to spend my days wondering about everybody's emotional balance. This life is becoming necessarily insular.
I'm writing my first novel about Greece -- I say first because I have an intuition that there will be others. Of course the book is about so much more than souvlaki and sirtaki: it is about these battles in which I engage myself; it is about reticence, and about repercussions. The decision to expatriate seems irrevocable, never mind the politics. There is a huge emotional investment as well. Especially at age forty!
My friend, George Delfakis, (who lives here in Tucson), tells me that he believes emigration to Greece would be easy -- plenty of work for someone with a small stake and a little imagination. Call the Greek consulate in Los Angeles... Call!!!
16 December, 1994, Santa Fe, New Mexico USA
I called... In fact, I did far more than call the Greek consulate. I called the Czech consulate and the Swiss consulate as well. I haven't written about this plan to expatriate for eight months, though my mental and emotional deliberations have had many ups and downs: contortions, regrets, reticence, doubts, spasms... Instead of documenting my emotional acrobatics, I finished the novel: Xenos. And it's splendid! At least I think so. In three days' time I'll be dropping it into the hands of the National Writers Association. Perhaps they will start the publishing process in my absence. That would be wonderful.
I'm on the road in my 1959 Karmann Ghia Coupe, driving from Tucson, via Denver, to Chicago. Two thousand miles of America in mid-winter. The Ghia has no heat. On Christmas Night, I will fly to London.
It's worse now than when I first began this journal back in April -- the politics, that is. The Christian Coalition funded the mid-term Congressional elections to the point where the far right now has Clinton on a string like a puppet. He looks scared stiff. He probably should be -- I know I am. Many Americans are frustrated and angry, confused, bewildered, but my sense is that it's out of our control now, and everybody seems to know it, at least on some deep level, whether or not they can bring themselves to admit it. This sick drama is wrought with tension married to a sense of powerlessness and futility.
George D. was great! All summer long he fed me scrumptious game from his deep freezer at the Marathon Restaurant. He would phone me around ten-thirty in the evening to invite me for the following evening's dinner, after the restaurant was closed. One night he'd cook venison; the next lake trout; then rabbit stew. All dishes he was not allowed by law to serve his regular customers because he'd hunted and fished the game himself. Night after night he filled me up not only with food, but with stories of Greek village life (many of which found their way into Xenos) and he also told me about his own expatriation from his home in the Peloponnese to Canada at age eighteen.
This journey I'm on across America was never meant as a ritualistic farewell. I simply had to conduct business in Denver and store my car with my brother in Chicago. But the trip does seem to be offering one final opportunity for assessment. I'll say it here and now, for the record: I'm hurt by what's happening in my country, by the disenfranchisement of at least two generations; by the hate radio and fear mongering so reminiscent of Hitler's propaganda machine; by the spineless press bought out by the very corporations that control the government from behind the scenes. I harbour no reconsideration about my decision to expatriate. It seems right; it seems like a sound decision. But just who am I trying to convince? To most, I'm sure I look like an alarmist, a radical. I don't care. To my eye, the Emporoer isn't wearing any clothes!
I remember travelling through Yugoslavia in 1989. It seemed then like the entire country had a bellyache. I couldn't really put my finger on it, but it was obvious that something was about to happen. Now, history has told that story in bloody detail. Maybe it's premature to be suggesting some catastrophic civil unrest in America. After all, we've been told over and over again that it can't happen here. We're virtually indoctrinated with the notion that ours is an orderly society. Ah! Wouldn't the status quo love to believe it! But they, themselves, are proving that memory is short, and attention spans shorter yet, and that terrible lessons once learned are not impossible to forget. How self-righteous are this new brand of leader that proclains not only illegal aliens and Blacks and homosexuals to be the enemy of middle class prosperity and morals, but now academics and intellectuals are targeted as well. Stupid, frightened people are easily led, and easily controlled.
17 December, 1994; Taos, New Mexico USA
How easy is it to get hold of your own money in our so-called free society?
My coffeehouse friend, Patrick Reilly, tried to cash a two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar cashier's check at Bank of America... No luck. They said they didn't have that much money. So it's become my contention that our money -- the money that we think is ours because the bank sends us a statement once each month confirming our balance -- this money actually belongs to the Federal Government, or maybe the World Bank; they are simply allowing us to use it, provided we spend it on something of which they approve. Case in point: Financial institutions must now report all transactions greater than three thousand dollars to the Feds. And just try to assemble a large amount of your own money without leaving an obvious paper trail. It is now illegal to export more than ten thousand dollars out of the USA. We can use the money -- our money -- as long as we continue to finance the system. It's all too much!
