Many have waken up in the last years to the real deal about globalization in politics, which in very short terms is that the left-right paradigm acted out by the leaders has no actual sense anymore, and that the real struggle is the one of the elite against the constitutions of the nations of the formerly called free world and against the people's rights (in favor of super-national authorities that are never questioned, even when they decide to bomb Belgrade or whatever.)
"Many" is not enough anyway, and in reality many is a very little figure. In Italy though it is even less, here everything is ruled by the false paradigm: every little local power, left or right, unionist or made-by-media is barricaded to defend its own role and its own little garden of historical battles, and a incredible load of energy is wasted everyday debating false issues and pretended oppositions. Example being that every italian blog who stands for the left or the right comes with a bunch of hired opinions and expected ideas (that its readership, faithful to the same ideas, will safeguard against the authors themselves), while those who blame corruption for everything (Beppe Grillo et al.) are in fact helping to trash the Constitution and the system of guarantees that seem to be the real enemy of the elite.
Thing is, comedians and politicians and media moguls and independent bloggers are hired in Italy by the "new world order" project or whatever you wanna call it without even knowing what they are fighting for. (I am sure our average politicians and rulers don't see more clearly than anyone else, their eyes and voices prove it.)
All they have to do is to sell ideas to the masses in order to go further with the project. Clear example being the recent statement by Vice Prime Minister Rutelli, someone who pretends to be on the left, when in reality he is nowhere, who said that it is now necessary to enforce a national DNA bank in order to fight crime.

Now, aside of the sheer stupidity of the idea (assuming that everyone is a criminal to help the police to investigate? thanks a lot) this statement is hypocritically (and hysterically) made possible by the numerous unsolved or hard to solve crimes that are everyday on the newspapers and that make people indignant and frustrated. So just like in central America, where the "war on drugs" is used as a pretext to implement the police state, and in north America, where the "war on terrorism" is used for the same purpose, elsewhere politicians use different pretexts: be it immigration, "global warming" or "rampant crime".

What remains is that the pace of this global change towards technologically-driven authoritarianism is faster then ever, and should be the first serious reason to worry in this strategic moment for everyone who pretends to be interested in politics.

Just a glimpse: US doles out millions for street cameras; cameras to scan emotional behavior are being designed; US presidency gets another surveillance “blank check” (and they want more); China gets from the US a massive human tracking system; and my city cries for its own too; while scientists seem to devote themselves to design new weapons against citizens and new weapons to terrify other citizens; while internet is being used to stop dissidence in a simulation of free speech (Mao Zedong style); soldiers tell about atrocities but nobody listen to them; and a new hoax to justify satellite weapons is being prepared. Etcetera.

Among his grand exploits, having cheated the government (25 billion liras of settlement in 2000); having blathered endlessly about charity while making a fortune; having sought the coziness of commonplaces...
But these are not great sins and we are not to judge sins anyways. Much worse would be having contributed to the impoverishing of music by reducing its ambiguity to a steadfast restated pronunciation of self-evident elements. Melody, pathos, lyrics, energy, in other words making the kitsch out of it. It was thank to him that in the last thirty years people forever learned that the word 'tenor' was to be associated with big men singing moving things on stage, solitary as monads and without real interaction with a opera (only "moments"), in a cloud of exteriority and lies under which the remains of music stays as nauseating as a jingle heard too many times. Pop music, in other words. Without the rebel element.
The Pavarotti kitsch will follow us for a long time, like a trail left behind his steps. It is everywhere in the newspapers now. Politicians before everyone else, because LP was a political tool obviously (politics masked by charity), and then the classic shower of hyperboles by celebrities' mouths. All the hype to hide everything that is human like misery or smallness.
Anyway. I don't think I will remember Luciano Pavarotti after this week and I doubt I will ever think about him evermore. Yet it matters to me to recognize in him one of the many, say, riders of the falling country who with great weight of trivialization helped the fall in these times.

