Yesterday I traded e-mails with an old Greek friend who reads this blog. She loved the Mr. Panos video I posted, and conveyed the sadness and disgust she feels at being Greek today. She wrote at some length about the political corruption that led her country to this impasse, in particular a patronage approach to government in which people came to think of the state as a bank to be raided, and politicians as sugar daddies who handed out the goodies in exchange for political support. For 30 years, she said, the two big political parties bought votes from the electorate, and the electorate allowed itself to be bought. The parties promised the world, at no cost. It couldn’t go on forever. Now it’s broken, and there’s no money to fix it, and the politicians (she says) are still maneuvering to hide the truth from the people and to preserve their own position.

I told her that it’s my sense that Americans aren’t looking at Greeks and saying, in effect, “Sucks to be you.” Rather, we’re looking at the Greeks and saying, “Is that going to be us one day?” Jim Hoagland thinks yes, it is:

The Greeks are forerunners of what the rest of us are becoming. The perilous waters that finally submerged George Papandreou now lap at the throats of the other leaders of the developed world. Like the former Greek prime minister, they soon must admit — to voters determined not to hear the message — that they have been making promises of low taxes and high benefits that they could never afford to keep. “We are all Greeks now,” to paraphrase Richard Nixon on John Maynard Keynes.

… I don’t need to go to Greece anymore to be surrounded by people who reflexively refuse to raise taxes to help with the national debt and the nation’s eroding infrastructure. And, alas, I don’t need to go to Greece to find political leaders too frightened to fight for proposals coming from deficit-cutting commissions they appoint. I can get that right here in the U.S.A.

It’s beside the point to talk about how we’re in better shape than Greece because we can print our own money, or this thing, or the other thing. The basic point is that like the Greeks, we have been living beyond our means, and our politicians lie to us about what is required to put our house in order because we don’t want to hear the truth, and we therefore reward politicians who tell us the comfortable lie. The painful truth is that Americans are going to have to get used to higher taxes, fewer services, a diminished standard of living and a relative decline in power on the world stage. Nobody wants to hear that, of course. But the God of the Prosperity Gospel is puny compared to the Gods of the Copybook Headings. 

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!