Our European Union is disintegrating. Should we accelerate the disintegration of a failed confederacy? If one insists that even small countries can retain their sovereignty, as I have done, does this mean Brexit is the obvious course? My answer is an emphatic “No!”
This vociferous statement by Yanis Varoufakis, the only minister of finance to rival Kardashian’s media coverage, is followed by his diatribe liking Brexit to a Tunguska style economic aftermath and preceded by a love story involving a cold yet strangely enticing Siemens refrigerator and a few transistors humming freedom songs under the blanket.
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If you want to read Varoufakis’ treatise on how a naïve bean counter elated by the Greek people’s choice to refuse payback was thrown into the seriously over regulated world of heavies with fat Euro deposits and little romance, do so, it makes an interesting read in the light of Panama Papers.
Many of you know Greece and appreciate its cocktail coloured sunsets, picturesque mazes of streets in towns built on the rock face of paradisiacal islands in order to confuse Jack Swallow pirates invading weekly from finding their way back to their skull and crossbones flagged vessels. Nowadays, the stone clad labyrinths are strewn with sun burnt bodies of fat Europeans who give up trying to retrace their way back to the hotel when the night clubs close. Mykonos, here I come!
Yanis argues that Brexit would disintegrate Europe, which in turn would lead to 1930’s style chaos, further implying that we cannot peacefully undo the federal mess because the path that led us to unite, abandoning frontiers and funny money such as Italian Lira no longer exists. Old lira denominated currency ceased to be legal tender on February 28, 2002. The conversion rate is 1,936.27 lire to the euro. Remember going to Rome and trying to work out the price of an overpriced gelato?
But we also know that tax and paying it are words that don’t exist in the language of Zeus and Sophocles, so aptly quoted by Yanis, friend of the oppressed.
Tradwell refuses to go where feta is king and finance ministers argue that paying debts, albeit ones engaged by the previous administration, is a moot point.
However, Tradwell believes that Europe should be saved, or rather that Europe can be saved by firing all its officials, demolishing all buildings with a European prefix and installing Fahrenheit 451 law encompassing the complete Brussels bibliography of inane legislation and starting again from scratch.
Tradwell’s modest abode is a humble house in a village where the very idea of bringing together countries where free speech was mostly, well, free was born with the aim of showing Stalin that we’re not afraid of his Gulag Archipelago Big Bear. Jean Monet’s house in the village is owned and maintained by the European Parliament, otherwise known as a convention of eunuchs at Spearmint Rhino; basically a good idea with little scope for conclusion.
The thatched cottage is a museum; its contents remind visitors of those great postwar men of power seeking freedom from total control.
Which is precisely what Europe’s doing with its people and it is diametrically opposed to the genesis of the common, federated land; it’s been trying to tell us that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. No, we’re all different; some of us eat Octopus after it’s been bashed against the quay of Piraeus. Some of us eat foie gras which equals torture to vegans. It’s one of Tradwell’s favourites, on toast with a glass of Yquem.
The picturesque sub-Parisian village where Tradwell’s pitched its tent houses two more landmarks of human diversity, physical intelligence and love of art: Brigitte Bardot Foundation and Maison Louis Carré.
The former partied hard with her then millionaire beau Gunter Sachs at her Bazoches sur Guyonne farm. When baby seals started getting clubbed wholesale and the wobbly parts of BB’s world famous body began venturing south she bequeathed the Jacuzzi and the surrounding acres to lame goats and cats with no tail.
The latter is an architectural paradise, converted to a museum by Finland, a member of the reviled union since January 99, a house designed by one of its greatest men, Alvar Aalto.
So much history and such a density of Europe crammed into a village virtually unknown to the madding crowd.
Many a student of architecture in from Japan on a whistle-stop tour of covert examples of European unity knocked on Tradwell’s gates asking the way to the shrine, the only building conceived by Aalto in Maurice Ravel’s backyard, only to be told that being a spiritual Samurai, he might as well listen to Brigitte’s menagerie meowing and take a walk on the wild side of Jean Monet’s garden.
Yes, Europe is all over the place over here; Maurice Ravel’s piano sits silently, waiting for Bolero’s suite in his house a mile away.
This is the Europe Tradwell strives to save, full of people doing their thing in a Babel tower of cultures.
We propose to leave Mr. Varoufakis to his nostalgic musings of spicy Koftas washed down with gallons of Absinthe Ouzo while sharing “don’t mention the war” jokes with his Troika mates.
This is the difference between dreaming and being.
You want to feel the Europe worth saving?
Visit Tradwell’s home ground.
Yasu Yanis.