How incredible the other day, talking to the girls at the bakery shop, as the radio reported of a philippine woman living in Italy, just outside our city, who slaughtered her entire family later trying to kill herself. The girls were joking about it like people do with events that are so remote and inconceivable that one cannot identify with it.
"She killed her husband with a knife!" said one.
"And her sons!" said the other. They were using the usual half phony sympathy tone of the milanese trades, hypocrite imitation of badly evoked old times.
It was so funny to them, because a woman had done it, and women are supposed to be defenseless or powerless compared to men. It was also funny because she was not italian, and thus such kind of disgrace had nothing to do with us, and could be treated more easily, like the thought of a inundation in India or a earthquake in Guatemala.
I couldn't joke with them as a customer is expected to do. All I could come up with was a sort of depressed smile I was sorry for.
But c'mon. It's years that a week doesn't go by in my country without news of some husband killing his wife. Some father murdering his daughter or son. Some lover, some brother, killing a sister, a ex pregnant girlfriend, etc. Every week. Certain weeks many times. But the girls were bantering as if news of this sort were unheard of around here. "It took a chinese woman to do it!" It was yet another big illusion sold cheap to us by Immigration. Helping us to picture our country as if it was a completely different, innocent little thing. Well, at least for a minute or two of fake conversation.
"Aren't italian men usually killing italian women?" I asked in the end, as the girl handed me a paper bag with in it the bread I had just payed for. "With guns, no?" I pursued. But the girls fell silent and incredulous. Could it be I was the only one who was noticing all the killing of women in the italian newspapers? I had had that same feeling before. It seemed like if these were events that no one wanted to really consider. Consumed rapidly, even if they kept turning up again and again, they didn't mean anything compared to other events, much more abstract and conceptual, distant and showy, that were discussed forever.
But I had disrupted the pleasant atmosphere. Especially when I ended: "If there's a gun in a house, you can be almost sure it will end up being used by a man to kill a woman! Isn't it funny?"
"I'll never give my husband a gun then", the girl proposed after a short while (I was already halfway the glass door), bursting in a fake laugh which strangely moved me.
I remember that all I could think of in that moment was "What I can't believe is that someone married you." I am always amazed when I am informed that people are married. I don't expect them to be. But I didn't said that. I only gave the usual curt salute of the non customary customer and left, to the apparent relief of the street where actually nobody was laughing.

I haven't followed the awards. I don't have a TV set, I never go to the movies, I am so out of touch I don't even know the name of most of the new Hollywood icons. And the old icons, all former alpha males with their hairplugs and gigantic white fake teeth, I am happy for them if they're still alive and kicking but, I'm sorry, they just bore me to death with all their self-indulgent aura and all.
Shiny gold disturbs me. Fanfare makes me sad. And the italians at the Oscars? Forget about them! Judging from Salvatores, Benigni and Tornatore, they usually begin to destroy themselves and to cover their own country with shame shortly after the ceremony, so I'm not even going into that.
The only thing that can surprise you when you're so out of touch with something, is to see other people interested in it. So many posts about the Oscars the day after. How anyone can be sucked up into that, you are left to wonder. But that's also so subjective. Honestly I don't really have a point "against the Oscars". I am only completely out of touch and happy with it and I wanted to say it, since today my mood is doing much better and all.

--in picture: shiny gold, ugh.

Three days ago I suggested that the fall of Prodi's government and his subsequent coming back was a staged operation to move the balance of power more to the center (or to the right) and make Prodi actually stronger than before. Well as you probably know the things seem to be developing just like I said.
Without modesty, I must admit that I haven't read an equally credible and accurate interpretation of the events anywhere else but here on this blog. Not that I am expecting to be applauded for this like a political expert or anything. But if you happened to read around it was all "oh, the bastards that betrayed Prodi", "now we really have to accept the vote of the right-wing christians", "I was so scared that this government could fall", "what good can make a ideal point if it makes your government fall", "look how that louse Prodi has to run to get the votes from the right to save his own ass". Etcetera.

I mean, many of us passed through these emotional stages, I sort of did it myself. But to understand politics means also to progressively detach ourselves from the feeling of the events as they unfold, and to try to look at them a little more cynically. Not because we must be cynical in our outlook, but because things, politically-wise, are cynical.

Now, I can understand non-italian blogs because, let's face it, what can you make of the italian politics from abroad?
Given the ineradicable, aged, backwards class of oligarchs that has been ruling the italian politics for decades with cosmetic enemy factions and all sorts of secret alliances and pacts and conspiracies, it isn't particularly easy for anyone here: it must be pretty difficult from the outside. You can deduce your considerations from what the media tells you and that's all. What could I really make of the Russian or Chinese or Vietnamese politics? You can't really be expected to sniff the air and smell the smoke from such a mental and physical distance, only using the cooked-up shallow interpretations of the mainstream media.

