Though because I, too, was bewildered—horrified, ashamed—by the financial crisis in my own country, I felt myself more vulnerable to new ideas, and from the unlikeliest sources. On one of my first days in Athens, I interviewed a member of the Communist Party who sat near a painting of Lenin and peppered his speech with “comrade,” all of which seemed absurd to my American sensibilities. But something in his sentiments, maybe just the outrage, felt wholly logical as well. “We deny this government propaganda that everyone is responsible for this situation,” he said. “We don’t agree with the EU idea that the banks are too big to fail, because they are still making millions in profits. It’s an illusion that it’ll be in the favor of people if we return to growth and development.”
Greece, I discovered, was a place where hammers and sickles and “Fuck the Police” graffiti decorated the city walls; where references to civil wars and world wars and an American intervention came up in daily conversation; where immigrants fleeing war and economic plunder scrambled atop the life raft of European shores and festered in Athens. To Americans, the Greek crisis seemed separate from the Arab Spring, which seemed separate from, say, East Africa, but later I would meet a Kenyan activist who had been incorporating such diverse movements as Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, gay marriage, and political stirrings from Cairo to Jakarta into her own development of Kenyan activism. We don’t count the early Greek protests as part of Occupy or the Arab Spring, but that wave of dissent might have kicked off in Athens, as early as 2008. Ideas and images were ricocheting around the world at new speeds, but they also settled in people’s psyches forever. In Greece, their rage was broad, bigger than Greece. Their rage, like that of so many others during that time, was against history.
*
THE STREETS OF CENTRAL ATHENS are lined with tables and in spring, when the sun is still pale yellow and soft, they are full of people. Greece is a café civilization, and yet visitors seeing this for the first time react defensively: What financial crisis? Look, every table is filled with Greeks. Shops were still open, crowds ballooned out of the Metro exits, cars clogged the streets. People were laughing. They gave street dancers their coins. The Acropolis hadn’t fallen down. How could we measure this new suffering in beautiful, quaint Europe when everything looked so nice? Only the Greeks themselves, as my friend Olga explained to me, would look at that souvlaki joint with the tables outside and tell you that a souvlaki and Coke cost only four euros, that that young man sitting there for hours was unemployed and didn’t want to sit in his apartment or he would kill himself, and that that elderly pensioner sitting with him had lost his pension and probably had been nursing that same draft of beer all day. The foreigner, the German bureaucrat, and the IMF representative couldn’t see that, and so for the young man and the old pensionless pensioner, there would be no limit to their suffering.
For much of the last century, Greece had been run, on and off, by the Papandreou family. They were Socialists. The first Papandreou, Georgios, became prime minister in 1944; his son Andreas took over in 1981. When I arrived in Athens, Andreas’s son, another George, had assumed the prime minister’s office, and thus had the unfortunate task of pushing through austerity measures to ward off economic ruin. I couldn’t get to George for an interview—he was busy—so I settled for Nick Papandreou, George’s very tall brother. When I met him, Nick was sitting at a long table at the Andreas Papandreou Foundation, a beautiful old house in a run-down part of Athens. A terrace off the back overlooked the city’s ancient graveyard. Black-and-white family photos hung on one wall; Nick’s novels and books, and pamphlets about his father, Andreas, lined another. Nick, who had an American mother and grew up in Canada and the United States, among other places, sounded American. The Papandreous, I would soon discover, had a long and tangled relationship with the U.S.
Nick told me a story about riding the Metro in Athens:
“Nick! Why did your brother bring in the IMF?” one passenger called out.
“No choice. It was either that or no one gets paid come July first,” Papandreou replied.
“Well, I am glad to see you taking public transport,” he said.
“What do you do for a living?” Papandreou asked the man.
“I’m a doctor.”
“Did you ever take side money from your patients?”
Everybody was listening. “Yes.”
“Are you still taking money on the side?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because now, the way things are, I’d be lynched.”
The fact that cracking down on doctors counted as a positive development in Greece was a sign of just how troubled Greek society had become. The Papandreous’ country was more than 300 billion euros in debt, which represented 115 percent of the country’s GDP. The European Union and the IMF agreed to bail the country out only if the government passed austerity measures like raising taxes and cutting social services. But reforming Greece required nothing less than a societal revolution that would upend the way people usually operated: from doctors and tax collectors and lawyers who took bribes to cabdrivers who didn’t give receipts. Greece also had a bloated, mismanaged public sector and a stunted private one, both legacies of a political system prone to clientelism and corruption, which had caused the demon-word “socialism” to creep into the censorious Western rhetoric about the country. I wondered how the West had ever allowed Greece, a member of NATO, to become so Socialist in the first place.