If "LOAFING" was the experience of an obedient soldier who came to serve his country and became a collaborator of the military junta that seized power, then "LIVING" is the erratic life and risky public acts of a state employee forced by his employer to serve a party that has captured the state mechanism. As they did twenty years earlier, his old army comrades have pretty much come to terms with the regime, and some are now exploiting it. The Karamanos of "LOAFING" could be myself, if he had returned to his mother country from Munich rather than from Tashkent, and if suffering hadn't pushed him to his breaking point.

I did not suffer enough, either as a pioneer at Nauplion, nor as a commando with the green-beret company that occupied the Greek Telecom tower during the April 21st coup d’état. My only spontaneous reaction, was relaying the information that the WDR and the Hellenic-German Chamber of Commerce had agreed to donate to Greek Army Television the then most powerful – black and white – European transmitter, located in Langenberg, where I found myself in the dawn of April 21st accompanying four officers as interpreter. The heroic scenario would have been to desert, leave my officers to the mercy of the Germans, and impede the delivery by blowing up the transmitter. But then there was no Red Army Faction, not even as an idea, and my extraparliamentary friend Rolf was still a trainee lawyer. The only thing that gave me a little satisfaction was when we went a few weeks later to pick up the transmitter and the WDR technicians sent us to our embassy in Bonn to find out why they wouldn’t give it to us...

Maybe it was these experiences that caused me to fixate on the OTE-Telecom, the transmitters, the media and bomb blasts in general. But in "LOAFING" there was no time to work out my own guilt, because I had to fit in a whole army of civilians, politicians, and a society that continued loafing collectively for the next seven years. The resistance of the few had been shown by others before me, and the complacency of conscience of the many after 1974 was taken over by the political parties.

* "Bios" (βίος) is Greek for life in general or a person's life in particular. "Politeia" (πολιτεία) means the state and the citizen's relation to it, that is, both "state" and "public behaviour". The expression "bios kai politeia" describes an adventurous person who has had his ups and downs, and is still living dangerously. In the Greek title I have replaced ΒΙΟΣ with BIOS, since it is also an acronym for the "Basic Input Output System" of every computer.