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summoned some four hundred blindness benefit recipients from the island to take an eye exam in order to determine whether they were really blind. Athens was a long way from Zakynthos, but the government did not trust nearby doctors to make accurate diagnoses, forcing island residents to make the long trip. In the hospital waiting room, I met Panagiotis Vozaitis, a skinny, bowlegged, retired currant farmer from Zakynthos. Vozaitis had not received the blindness benefit, but had decided to make the trip with his daughter anyway when he heard the exams were taking place. He had eye problems, he said, and had twice tried to get the blindness benefit, but had been unsuccessful. With his small farmer’s pension, he could not afford even the bargain rate of eight hundred euros, paid in two installments, he alleged the island ophthalmologist had requested of him for a blindness diagnosis. “If I had it, I would’ve paid it,” Vozaitis told me. Now he was in Athens to see if he could get the benefit in the proper manner—due to blindness. Vozaitis said he could not see out of his right eye, and had some problems with the left. A doctor later told me the old farmer wasn’t impaired enough to qualify for the benefit, for which one has to be almost completely blind in both eyes. I had suspected as much. As Vozaitis and I spoke in the hospital, his pale blue left eye focused alertly on me as he talked about the crisis and derided the politicians who “stole it all.” Though he did not technically qualify for the benefit, Vozaitis’s story showed how Greece’s social safety net, while having been abused as if it were a slush fund by many of the country’s politicians, was deficient at fulfilling the purpose for which it was intended. Vozaitis, after all, had traveled several hours because he could not trust he would receive a benefit he might have been entitled to without having to pay a fee. When I mentioned Gasparos, the man who had been prefect when many suspect blindness benefits were handed out, Vozaitis laughed.
    “Those who eat a lot also give to those who vote for them,”he told me. “That prefect is going to become bishop one day.” This expression, to “eat,” is the ubiquitous Greek shorthand for illicit feasting on public money. Those politicians who ate also bequeathed some of the spoils to the voters, Vozaitis was saying. This way of seeing things, while accurate, was also somewhat controversial in Greece. To the extent there was any consensus on the domestic cause of Greece’s fiscal problems, it was that “the politicians ate it all,” a phrase I very frequently heard when discussing the crisis with Greeks. There was less often acknowledgment of citizens’ eating. When one prominent Greek politician offered a more inclusive theory of how Greece’s money had been consumed, it was not well received. The politician, Theodoros Pangalos, was deputy prime minister in 2010 when, speaking in parliament, he offered an answer to the question Greeks were asking the politicians: “How did you eat the money?” Pangalos, a hefty man who barely fit into his parliamentary seat, then answered: “We ate it all together in the framework of a relationship of political clientelism, corruption, payouts, and the debasement of the meaning of the politics itself.” This statement—reduced to “We ate it together”—quickly became famous and served as a kind of mantra of the debt crisis, though it was usually uttered in irony and outrage, as Greeks felt that politicians and their powerful associates ate it, or at least a lot more of it than everyone else. Yet that anger did not take into account the fact that politicians did not exist in a vacuum, and had found ways to involve their voters in the feasting, thereby securing their electoral place at the head of the table. The manner in which this allegedly transpired on Zakynthos was flagrant, but the vast majority of the time it was much more mundane, and legal: rapid