"Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And sell the Acropolis too!"—headline, Bild newspaper, March 4, 2010
Sometimes they cut to the essence of the story, those tabloid headline-writers, even when they haven't got the quotation exactly right. What the German politician being quoted in the Bild article cited above actually said was, "A bankrupt party must use everything he has to make money and serve his creditors. … Greece owns buildings, companies and several uninhabited islands, which can now be used to repay debt."
What he meant, though, was more accurately reflected in that Bild headline: The Germans are fed up with paying Europe's bills. They don't want to bail out the feckless Greeks with their flagrantly inaccurate official statistics; they resent being Europe's banker of last resort; they object to the universal demand that they plug the vast holes in the Greek budget deficit in the name of "European unity"; and for the first time in a long time they are saying it out loud.
