Ben Cahill of Senior College put a cartoon on the Tutor2u blog about the role Angela Merkel has in determining the destiny of Greece. The cartoon below has Merkel showing the Greeks to their only option ie. the labyrinth to be consumed by the minotaur. What she basically saying to the Greeks is that you have no choice but to stick to the reform measures and strict austerity measures. Furthermore one could say that after the soccer quarter-final on Friday “One gone, one to go”.
This cartoon also reminded me of book that I recently read called the Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis. The Minotaur is a tragic mythological figure. Its story is packed with greed, divine retribution, revenge and much suffering. It is also a symbol of a particular form of political and economic equilibrium straddling vastly different, faraway lands: a precarious geopolitical balance that collapsed with the beast’s slaughter, thus giving rise to a new era.
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According to the myth’s main variant, King Minos of Crete, the most powerful ruler of his time, asked Poseidon for a fine bull as a sign of divine endorsement, pledging to sacrifice it in god’s honour. After Poseidon obliged him , Minos recklessly decided to spare the animal, captivated as he was by its beauty and poise. The gods, never allowing a good excuse for horrible retribution to go begging, chose an interesting punishment for Minos: using Aphrodite’s special skills, they had Minos’s wife, Queen Pasiphae, fall in lust with the bull. Using various props constructed by Daedalus, the lengendary engineer, she managed to impregnate herself, the result of that brief encounter being the Minotaur: a creature half-human, half-bull (Minotaur translates as ‘Minos’s Bull’, from the greek taurus, ‘bull’).
When the Minotaur grew larger and increasingly unruly, King Minos instructed Daedalus to build a labyrinth, an immense underground maze where the Minotaur was kept. Unable to nourish itself with normal food, the beast had to feast on human flesh. This proved an excellent opportunity for Minos to take revenge on the Athenians whose King Aegus, a lousy loser, had had Minos’s son killed after the young man won all races and contests in the Pan-Athenian Games. After a brief war with Athens, Aegus was forced to send seven young boys and seven unwed girls to be devoured by the minotaur every year (or every nine years according to another version). Thus, so the myth has it, a Pax Cretana was established across the know lands and seas on the basis of regular foreign tribute that kept the Minotaur alive.
Beyond myth, historians suggest that Minoan Crete was the economic and political hegemon of the Aegan region. Weaker-city states, like Athens, had to pay tribute to Crete regularly as a sign of subjugation. This may well have included the shipment of teenagers to be sacrificed by priests wearing bull masks.
Returning to the realm of the myth, the eventual slaughter of the Minotaur by Thesus, son of King of Aegeus of Athens, marked the emancipation of Athens from Cretan Hegemony and the dawn of a new era.
Aegeus only grudgingly allowed his son to set off to Crete on that dangerous mission. He asked Theseus to make sure that, before sailing back to Piraeus, he replaced the original mournful black sails with white ones, as a signal to his waiting father that the mission had been successful and that Theseus was returning from Crete victorious. Alas, consumed by the joy at having slaughtered the Minotaur, Theseus forgot to raise the white sails. On spotting the ship’s black sails from afar, and thinking that his son had died in the clutches of the Minotaur, Aegus plunged to his death in the sea below, thus giving his name to the Aegean sea.
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This suggests a tale of a hegemonic power projecting its authority across the seas, and acting as custodian of far-reaching peace and international trade, in return for regular tributes that keep nourishing the beast from within. The role of the beast was America’s twin deficits, and the tribute took the form of incoming goods and capital. Its end came from the collapse of the banking system. The book is well worth the read and not too long either.
ECONFIX 