18 December, 1994; Denver, Colorado USA
This process of expatriation is not impetuous or impromtu. Many ideas must be examined from every angle and perspective. Comparisons must be analysed: cultural and political comparisons; even geography. My decision is not a frivolous one. It is not made without due consideration.
19 December, 1994; Chicago, Illinois USA
This idea of expatriation goes back several years. I recall talking with Ilse Adler, my German teacher, about leaving Hitler's Germany. I was reading Shurer's 'Rise and Fall' at the time and seeing subtle but alarming parallels -- or so I thought. Ilse told me about how so many Jews in Germany had read 'Mein Kampf' but just couldn't believe it would ever really happen. She told me about how she and her husband were on the last train with Jews aboard allowed to leave Berlin for Palestine -- about how the Nazis confiscated her last ten marks and her gold wedding band --but she got out, and never went back. I said to her: "Ilse, what would you do at age seventy-five, with your eyesight failing, if it were to happen again -- here in America?" Her reply was straight forward: "If somebody wants to do you harm, start walking." And she motioned toward the corner of her minimalist apartment where he small rucksack was stored.
Of course I must ask the question: Are my prognostications imagined, or exaggerated, or ill-conceived? There are certainly any number of my friends who consider my observations to be overly pessimistic. Some have begun to find me tiresome; others have made it known, albeit subtly, that they wish I would just relax and try to fit in. "What if you're right?" they would ask. "What then?"
Ilse must have been in her early twenties, if that old, when she left Berlin. The Nazis murdered her family -- she never told me so, but I could see it in her eyes. She couldn't say it, but she knew the end that her mother and father and siblings had met. She never went back to Germany; she never wanted to set foot on German soil again.
*****
I understand that it's now virtually impossible for high school students to find a copy of J.D. Salinger's novel, 'Catcher in the Rye'. Apparently the representatives of the Christian Coalition have gained control, or at least significant influence, over many school boards, and they seem to be intensely interested in purging libraries of 'undesireable' literature.
I recall being encouraged to read Salinger's tale of alienation and despair when I was fifteen or sixteen. It made a difference in my development, as it did with so, so many others. Of course I identified with Holden Caulfield's cynicism (what adolescent wouldn't?), but the point is that I experienced a sense of identification, and the book fueled my interest in literature. I've considered (mostly a muse) buying one hundred copies of Salinger's classic and handing out free copies a few blocks away from Flowing Wells High School in Tucson. Get your banned books here! Get 'em now! Get 'em before they arrest me, confiscate my trade and burn the blasphemy!
Besides banning 'Catcher in the Rye', Flowing Wells High School, which is now controlled by the Christian Coalition, has censored the students' dramatic presentation of 'The Shadow Box' because of its sympathetic approach to homosexuality. Somehow, these administrators have apparently come once again to the opinion that if they can only camouflage the elements of society that they deem unseamly or unfit, then those elements will simply diasappear. Or, more likely yet, they can divert public attention away from some sinister agenda they support by creating a pseudo-moral pogram.
It's not only 'Catcher in the Rye'or 'The Shadow Box', it's the systematic discrediting of literature or art that questions the status quo. Certain questions, in and of themselves, have become obscene. Fear has replaced enthusiasm, and so many now seem willing to give up their rights for the sake of some promised order. Of course the order is not real. Nor is the fear. The cultivated ignorance is, however, quite real -- it is the legacy of this movement to the right. Hitler employed such tactics, and Savonarola put an end to the Renaissance with a similar movement. To live in a Dark Age where those in control believe that theirs is an Enlightened cause! What a legacy! What sick irony!
27 December, 2006; London, England
I'm simply feeling happy to be away from America. I'm staying at the home of my friends, Joel and Chase, in St. John's Wood, a block away from Abbey Road Studios and the famous crosswalk where the Beatles were photographed for the cover of their final L.P.
Joel and Chase are themselves expatriates. At least of a sort. Joel works for a big US company in telecommunications. In fact, he's International Director. Big Job! Only I wonder whethert he ever considers the ramifications of bringing American-style communications technology to the likes of Poland or India.
