Read Online The Full Catastrophe by James Angelos - Free Book Online

some people who don’t have a shoulder to lean on, they didn’t have bread to eat, and maybe there we gave them every leniency.” This was a curious comment. Since only the legally blind are entitled to the benefit, there’s not a lot of room for leniency. “We were lenient, but within the limits of the law,” he added. “The other things that they say, this and that, those are slanders. You should know that Zakynthos is a very beautiful island, it has a lot of good things, but it’s an island of gossips.”
    A few months later, as the health ministry’s efforts to publicize its crackdown on the island intensified, the Greek media picked up the story in earnest. Greek television-news talk shows, which are often a cross between
Meet the Press
and
The Jerry Springer Show,
invited the deputy health minister, the mayor, the former prefect, the doctor, and various commentators to discuss the scandal. On one popular show, the mayor of Zakynthos said residents of the island, including some who had received a blindness benefit, had thrown yogurt at him—exhibiting good aim—in protest of his reforms. He said he considered the yogurt attack “a medal and an honor,” adding, “I don’t care about the political cost.” The mayor also claimed a priest on the island was one of those fraudulently receiving the blindness benefits.
    “That is to say, he was reading the gospel?” commented one guest on the program.
    The show’s moderator fumed with anger over the scandal.
    “The Troika had to come for us to do such investigations?” he said to the television audience. “It’s an embarrassment. It makes you want to go crazy. It makes you want to say, ‘Good what’s happening to us, good what they’re doing to us,’ those who’ve come from the outside.”
    Television pundits and the mayor called for a criminal investigation, with the doctor receiving the most vitriolic criticism. A few months after my visit, the doctor resigned from the hospital. Over the phone, he told me his decision had nothing to do with the “noise” about the blindness scandal. “I was ready to retire,” he said.
    —
    One afternoon in Zakynthos Town, I went for a walk in the city center, passing jewelry and designer clothing stores and cafés. At the time, there were no boarded up-stores or other signs of economic misery that were increasingly prevalent in Athens. Rather, the town appeared to be pretty well off. The city government may have long been broke, but the people living there seemed to be doing okay. I passed the offices of the island’s religious authorities, located near the mayor’s office, and decided to stop in and see if I could speak with someone about the spiritual state of the island. At the door, a man in a black robe asked me the purpose of my visit. I told him I was writing a story about “the blindness.”
    I was introduced to the general vicar, Panagiotis Kapodistrias, who also wore a long black robe and had a graying beard. On his office wall hung a framed image of Jesus lying dead at the foot of the cross, pierced by two spears. I sat down across from the vicar at his desk, and he offered me a piece of baklava from “Constantinople,” as Greeks refer to Istanbul, where he’d recently visited the Ecumenical Patriarch, the spiritual head of Orthodox Christianity. As we spoke about the quality of the baklava, a Polish woman entered the office and asked for money. She had three children, she said, and couldn’t find work. She had made twenty-three euros a day over the summer unloading trucks, a job, she said, “only a man should have done.”
    “I don’t ever see you in church,” the vicar said.
    “I do go,” she replied.
    “I’m not going to give you a lot,” the vicar told her. He filled out a little slip of paper for her, noting the size of the donation—fifty euros—which she could exchange for cash in another office.
    “That’s a lot,” said the Polish woman. “I can live on that for two or