By Julian Delasantellis

Ancient Greece built outdoor amphitheaters at Delphi and Thespis for performances of the plays of Sophocles and Antigone; in England, it was The Rose and The Globe theaters that first saw the brilliance of the Bard.

Let no one believe America lacked the commitment to culture and fine arts that produced Oedipus and Twelfth Night; those people will be humbled by their ignorance very quickly. America’s great contribution to the Thespian gods, is, and always will be, the invention of dinner theater.

Almost like the product of a time and motion study that seeks to more effectively utilize the time spent during nights at the theater, being able to down your chocolate cheesecake eclair while simultaneously listening to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” is a virtual guarantee of getting home before the last rebroadcast of ESPN Sportscenter.

But in another modern variant, the old rules of polite theater go completely out the window. This is the alternative of dinner theater, where the audience not only watches the play but participates in it as well. This situation will not likely have a seated audience member becoming Martha as she replies to office buddy George just after taking a big bite of turkey leg duringWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; it’s more like one where the show audience becomes actors and actresses in another audience, like the hilariously staged bridal ceremonies of productions such asTony and Tina’s Incredible Italian Wedding.

With an eye towards America’s cultural diversity, these shows sometimes become Eamon and Maureen’s Incredible Irish Wedding, or Sanchez and Maria’s Incredible Spanish Wedding – a particularly daring troupe may try to stage Yasir and Golda’s Incredible Mixed Wedding.

The plots are usually the same no matter the playbill. Outrageously characterized, frequently stereotyped bridal party and family members are left to face the inevitable stresses and fissures of the average wildly garish and overstaged American middle- and upper-middle class “fairy tale” wedding.

But now, it looks like the format has been successfully repackaged for a foreign audience. Yes, how else could one describe what we are now witnessing other than Hans and Olivia’s Incredibly Stupid European Monetary Union?

You’ll laugh until it hurts. The Greeks and Germans certainly are.

When last I and other ATol commentators (I through my February 17, 2010, Asia Times Online article, Deficit flights of fancy) addressed the financial crisis of the southern European periphery a couple of weeks ago, our modern-day Greeks did not seem to be offering the world all that many gifts.

Athens, the point of the spear for a group of overspending, overleveraged countries derisively called the “PIIGS” (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) was having real difficultyrefinancing its national debt on world bond markets; if this situation continued and spread to the rest of the PIIGS, it was feared that it could be the first real indication of the anticipated bond-buyers’ strike that could cause government interest rates to spike sharply higher, bringing to a close the Keynesian experiment that is attempting to reflate the world economy through debt-filled stimulus.

The question then would be, if the Greeks and the other PIIGS went to Germany for their emergency funding and failed, where would the United States, with its much bigger funding requirements, go? To China, even though that nation has been giving many indications that it wants to disassociate its future from both the US dollar and the US’s floundering economy?

The belief has until recently been that Germany would soon fulfill its assigned role within the European Union and write the checks to bail out Greece and then the rest of the PIIGS. It had always happened this way before; almost like a stern rich uncle bailing out a spendthrift nephew with a big check that had followed a long lecture, the expectation was that Berlin would toot on its tuba a few times, but eventually pay up.

Not this time. Even though Germany is handling it better than just about any place else in the world except China, the stresses of the world financial crisis are stiffening bipartisan German domestic opposition to a Greek bailout. It’s almost as if a tea-party movement is springing up right there in Middle Europe – and what would be more terrifying than a tea party composed of the ignorance of the American tea parties and the discipline of the Germans?

The German newspaper Bild has reported that two-thirds of Germans are opposed to helping Greece; 53% would favor the expulsion of Greece from the EU if its continued presence threatened the stability of the monetary union. As of Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was still hanging tough for more Greek budget cuts and against any German aid, saying, “We have a treaty which rules out the possibility of bailing out other nations.”

In 1975, after then-US president Gerald Ford denied New York City’s request for bailout assistance, the tabloid New York Daily News responded with perhaps the most famous headline in American journalism – “Ford to City – Drop Dead”. A more current variant might be “Merkel to Greece –Tot Umfallen!”

Naturally, the Greeks noticed that no bullion blitzkrieg was on its way, so then it was their turn to dial up to 11 on the nastiness rheostat. Sentiment abounded that Greece had already paid Germany far in excess of its rightful due, namely, the 300,000 Greeks who died under the brutal German occupation of Greece during World War II.

Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos was only slightly more diplomatic, noting that the entire financial crisis was a result of “Nazis” (who) “took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime in the future” – presumably through German reparations to Greece. In the Eleftheros Typos, a bit of photoshop fun was had by the editors, who placed a large swastika in the right hand of Heinrich Strach’s Winged Victory statue in Berlin.

Keeping the debate at a mature level, Germany’s Focus magazine featured a report that Greeks saw their brethren among theGastarbeiter, or guest workers, in Germany in a particularly negative light. On the cover of the magazine was a statue of a proud Greek national treasure, the Venus de Milo. However, this one’s arms had been restored so as to show one of the goddess’s fingers in a particularly inappropriate hand gesture. The caption on the magazine’s cover is also probably guaranteed to launch another southern salvo – “A fraud in Europe’s family”.

However, there are late indications that the discovery of the jackboots at the back of the Iron Mistresses’ closet, or her Panzer in the attic, may be loosening the purse strings around her heart. Economist Simon Johnson, a former International Monetary Fund official and now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in his “Baseline Scenario” blog on Monday of a developing French-German deal to lend Greece a further 60 billion euros (US$81 billion) over the next few years, hopefully giving time for Greece to get its own house in order. This deal would totally blow out Greece’s EU debt limitations, but it just might get the EU through the current crisis – which, in the final analysis, is just the type of short-term thinking all politicians want to do.

Der Spiegel is reporting that work on a restructured, more powerful federal structure for the EU is part of the deal, one where Germany and France could force the smaller countries into compliance rather than just trying to coax them. This time, apparently, it’s not the Greeks to beware of bearing gifts.

As the crisis dawned, many observers contended that, at its heart, it only displayed what a poor idea the current construction of European unity is. If the weak Greek economy had not been tied to the strong German economy through their common currency, the euro, the individual Greek currency could have depreciated until the country’s deficits were gone, likewise for the individual German currency appreciating its own surpluses away.

But the idealists such as Jean Monnet, the post-World War II French economic official and dreamer of a unified Europe, had another idea. If all the states of Europe were unified into a common economic union which included a common currency, strong, export-orientated states such as Germany would benefit from having markets with stable exchange rates around which to plan their export campaigns, and the weaker currencies would gain access to the wealth of the rich countries of the north. One wonders whether even the great Monnet ever realized just how long his bureaucrats would have to take into account the popular passions and hatreds of the past in formulating policy.

It’s not as if economic and currency unions can’t work – just look at the now 223-year-old American monetary union, unified under a common currency called the US dollar. During the time of the governing framework that existed prior to the adoption of the US constitution in 1788, the country was ruled by a weak central government mandated by the articles of confederation, adopted in 1781. This arrangement did include separate currencies for the separate states; for a few years it actually was possible to trade the nascent US state currencies off against each other.

Eventually, the system was seen as unworkable and a common currency, the US dollar, was adopted.

Why did US monetary union work, while European monetary union still struggles through its growing pains? The answer isn’t so much the monetary policy of currencies, but the fiscal policy of budgets. US state legislatures are prohibited by law from running deficits; they must balance out (with the exception of possible surpluses) inflow and outflow every year.

European governments and legislatures still have the luxury of deficits; we can talk of different fiscal policies being adopted by Ireland and Belgium, not by Iowa and Texas. These different policies are what leads up to the big surpluses or deficits that the European Union has to periodically handle, imbalances that have to be dealt with through fixed currency value adjustments, otherwise known as currency realignments, or financial legerdemain such as what France and Germany are about to try once again. If these don’t work, the union must necessarily break apart under the weight of its imbalances.

At least on this first real international monetary crisis of the Great Recession, the Franco/German rescue package seems to insure that the abyss is not looking back at us as we look down into it. Maybe it will be different if the other PIIGS come to the trough soon seeking the same terms. Perhaps the final line in this comedy is a renewed warning that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw so many stones.

The house lights come up, the actors take their final bows, the crowd reaches for their doggy bags filled with the cheapest, greasiest cuts of stringy gristle and fat-studded undercooked bone in prime rib, and head quickly out the door, hoping against hope to conclude their evening of arts and letters by being the first car out of the parking lot.

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached atjuliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.