July 7^th

Today it’s Pat Buchanan’s turn to hold the stage. He has expanded Greece’s failure to pay its bills into “an existential crisis.” The real crisis, he maintains, is the influx of those pesky unwashed African heathen into “the mother continent.” The what Pat? Is Europe now the mother continent? From my reading of Paleoanthropology, I always assumed that Africa was the mother continent. Of course given Pat’s aversion to people of color perhaps he prefers to believe his ancestors evolved in Europe, perhaps with the Neanderthals?

Pat is in a swivet over the low birth rate of European countries compared with the birth rate of their immigrants. I believe Pat has to accept the fact that Europe and the United States will, over the years, just gradually turn more tan. I know he hates that, but like the ageing process, he’ll just have to get used to it.

There is one issue where he has a point: immigrants flooding into Europe. It takes time to absorb immigrants who come from a different culture and have different values. If too many, from a very different culture, arrive all at once the host culture will have some dislocation trying to absorb them; it happened here and it happened with my ancestors, the Pennsylvania Dutch. No less a founding father than Ben Franklin referred to them as, “Palatine boors who refuse to learn English and want to change the culture of Pennsylvania.” Actually they wanted to be left alone and they saw no need to learn English because they got along just fine speaking Low German. Still, their culture wasn’t very different from the Pennsylvanians already here.  If  anyone from outside Europe can simply put a foot on the continent they will then be admitted  as refugees and that has to be changed; how, and to what, is up to the Europeans but this system isn’t working and they must know that.

Not to be xenophobic, but the problem with the Greek economy is the Greeks. Some years ago I flew to Athens on Hellas, the national airline of Greece. Prior to take off my wife and I were buckled into our seats. There were still about twenty people standing in the aisle visiting with old friends also on their way to Athens. The attendants tried to get these folks to sit down so the plane could take off…forget about it. After about fifteen minutes of pleading with the aisle folks to sit down and being ignored the pilot took off anyway. Once in Athens an interesting traffic ploy emerged: if a red light up ahead had stopped a line of traffic, no matter; the driver of a small car would swerve on to the side walk, horn blaring at any pedestrians, barrel his way to the intersection and there make his turn into traffic.

It should not surprise anyone that 89.5 percent of Greek income taxes are not collected compared with 3 percent of taxes in Scandinavian countries. If people refuse to pay their taxes the country can’t pay its bills. (Grover Norquist take note.) Their politicians promise benefits but refuse to collect the taxes to pay for them. (We, on the other hand, fight wars and refuse to collect the taxes to pay for them.) It will be interesting to see what happens now!