the Minotaur metaphor from Yanis V.

The day after we arrived in Greece for a vacation, they

held an election there.

The leftist Syriza party won, propelling Alexis Tsipras into the office of Prime Minister. With no delay, Mr. Tsipras appointed Yanis Varoufakis as the new Finance Minister for Greece.

Before that week was over, these two men were visiting national leaders all over Europe. They were abruptly leaping into the Continental fracas of unbalanced financial equilibrium between their bankrupting government and the Euro creditor overlords up north.

Messers T and V immediately let it be known that their negotiating strategy on behalf of the Greek people would be very different from that of their predecessors. Austerity was not working to solve the problem, and would no longer be tolerated by the poor people of Greece. And it was time to acknowledge that fact. Something had to change.

That was about 3 and a half months ago. Now, in May 2015, the then-newly-appointed finance minister Mr. Varoufakis has already been replaced; he is now moving on to other roles in the international order of things (if "order" is an appropriate word for whatever it is that holds our nations together.)

As I write this, on a Sunday morning in May, in the USA, I am 2/3 of the way through reading Mr. Varoufakis' book The Global Minotaur;

http://www.amazon.com/The-Global-Minotaur-Financial-Controversies/dp/1780324502

I can tell you I am not surprised that his role as a negotiator was so brief. The man is a truth-teller. (of the leftist type; there are truth-tellers on both the "left" and the "right".)

As a regular ole conservative-leaning working-stiff kind of guy, I've done quite a bit of reading on this financial Crisis that has engulfed us since the fall of '08. Mr. V's explanation of that 6-year devolving tsunami is the easiest to understand that I have seen.

Yanis' strategy is centered on what we call these days a narrative. That is to say, a kind of story. He converts the whole unfolding circus of events into a story based upon the ancient Greek mythical tale of a terrible flesh-devouring beast, the Minotaur. If this sounds far-fetched, it is.

My conservative brethren these days disdain the narrative approach to elucidating current events; they prefer, as Sgt. Friday used to say back in the day. . . just the facts, ma'am.

As if such a thing--separating facts from fluffy hype--were possible in this day and time of cyber bewilderment. Even statistics, raw numbers, are near-nonsense nowadays; they're almost useless for making sense of contemporary fiscal/financial conundrums.

One has to survive by intuition in the 21st century.

There's "spin" imposed on everything! Consider the unemployment figures that the BLS cranks out every month. Talking heads await those stupid numbers on the first Friday of every month, so they can have something to talk about, forming projections and predictions about future events based on stuff that already happened last month. Looking for the "trend."

To hell with the trend! What's the truth?

Unemployment rate, or Labor participation rate?--you tell me which one really tells the tale.

It's like the CPI, Consumer Price Index. They leave fuel and food costs out of the equation, when those two factors comprise the biggest impact on every "middle class" household budget. Go figure.

But I digress.

Here's this lefty, Mr. Varoufakis, an economist. He writes a very interesting book, using the Minotaur analogy narrative, and helps me understand what the hell has been happening in the world of money, which is to say the real world.

And though he claims to be some kind of neo-Marxist, I don't care. If some conservative can do a better job of explaining why the free market has been buried under a landfill of toxic assets and leveraged finance-babel, let him/her do so.

I've blown my wad here in ranting, which is something I hate to see in other blatherers online, so I'll not weary you with more of this grievance;

I'll not explain the Greek's minotaurial metaphor. Except to say it involves the global recycling of economic surpluses since the post-WWII Bretton Woods financial arrangement that slanted everything in the world toward American advantage.

But now, since 1971, when Nixon shut down the gold window, all of that US-favoring international baggage has been lost in an airport somewhere between Brussels and Beijing and so the great recycling flow of surpluses has reversed. So that now it morphs into recycling deficits instead of surpluses and the winners will someday be losers and vice versa and so austerity is for the birds and now Mr. V thinks the Bretton Woods potentates should have listened to Mr. Keynes in 1944 instead of Harry Dexter White.

Or something like that. More about this later, probably next week after I finish the book. I suppose I'll have to jump over to Hayek or Schumpeter or Mr. Volcker for some right-leaning controlled financial disintegration explanations after this tragi-comedic death-toggle with Greek mythology.



Glass Chimera

Be aware of Greeks bearing debts

Greece is, you see, the opposite of California, and I'll tell you why.

The first thing is: Greece is very old. California is, on the other hand, very new.

