What is "bigger"? Which has more conceptual weight, 50 years or half a century? Where do you understand it the most? How much time did it run? I will vote for the second one. Half a century is a long time. Within half a century you think that there must have been world-historical cultural and socio-political changes. And yet, when the starting point for counting is the Polytechnic, the concept of time becomes relativized.
Why the Polytechnic in Greece is still alive.
Perhaps it is one of the most successful slogans... For half a century we are still living in the framework of the political culture of Postcolonialism. We still have this chapter open.
I am a child of the Polytechnic generation. My parents are the Polytechnic generation. In a little while I will be fifty years old and I still define myself and sociologically identify myself as a child of the Postcolonial generation... As if I never became an adult. How to become? Since the Postcolonial generation never came of age politically.
Forty years teenager near half a century
I turned white in the summer
I tanned in the winter
Forty years immature
You debauchee Don Quixote...
Vassilis Papakonstantinou could not have said it better in 1992 when he released the song. Nor to define it better in every concert since he changes the verse; fifty years, sixty years a teenager.
I became a mother and with this song I lulled my son...
Nani nani our child nani.
Nani nani and I ordered,
nani nani in the City his dowries
and I ordered his jewelry.
Nani nani and wherever
it hurts so much, nani nani,
his nani nani
while Vassilis from his sleep was still making a fool of her, stretched his slingshot and marked planes, he forgot to grow up and stayed on the shelf.
And together the entire Left of post-political Greece.
What no;
There could not be a better time than the coincidence of Kasselakis and the political kitsch parody of the dissolution of SYRIZA with the fiftieth anniversary of the Polytechnic. How much irony of fate you will tell me... The generation of the Polytechnic is the generation of the Left. More precisely, the generation of the ideological hegemony of the Left. Which is being dissolved today. And he collides head-on with the 35-year-old Kasselakis, who came to change the teenage Left, to make it an adult; to adapt it to the model of the American Democratic party, which includes three main ideological wings, the Center with the moderate, conservative and liberal Democrats, the Center Left with the liberal and progressive Democrats and the Left with the social democrats and democratic socialists of the Democrats. Social liberals, as modern liberals in America are characterized, and progressives make up about half of the Democratic base.
Since we didn't see any advance in Greece for so many years with the Left of the Soviet model, we said let's try the American one as well.
If you have seen House of Cards which describes the story of Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the ambitious and immoral politician of the Democratic party and his equally ambitious wife Claire Underwood, I don't think you feel very safe... If you do, image replacing frank and claire with stefano and tyler you'll probably feel worse.
Perhaps this is the perennial problem of the Greek Left. It consistently adopted models from abroad, which it never managed to assimilate into the Greek reality in the sense of the socio-political and geopolitical characteristics of the country. Under the guidance of ideological "parents" how not to remain a teenager? So how does he manage to pass the political coming of age milestone? Which requires you to accept reality and start deciding and acting within the rational framework of the possible? Which requires you to stop only opposing the establishment and start finding solutions? Where common sense sometimes collides with daydreaming, and sometimes violently wakes you up?
However, our democratic consciousness for half a century was fundamentally shaped by the Polytechnic or rather more correctly by the Juntic trauma and the narrative of the Left's moral advantage. The generations that lived through the Polytechnic could neither overcome it, nor assimilate it, nor transform it into something modern. And the generations that did not live through it were nurtured with his epic and perhaps formed feelings of inferiority. And so we move forward after fifty years teetering between nostalgia, idealization and jealousy.
Is that enough?
Could it be that from the Polytechnic to Kasselakis it is not a cigarette but half a century?
And half a century is too much time.
*Cover photo: Enthusiastic audience at a Mikis Theodorakis concert in Athens, in the days after the fall of the junta. [Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]