Trump, Friedman and the Garbo
The italics of Teo Dalavecuras not only on Trump …
A consolidated tradition in the United States has it that the outgoing President, as a last gesture when leaving the White House permanently – at least as a tenant – on January 20, leaves his successor a personal letter with which he wishes "Good work", "Good luck" or something equivalent.
Donald Trump has also adhered to this custom. "The President," said Joe Biden, "wrote a very generous letter." “This is a personal letter,” added the new tenant of the Oval Office, “and I don't intend to talk about it until I have spoken to him. But she was very generous ”. This was reported by the CNN correspondent.
It does not seem to me that this declaration has attracted attention from us and it is a pity. After all, the mainstream media have done their duty to help bring down Trump's image, even with excess of zeal. Trump's "generous" letter could have been an occasion to talk, at least once, not about the dog biting a man but about the man biting a dog. But also to reflect on a difference between Italy and almost all the other countries in the world: a difference that has an ancient flavor and is called good education.
Of course, we are speaking "only" of good education, of "pure form" (which in Italian is synonymous with: "the height of the useless"). If, however, it is permitted to use, outside its context, the happy expression of the great jurist and philosopher Natalino Irti, that of the "lifesaver of the form", the "pure form" of good education is none other than that resource that usually causes two boxers, when they come down from the ring, stop punching each other. It is the resource that teaches us to know how to win and how to lose, to take prisoners and let oneself be captured, contrary to what Cesare Previti promised in his time; which allows us to understand that a compromise is not necessarily a conspiracy or a scam but can indeed be a compromise. Consequently, it is that resource that is certainly not enough to guarantee perennial life to democracy, but without which democracy, understood as a regime that allows the non-violent management of collective conflicts, is not even imaginable (as to "saved democracy" and to the "returned democracy" of which the headlines are full these days, I confess that as the personification of a concept it seems to me a little worse than the "Goddess Reason" of two hundred and more years ago).
That of "rudeness as a choice" is a well-known syndrome that basically we Italians are pleased with and that, paradoxically, if it prevents us from settling conflicts of interest without generating any aftermath of incurable hatred (Renzi vs. nomenklatura Pd, for example) reconciles rudeness with flattery and the rhetoric of euphemism very well. So it is useless then to cry about the depressing nature of public discourse in Italy: it is the consequence of a rudeness cultivated with perseverance.
As for the American Alan Friedman and the painful "joke" about Trump going to Florida "with his escort", it is no coincidence that for more than thirty years Italy has become his promised land.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/trump-friedman-e-il-garbo/ on Sat, 23 Jan 2021 06:10:37 +0000.