Comeuppance: A Revenge Fantasy

I have a revenge fantasy.
I hope the Greeks will have long memories.
They will remember not only their contributions to Western civilization and their willingness to say ‘Oxi’ when it feels right.
Maybe they will not only remember the Nazi occupation and Churchill making common cause with the collaborators and their brothers and sisters in the battered Resistance gunned down in the streets. Maybe they will also remember the tweeting Finns and the scolding Ostie physicists and the smiling damned villains in their white hair and pearls and the bespectacled Dutchmen in their three-thousand-Euro suits and the Slovaks and the Irish and the you-name-its who’ve gotten back into lifeboats after Charybdis’ maelstrom and stomped on the knuckles of the desperate Odysseii still trying to climb back in and the Latvians parvenus who’ve lost a quarter of their population and want the Greeks to taste some of the toxic food that their own people have been force-fed…
I hope the Greeks remember them when the Gucci is on the other foot. Or rather, when a Europe has been built that places a greater premium on the lives of its peoples than on the pockets of its coddled, bailed-out bankers who want their like-minded servants in goevernment, Greek-speaking and non-, to privatize the Parthenon…
Better yet, maybe the ideologues will, recalling that the name of their beloved “Troika’ was borrowed from the NKVD, realize that structural violence can be more murderous than the kind involving sidearms and bullets in the back of the neck, and be persuaded by the reported utterances of Matteo Renzi, who, on the evening of July 11th, was first heard to express the sentiment that “Enough is enough”. Humiliation, after all, cannot be measured in actuarial tables and bottom lines, but immiseration can …
A thousand years from now, if the world still has breath in its body, I hope that the metaphorical hoes and the metaphorical pitchforks will have been put back indoors with the grain stores after having scared the wits out of the lords of the manor and the masters of the universe, and that somehow the Austerians or their ideological offspring who have sowed the wind will reap the whirlwind and get their comeuppance. A metaphorical comeuppance, to be sure...
Or maybe memory will be its own revenge...