These technologies are wonderful indeed -- in a technical way. Yet they seem to necessitate a widening in the gap of human-to-human tactile contact. At some point we are certain to be dealing only with symbols of one another, human warmth degraded as a result. I'm not anti-technology per se; still I am more than a binary representation of myself. The most subtle characteristics of personality are not revealed within a dot-matrix -- the light reflected in a sudden glance; the rhythm of breath or the nervous tapping of a foot.
All in all, Joel and Chase look unsettled here in London. They look timid and uncertain. A bit frustrated and perhaps ready to give up this self-imposed exile and go home to the States. But that's not going to happen, because they've given up control. The corporation is now calling the tune, and Joel is dancing like a madman. Chase is simply trying to keep her balance, all the while wondering what the final price might be. They're fish out of water; it's obvious as their foreign accents.
And what about me? Well, one day after arriving it seems that I'm almost more comfortable than my friends. As usual, my approach to Europe is unhurried. I try to accept this continent on its own terms, so I'll see what the future holds for me here...
1 January, 1995; London, England
During the past few days a few startling realities have come to light, making the disparity I suspected between American and Euro-economics even more dramatic than I once suspected. For example, the town house in which I am staying rents for about five hundred pounds per week, which is an equivalent of $40,000 dollars US per year. This sum is considerably more than I made working one year in the States. Not to say that some Americans do not make more, but certainly the majority make considerably less.
This townhouse in the St. John's Wood neighborhood is very comfortable -- a parlor, a library, formal dining room, lounge, modern kitchen, four bedrooms, three baths -- about the size of an American family-style home -- at two and a half times the price!
Around the corner a Pakistani news agent is advertising for a part-time cashier. He is willing to pay an equivalent of $8.50 per hour, plus insurance and all taxes. A similar job in the States might net the worker $4.25 per hour with no benefits whatsoever. Buying power for the money earned might not be all that different, until the American worker chooses to spend his money out of the States, or on goods made in countries with so-called higher economies -- goods like a BMW or a Volvo automobile, or a sailboat, or a South African diamond.
America is presently cultivating 'free trade' relationships with many lesser developed countries, particularly in Central and South America. This strategy accomplishes several near-term advantages, or so it would seem. First, it provides American manufacturers with a cheap source of labour (good for owners of companies and for shareholders). Secondly, it ensures a steady supply of goods for American consumers (who subsequently fail to notice that prices, as well as their own wages, are falling below the standards of other First World countries, thereby eventually restricitng freedom of movement, economic and otherwise, within the world community. This ensures the wealthy business owners a captive work force, or a race of slaves that are largely ignorant of their own situation. The working class is codified with an abundance of 'cheap luxuries'. And all is well as long as ignorance is preserved, and there are ample resources to exploit from so-called 'hungry' economies. But, sooner or later, I suspect, the 'cheap' American cost of living will be compromised by a heady round of economic inflation. What then? There will probably be no way to correct a system long out of control, and the long famous and coveted American largesse will be long gone, and probably not recoverable.
24 September, 2006; Corfu, Greece
That is where my journal ends -- quite abruptly. Reading it now, twelve years on, is to me interesting, considering how I've ended up, not to mention how world events have unfolded, especially in regards to my native country.
To briefly finish the tale that I for some reason did not record at the time, I stayed on in London just a bit longer before flying to Geneva, Switzerland. How cold it was that winter in the Alps! From Switzerland, I travelled into Italy, down the east coast to Brindisi, where I took a ferryboat to Corfu. I remember arriving on Corfu very early in the morning, before the sun was up. I walked from the port to San Rocco Square in Corfu Town and waited for the first bus to take me to Kontokali.
Arriving in Kontokali, I was shocked to see the village in mid-winter. It was nothing like I remembered it when I'd visited during the summer season. Nothing was open, nobody was about. I found nowhere obvious to stay.
After a couple of hours of searching for a room (word must have gotten around that a winter tourist was in the village) I was approached by a man offering a room at his house. Sight unseen, I accepted his offer, and as it turned out, his wife was the sister of my friend Takis, who was away for the winter in Cyprus. The room that Thalia and Pauli gave me was more or less comfortable, except for the fact that the heat was turned on only for an hour per day at five o'clock. I managed with a few extra blankets.