The "West"--that is to say, California and all the rest of us New World types-- actually started in Greece about three thousand years ago. Greece was the "West" because it was westward from what was, in ancient times, the Old Country, the region we now call the Middle East, or Levant, or Holy Land, depending on your point of view.

Long ago, after Alexander and his military legacy turned the Persians back at the battle of Marathon, long about 490 b.c.e., the people of the Greek city-states began joining together to form an historical entity that we now call Ancient Greece.

And since that time, the whole thing of Greek culture moved westward and northward over a couple of millennia of time. The great thrust of Western thought, anchored in a mental discipline called philosophy and a political idea called Democracy, inspired empires and nations from those ancient days until the present day.

We still dream about governing ourselves in this thing call a democracy, but it has never quite manifested in a way authentic to the original concept.

Probably never will, but it's a nice thought.

A couple hundred years after the Greek Golden Age, the Romans came along with their Republic and their empire. Much of their marvelously innovative empire-building was rooted in Greek thought and mathematics (Euclid and Pythagoras). A lot of what the Romans did was direct imitation of Greek stuff. A good example of this is their omnipresent use of Columns for holding buildings up.

You've heard of Doric columns, Ionic columns?

That's Greek stuff. Except that--guess what!--the Doric and Ionic names originated across the Aegean sea from Greece, in a region called Asia (Minor), which is now Turkey. Go figure!

A couple hundred years after the Greek Golden Age, along came the Romans. What they ended up doing was much grander and more elaborate than what the Greeks did. They took Greek columns and turned them into a universal architectural art-form. Those two earlier Column designs--the Doric and the Ionian-- were not fancy enough to suit the Roman sense of grandiosity. So the Romans decorated the capitals (tops) of their columns with new, leafy frou-frou carvings and castings which came to be called Corinthian.

The Corinthian name, however, was not Roman, but Greek. Corinth was an important city in Greece. So once again, go figure.

Figuring is important to the whole advance of Western civilization. Everywhere Greeks and their European progeny went, they were figuring stuff out.

Thus did Western Civilization expand over millenia of time. Along came the Germans, French, Spanish, British, all of them making ever grander plans, striving to construct their own versions of civilization.

When the Greco-Roman enterprise got to the big Sea at the end of Europe--aka the End of the Earth--its expansion was delayed for a few hundred years. But then along came Cristoforo Columbo and Presto!, Western civilization took a grand leap across the Atlantic Ocean.

Now we Americans know about Boston, New Yawk, Philly, etc etc etc; and we are intimately familiar with Paul Revere and Grampa George Washington. Why we even know about Charleston and Savannah and all that unreconstructed goings-on down south, but what's important here is California!

Why?

Because Americans are adventurers. Our forefathers and foremothers hit the ground running after we got off the boat in Baltimore or Ellis Island or wherever it was.

Before you knew it, we were all the way over on the far other edge of the continent, in California, baby!

Or bust! That's what the Okies said.

And that was, if you think about it, the very end of the Greek frontier. From Athens to Anaheim, westward ho all along the way. That's all she wrote.

The westward expansion of Greek culture ended at California. It couldn't go any farther. Why, even when they o'erleaped the wide Pacific, what did they find?

China!

It doesn't get any older than that--China. No Westward expansion there, although the Brits made a few dents, and of course there was Marx and all that People's trial and bloody error.

Now We Americans have a saying: as California goes, so goes the nation.

That means that, from the 1849 Gold Rush on, the great exploratory thrust of American ingenuity and creativity originates in place called California.

The land of fruits and nuts.

And broccoli, lettuce, grapes, wine, silicon, integrated circuit chips, beach boys, beach girls, computers, iPhones, movies and pop culture, etc etc etc.

So once all the migrant Europeans got themselves planted on the East Coast back in the 1800s, they built so many cities, and built them so quickly, that before you know it they got overcrowded and pulled up stakes to head West.

Go West, young man, wrote Horace Greeley, about a hundred and fifty years ago.

And very quickly. We developed America from raw earth, from Schenectady to San Francisco in less than a hundred years, blazing a yankee trail all along the way.

And when we hit up against that great Pacific rim, the grand tide of our exuberance struck a sea wall and then it swayled back the other way: Disney in Paris, McDonald's in Athens, Kennedy in Berlin!

But now--and my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars--our grand millenia-old Restatement of Greco-Roman expansionism strikes, back at its ancient nascence, an Athenian rampart.

So I see the next phase of history this way: As Greece goes, so goes the West. And this is what it looks like, according to a pic I recently snapped in Athens:

Which is to say, a propped up portal. Where can we go from here?

Glass Chimera