But I think the italian average observer should have performed a little better.
Because sure, maybe I am being wrong, maybe I am paranoid, conspiratorial and all that. Maybe the political scenario is really that ideal or shallow battle they want us to believe it is. Maybe it is really impossible to set up or push in the wrong direction a couple of confused extremists and make yourself a big favor. Maybe.
Still it is pretty surprising that nowhere in the whole blogland (as far as I know: I'm expecting to be contradicted here) no one ever suggested that the whole thing could actually not be what they were telling us it was. That it could be something ran from backstage, in a risky, adventurous, but well-prepared way: so as to look as if there wasn't any other chance for the left-wing supporters but to accept the idea that their government was moving to the right.
It seems such a pretty obvious interpretation to me! especially considering that:

1) both the two extreme left supposed traitors of Prodi come from very disciplined parties;
2) both the two life-long senators supposed traitors of Prodi supported very warmly an opening of Prodi to the right;
3) Berlusconi never really worked against the operation and never really wanted elections, which means that since the beginning he was taken care of (no law against his conflicts of interest in the new government plan?);
4) Prodi had a weak government and he knew it;
5) the better way to demolish your own weak government is to do it yourself --so to remain in control of the whole process --and do damage control.

But I guess our blindness to possibilities and schemes like these is precisely the reason why such operations are possible.

-- in picture, above: Prodi being shy

Prodi is preparing himself to play a game which doesn't contemplate a tie: "This time it's winning or loosing". The plan of attack is ready, maybe it has been ready for months. Few, but precise reference points. A possible new term for Prodi could be accepted only at strict conditions, only if "I'll have free hands", only for a "strong and binding program."
-- From corriere.it, read more.

Ok, the fall of Prodi is starting to look more and more as a staged operation. Prodi had a weak government and needed an excuse to get new forces into it --taking them from Berlusconi's front. This had to be done without offending Prodi's left-wing partners, the communists and former communists (OK, I'm kidding: it had to be done without offending their supporters. Italian politicians are never "offended".)
So, a emergency situation had to be set up, where Prodi had to either enlarge its coalition or die and bring everyone down with him. I immediately kind of had the feeling the whole thing was staged (ten years ago Prodi was PM and got stabbed in the back in just the same way: how can you make the same mistake twice?)-- but I didn't believe Prodi could actually remain glued to the chair despite it.
Instead the situation will probably develop like this: Prodi will get from the President a second chance to form a government, on the grounds that members or former members of the UDC democratic christian party will pass on his side. The new government will be formed and he will finally have the strong coalition he needed, ranging from neo-communists to right-wing christian democrats.
It's impossible to say for sure with italian politics so, we'll see. But finally --at least for a short while-- things are going to be disgusting enough to be fun again.

note: Since Follini seems to be one of the oligarchs of the right who could change side in the next days and pave the way to others, I wonder now if it was a coincidence that in the last weeks there were huge billboards around in Milan --and probably other italian cities-- with Follini's face and name on them, despite the fact that no elections were taking place, anywhere.

so Prodi's government just fell on the intention to prolong the mission to Afghanistan which the government defended. Incredible although was probable although possibly staged although will end in a mess anyway. One way or another, it's probably the end for Prodi. It's the second time in his political life that he fails this way, stabbed in the back by less than five votes of the same stock of communist and christian senators, and you can't survive that twice.
Anyway, it is so obvious that it's not fault of the mission to Afghanistan, nor of the small pack of lousy senators who betrayed: I happen to know in fact that the fault is all of the new logo that the government presented yesterday: the logo that was supposedly meant to relaunch the italian "system" of tourism, localisms, heritage and governance.
It is known how ugly design can be fatal for pretty much anything, but this particular logo is so ugly and meaningless (almost bad as the design of the mascot for the world championship 1990, "Italia '90", whoever remembers that) that it had to be bad luck: a old-fashioned "i" next to a green blob out of proportion? c'mon! They can say it's a "t" to make a "it", but it's either a smeared blot or as airos says a zucchini. I'd say it's an eggplant. But anyway: It's such a classic case of wrong design... only a stupid slogan could make it worse.
Well, of course there's also a stupid slogan. "L'Italia lascia il segno", "Italy leaves the mark", which seems more a mafia threat than a anything else (maybe marks left on faces cut with Sicilian knives?)
But it's true, it's true. Italy does leave the mark on you. When you fall it does.