My original idea had been to buy a small hotel on Corfu -- something not too big, perhaps fifteen rooms. (At that time in my life I could easily have afforded such an investment, or so I thought). For the next few weeks I looked around, talked with people, asked questions; but the more I looked, and talked, and enquired, the more convinced I became that were I to find a hotel and make the investment, I would, in all liklihood, end up broke and with no hotel. I remember feeling like a fool.
At the end of January I left Corfu not knowing where I was really going, or why. Not knowing what lay ahead for me. I drifted over to Sicily and stayed a few weeks at Taormina. Then I made my way up the Italian west coast on my way to Nice France, where I stayed the rest of the winter to ruminate over my failed attempt to move to Greece before returning to the States.
My restless spirit was not, however assuaged. By late spring that year I was in Hawaii; in autumn I was tromping about the Lake District in the UK, chasing the ghosts of the Romantic poets (research, I said then, for a book I never wrote). For the next few years, I travelled back and forth between the States and Europe, always looking, always scheeming. Not until 2001, after I'd met K., did I finally decide to give it another try, this time with all of a thousand pounds in our pockets. And the rest, as they say, is history!
Much has happened since in the world arena, and also in my native country. Situations I described twelve years ago are no better, in fact, quite the worse. The rich get richer as the poor go scratch. Education is abysmal, violence is rampant. America has now lost two of its great cities: New Orleans, of course, to Hurricane Katrina, but more specifically to a lack of response from the government in the aftermath of the storm; Detroit is now a wasteland, probably beyond salvage, as the literacy level has plunged below fifty percent. I'm afraid other once great cities are at risk as well. In LA, only twenty-nine percent of young people actually graduate from high school, and I can only wonder what the standards are for those who do graduate. Then, of course, there is the perpetual war being waged now in the Middle East (where it will expand to in future is anybody's guess, and probably depends on where there is easy booty to be had). Anybody who has read George Orwell knows the scenario already; perpetual wars fought in distant lands with nebulous casualties posted on some board somewhere that nobody really reads anymore...
All in all, I'm happy with my decision to leave America. Of course I miss my homeland sometimes, who wouldn't? But when I really stop to think about what it is I'm missing, I discover quickly that it is the myth I miss, not the reality. And that myth seems to me to be long gone, something I once dreamed when I was but a child, naive and complacent, secure and hopeful. In relocating to Greece, some of those feelings I felt in childhood have returned. It is often observed here that Greece is fifty years behind the rest of the developed world; I say, let it take its time catching up! And do so vigilantly, intelligently! I say to the Greeks: Keep your families together; do not come to value money over civility; respect and value your neighbors -- their differences above all! Do not grow fat and sanctimonious, and when your leaders are not responsive, do not be afraid to show them the door.
Greece is in my view a country on the cusp. It is quite literally waking up after a fifteen hundred year nap. The people here are eager and enthusiastic to better their lives, and they seem to see endless possibilities before them. I remember when America was like that, but it also seems a long, long time ago. Perhaps this eagerness and this enthusiasm is the very best thing about living in Greece. That and the longtime tradition of hospitality and civility. I've said on occasion that it was the Greeks who invented Western civilisation as we know it, and they alone have never separated the ideas of civilisation and civility. Here it begins with each man and woman, and extends to each man and woman. And if there is any one thing that imparts a feeling of well being, it is knowing that one is welcome and valued.
Back in 1994, just before I left for Europe, I remember talking with my brother about my passion to leave America and make a new life for myself in Greece. He thought I was crazy. "The fix is in," he said to me. "The fix has been in for a long time, and everybody knows it. The choice is simple: either you shut your mouth and play along with the game, or you move to someplace where the plumbing doesn't work so well."
As anyone who has ever been to Greece knows, we often have unannounced water cuts, and we still have to put our toilet paper in bins, as the pipes here are too narrow to accommodate that particular waste. In short, the plumbing doesn't always work so well. I've now learned to live with that inconvenience; and given the choice between a society obsessed with greed and avarice, one willing to sacrifice substantial values for phony morality, one willing to favour trite facsimiles over insightful art, one willing to cultivate ignorance over enlightenment, one so willing to cast each individual into an insular prison, I'll take the bad plumbing, thank you very much! Yes, I've come home to a place more in tune with the person I am, and the person I want to become. And it feels good indeed to once again be able to breathe.
David
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