Good news for George W. Bush. Turns out that a loose grasp of certain foreign policy details -- not knowing much about the Grecians, to be precise -- doesn't disqualify a fellow for the White House, after all.
On a rainy morning tour of the Acropolis Nov. 20, Bill Clinton ("one of our greatest presidents," sayeth Al Gore) blurted out something extraordinary to his guide, Greek culture minister Elisavet Papazoi. Pieces of sculpture and friezework original to the Parthenon -- but safely housed since 1816 at the British Museum in London -- should be returned to Athens, Clinton told Papazoi. "If it would be me," he volunteered, "I would give them back immediately." The president thus barged unwittingly into a heated, ongoing dispute between the Brits and Greeks over "restitution" of the socalled Elgin Marbles. And did so, incidentally, on the side of a particularly philistine museological ethnocentrism.
As late as the middle 1600s, the Parthenon was still in pretty good shape. On the west pediment, for example, 20 figures by the 5th-century B.C. sculptor Phidias remained intact. By 1800, however, only four were left, and two of them had no heads. The Greeks had used the Parthenon as a munitions dump during their war with the Turks, and the temple had been shelled. And both the Greeks and Turks had later quarried or otherwise defaced the site's marble. So in 1806, the British diplomat and amateur archaeologist Thomas Bruce, earl of Elgin, purchased from the Ottoman governors of Athens, and began shipping back to England, an extensive collection of the Parthenon's surviving masterworks.
The rest of the Acropolis has ever since continued to crumble -- victimized by floods of tourists, automobile emissions, encroaching development, and a series of famously bungled 20th-century Greek "restoration" jobs. But for decades now, a succession of Greek governments have been demanding the return of their "stolen patrimony," despite the fact that Athens has neither a legitimate legal claim to the Elgin Marbles nor any feasible plan to preserve and display them.
The Brits have always firmly and correctly said no. They said no again last week in response to Clinton's little Acropolis brainstorm. During parliamentary debate, and in unusually candid interviews with the press, spokesmen for both the Labour government and the Tory opposition essentially told the president to keep his yahoo mits off England's antiquities.
And that's only the half of it. The "principle" Clinton was advancing in this incident -- he apparently told Papazoi that all such antiquities should be similarly removed from all the world's museums -- is ludicrous. But the principle Clinton's Washington aides advanced in the course of post-Parthenon damage control is even more peculiar: The White House disavowed the president's remarks!
Washington has taken no official, public position on the Elgin Marbles, administration flacks Joe Lockhart and Barry Toiv told reporters; in Athens, Clinton had merely been expressing views he holds "privately." In other words: He may bungle the foreign stuff till the cows come home because the president doesn't necessarily speak for the United States.
Now there's a handy idea. As THE SCRAPBOOK goes to press, Clinton is beginning a visit to the Balkans for his first post-NATO-rescue speech to the . . . um, Kosovarians. He has just delivered an appallingly presumptuous sermon to them on their obligation to "forgive the Serbs." No doubt that, too, will be brushed aside as his "private" view and therefore meaningless. Governor Bush will want to take note.