Antigone in Genoa

Sophocles (496-406 BC) was a man before his time, at least where the Genoa protesters are concerned. His anti-authoritarian spirit would have them carrying his portrait, bust rather, on one hand and the Molotov cocktail on the other. Antigone, among his greatest plays, is one that makes us think not just about politics, but also about the ethics that drive us to take a stand. Here's how it goes: The sun also rises over Thebes. The two sons of Oedipus (you know all about the bad luck of that poor motherfucker), Eteocles and Polynices, had arranged to rule Thebes by turn. Eteocles got used to being number one and refused his brother his turn. Polynices did what most of us would do?he took matters in hand, by marching against his own city with foreign support. Both brothers were killed in the battle, and their uncle, Creon, decrees that Polynices is a traitor and should lie unburied outside the city. To the state he is a public enemy, the indignities on his body a warning to all aspirant revolutionaries.

Enter Antigone, the grieving sister of the dead brothers. To her, Polynices is a man, and the gods decree that every man must have a burial. He is also her brother, and who the hell is the state to tell her differently. She gives him a token burial by strewing dust on his corpse, and in consequence suffers martyrdom.

Unlike the Italian police in Genoa, the ancient Greeks did not fool around. Antigone is buried alive on orders from her Uncle Creon?who is also the father of her betrothed?and who belatedly discovers only too clearly the cost of power. The left, of course, has always seen Antigone as a rebel, a person who is willing to take a stand against legislation they cannot accept. We on the right see her as more of a conservative, one who prizes individuality and conscience above the will of the state. Mind you, I don't think that Antigone has ever been performed in the Soviet Union or Communist China because of the messages the play communicates.

When Jean Anouilh produced his version of Antigone in occupied Paris, he did not need to dress Creon in a Nazi uniform. He nevertheless got his point across. When the play first appeared it was in Athens, and the Athenians maintained that their mythical King Theseus had led a force to Thebes to force Creon to bury the dead. This was held up as an example of the virtues of an interventionist foreign policy. (The grotesque Madeleine Albright, I am certain, had some researcher dig all this up while she bombed Serbia to smithereens.) In Periclean Athens, the play preached to the converted. Athens was an imperial power, and Sophocles was the free world's first policeman's spokesman.

Antigone makes us think about much more, however. Not just about politics and the sanctity of the state versus the sanctity of the individual, but also about feelings and the hurt that drives us to take a stand. Antigone is a drama queen. She hates her suffering, is frightened of death, but is also in love with those of her brother. She courts arrest, shuns the advice of sister Ismene and chooses martyrdom to gain celebrity and fame. Which brings me to the overreported subject of the Genoa protesters.

It would be insulting to my heroine to ask if there was an Antigone among the 100,000 protesters, because they had to deal with Berlusconi and not Creon. Since the first protesters of the 60s, among them the spoiled, the rich and the bored in America, Antigone has always come to mind. In South Vietnam, as well as in Czechoslovakia, Buddhist monks and Jan Palach immolated themselves and got their points across. Not so the self-publicists like Jane Fonda and the Berrigans, celebrity-seeking opportunists in the Robert Kennedy Jr. mold. As Fareed Zakaria wrote, "It is a sad irony that many of the same people who highlight the desperate condition of poor countries oppose the only realistic solution for them: that they quickly and wholeheartedly embrace the technological revolution of our times."

Zakaria has a hell of a point. Not a single person has died from eating genetically modified food, yet malnutrition kills millions every year. Having said that, the G-8's regimes are riddled with corruption, incompetence and arrogance on a scale that would alienate Christ's apostles. Let's face it. The whole business of international summitry is so much showing off. The protesters should have been burning down bureaucrats' offices rather than attacking capitalism per se. The protesters should have been protesting the EU, the corrupt, unelected and unaccountable cathedral of bureaucracy, not the United States. (To illustrate the arrogance of socialist governments, the Greeks announced that under a left-wing government, unlike the Berlusconi regime, Greek anarchists would not have been clubbed by the carabinieri. In diplomatic circles this is the equivalent of a nuclear strike.)

But back to Antigone. And politics. She surely thought that having God and justice on her side was a good thing. She nevertheless went down Swanee. Every German soldier's belt had "Gott mit uns" written on it?God with us. They also went down Swanee. The last line of the play says: "For proud men who speak great words come in the end to despair, and learn wisdom in sorrow, when it is too late." Great literature teaches us everything, but we understand nothing.