Post-election noterelle
Salvini was demoted from captain to sergeant; Berlusconi is immortal; Giorgia no longer says "Yo soy", but begins to say "I am". And Read… Michael Magno's Notepad
After September 25, the following can be concluded:
Salvini was demoted from captain to sergeant; Berlusconi is immortal; Giorgia no longer says "Yo soy", but begins to say "I am"; Calenda and Renzi are already thinking about the fourth pole; Read it for the second time, it is not serene; Conte understood that the southern one is a complex issue that requires simple solutions; Fratoianni and Bonelli can't wait to vote no to anything; Comparison, Rizzo and de Magistris play tresette with the dead man (to quote his name would not be elegant).
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In 1822 Gioacchino Rossini paid a visit to Beethoven in his home in Vienna, famous for being a hovel with a broken ceiling and a pital always on the piano. After an exchange of views on the musical trends of the time, the genius of Bonn dismisses him inviting him to compose only comic operas in the future because the Italians were not made for serious opera. Even if seven years later the genius of Pesaro would have blatantly denied it with the “Guglielmo Tell”, a masterpiece of the romantic theater, the anecdote is significant. In fact, it attests to the circulation in the cultural elite of the Habsburg empire of a polemical idea of our national character, deaf to the depths of the drama.
After Hitler's defeat, in "Doctor Faustus" (1947) Thomas Mann takes up this representation of the prosaic and "carefree" soul of the descendants of Aeneas and contrasts it with that of the German people, fearless in pursuing their catastrophic destiny to the end . Cesare Garboli in his “Sad and civil memories” (2001) has dismantled in a couple of masterful pages the mythology of the Teutonic described, in terms now Dionysian and now Nibelungian, by the great Lübeck novelist. However, there is no doubt that this is how the countless travelers who came down from the north to enjoy the sea and the sun that so much envy us have seen, and still do: politically cynical but weak, sentimental, festive; prone to acting, singing, laughing.
In short, like the country of Machiavelli for those who have studied, of Pulcinella for the illiterate. This country, which suffered the tragedy of the Mussolini regime, today is at the feet of a lady for whom fascism is like a dust, like dandruff that is swept away from the dress before a walk. Giorgia Meloni, it must be acknowledged, conducted a very effective electoral campaign, which relied on the ancestral gregarious instinct of that majority of Italians who pride themselves on giving a fuck about the past. Even politics without history, Alessandro Manzoni observed, is like a blind man without a guide to show him the way. Mala tempora currunt, sed peiora parantur.
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There has been a climate in Italy for the 1930s and is a goddaughter of Mussolini about to take power? Let's not exaggerate, and we don't do favors to “Yo soy Giorgia”. The truth is that, when the economic-social crisis and the discredit of the political class go hand in hand, the invocation of the strong man (in our case, the woman) is born. And its followers are inclined to justify some "breaking the rules", provided it serves to defend the people from internal and external enemies, restoring order, security, sovereignty to the country.
"A strong man like Richelieu / would take us all to the port", is the nursery rhyme that was sung in the Parisian taverns on the eve of the Brumaio coup (December) 1799. Many protagonists were then inspired by that first Napoleonic model of the various totalitarianisms that flourished in the twentieth century. However, whatever subtle distinction is made in the matter of totalitarianism, the contrast with liberal democracy remains irreducible. But it is a contrast that does not seem to inflame the hearts of many voters in Italy.
Of course, the history of our parliamentary regime is dotted with "leaders" who have won the admiration and devotion of their fellow citizens. But the leader is democratic, as Giuseppe Galasso observed ("Liberalism and democracy", 2013), only if he inscribes himself and his action in the logic and forms of democracy, not if he inscribes the logic and forms of democracy in those of his own action and of his own ends. Ultimately, the strong man (or woman) is a myth that always reflects an uneasy condition of the working class. One can react to it, paraphrasing the title of a famous book by Albert O. Hirschmann (“Loyalty, defection, protest”, 1982), denouncing the risks or disinterested in it.
But there is also a third possibility: the "I adapt", out of cowardice or out of convenience. It is the maximum expression of loyalty to the winner of the round, the real alternative to both defection and protest. After all, after the liberals for Salvini, the liberals for Meloni immediately popped up like mushrooms. But anyone who plans to conquer the palace of power should remember it: due to its location on the hills of Rome, notoriously with a temperate climate, it will never be a Winter Palace.
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Short allegorical account of the eighteenth parliamentary term:
“I am met by a generic elderly person who for years, in this historical-biblical-mythological rebirth of our cinematography, has been passing from one film to another without even changing his make-up. He is a sage in Thebes, an archon in Athens, an adviser to the court of the pharaohs, a priest in Babylon. In Crete he is a guardian of the labyrinth, in Olympus he is Saturn, in Galilee an apostle. He asks me for a small loan. – Aren't you working ?, I ask him. He spreads his arms, desolate: -I should be a senator, but in September! " (Ennio Flaiano , “The loneliness of the satyr”).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/noterelle-postelettorali/ on Sat, 01 Oct 2022 05:25:42 +0000.