The grillance
(… from the outskirts of the empire I receive and publish …)
Hi, Alberto.
Wishing you a good summer break (if you manage to cut it out), I wanted to submit a reflection on the grullance/grillance that now seems to have infected everyone in the matter of salaries. Poor Fassino, who spoke at the wrong time, was overwhelmed by the arrows of his own companions who were now slaves to their own self-referential rhetorical scheme. Now I think it is difficult to dismantle the criticisms with rational arguments because there are idiots who start from the assumption, sometimes unexpressed, that "their" money (but then we have to see if they actually pay direct taxes) should not be used to pay politicians and that even one euro would be too much. However, they do not know that "their" money is used, indirectly, to pay footballers for example. In fact, the municipalities in Italy still guarantee almost all the sports facilities used by football teams, often upon request for very small concession fees, just as numerous regulations have been adopted over the years at a national level to guarantee a soft landing. to failed sports clubs or to ward off the specter of failure, not to mention the river of public money spent on every championship match and not just for security and public order: if football teams were to contribute financially to all this they would not be able to pay the salaries they pay in Italy and perhaps they would not even survive a month… Not to mention the entertainment sector which is perhaps the most supported of all, among those substantially privately managed. All the maître-à-pensers, like Gassman or Moretti, are very convinced that they have the majority of their writings in subsidized productions (films or theater shows) or that they tour for subsidized theaters and cinemas, if not directly public: I would like to verify but not I have neither the time nor the skills as an investigative journalist. I know that a DOC grillino would say that all these people should die of hunger, but I don't know if all the opportunist anti-caste people who are attacking poor Fassino would go after him: after all, everyone has their own little circles and the state, the regions, the municipalities or parapublic bodies are present and provide substantially in all sectors, but strangely little is said about them. Well, I think that for once we should get down to the level of these people and (even though we know we are right) reply not on the point but by changing the subject and asking for an account of the origin of the incomes of many of their favorites if not, in some cases, of them themselves. Which obviously does not necessarily mean that we think that these incomes should be cut…
(… of course the problem of reacting to the outcry without triggering a race to the bottom is difficult to solve, because the essence of the outcry is the race to the bottom: lowering high salaries draws applause – and is doubly regressive, both in a political and distributive sense – compared to raising low salaries! The breeding ground of grillanza is hatred, we have always told ourselves, hatred and distrust. Hitting the enemy is more satisfying than helping a friend, especially if you don't have any friends, perhaps simply because you don't deserve any. In short: what makes grilling difficult to manage is its different, self-defeating and petty humanity. Stooping down to their level is a prerequisite for engaging their attention, for opening a debate, but it also means losing from the start. I say it another way: it is a case in which using the opponent's strength without harming oneself requires an extra effort of creativity. Comments welcome… )
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/08/la-grillanza.html on Fri, 04 Aug 2023 11:33:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.