Greek statesmanship
A sense of humor may take various forms and laughter may be anything from a refined tingle to an earth quaking roar, but the effect is always the same. Humor helps us to maintain a correct sense of values. It is the one quality which political fanatics appear to lack. If we can see the funny side, we never make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously. We are always reminded that tragedy is not really far removed from comedy, so we never get a lop sided view of things. This is one of the chief functions of satire and irony. Human pain and suffering are so grim; we hover so often on the brink of war; political realities are usually enough to plunge us into total despair. In such circumstances, cartoons and satirical accounts of somber political events redress the balance. They take the wind out of pompous and arrogant politicians who have lost their sense of proportion. They enable us to see that many of our most profound actions are merely comic or absurd. We laugh when a great satirist like Swift writes about war in Gulliver’s Travels. The Lilliputians and their neighbors attack each other because they can’t agree which end to break an egg. We laugh because we meant to laugh; but we are meant to weep too. It is too powerful a weapon to be allowed to flourish.
The sense of humor must be singled out as man’s most important quality because it is associated with laughter. And laughter, in turn, is associated with happiness. Courage, determination, initiative – these are qualities we share with other forms of life. But the sense of humor is uniquely human. If happiness is one of the great goals of life, then it is the sense of humor that provides the key. Greece, economically, is in the black. With very little to export other than such farm products as tobacco, cotton and fruit, the country earns enough from ‘invisible earnings’ to pay for its needed, growing imports. From the sending out of things the Greeks, earn only $285 million; from tourism, shipping and the remittances of Greeks abroad, the country takes in an additional #375 million and this washes out the almost $400 million by which imports exceed exports.
It has a balanced budget. Although more than one drachma out of four goes for defense, the government ended a recent year with a slight surplus — $66 million. Greece has a decent reserve of almost a third of a billion dollars in gold and foreign exchange. It has a government not dependent on coalescing incompatible parties to obtain parliamentary majorities. In thus summarizing a few happy highlights, I don’t mean to minimize the vast extent of Greece’s problems. It is the poorest country by a wide margin in Free Europe, and poverty is widespread. At best an annual income of $60 to $70 is the lot of many a peasant, and substantial unemployment plagues the countryside, cities, and towns of Greece. There are few natural resources on which to build any substantial industrial base. Some years ago I wrote here:
“Greek statesmanship will have to create an atmosphere in which home and foreign savings will willingly seek investment opportunities in the back ward economy of Greece. So far, most American and other foreign attempt have bogged down in the Greek government’s red tape and shrewdness about small points.” Great strides have been made. As far back as 1956, expanding tourism seemed a logical way to bring needed foreign currencies and additional jobs to Greece. At that time I talked with the Hilton Hotel people, who had been examining hotel possibilities, and to the Greek government division responsible for this area of the economy. They were hopelessly deadlocked in almost total differences of opinion and outlook.
