Big news on the italian media, for the arrest of a bunch of "new" supposed members of the red brigades, the communist terrorist group that so many favors already did to past italian governments during the seventies and eighties. Among their targets, once again were politicians, managers, journalists, Berlusconi, etc.
This is really a corpse resuscitated, since this senseless and imbecile experience of our history was already dead few years after its beginnings, and have been resuscitated so many times since then. But I guess the supply of criminal idiots for these acts is always large.

I am now expecting without the slightest enthusiasm the gigantic pointless debate that will soon be sparkled by the fact that some of the arrested where also members of the largest left-wing trade Union organization in the country.
It's not a surprise to me. There is something about working for a trade union organization in Europe that drives you mad. I've seen it in certain persons I know (i.e. my father's wife). Endless meetings, pompous speeches of the leaders, constant fighting about the pettiest smallest things, the fact that the rulers rule no matter what you do, the fact that you get to manage a lot of power and yet this power goes nowhere but to nourish the organization itself: all these things can cause enough frustration and longing for action to bring the idiots to grab the gun and make silly plans of revenge. Shake the world in ten days and all that.

It is really absurd, almost comic, how these people can call themselves 'revolutionaries': when all they always come out with is to go and kill or kneecap some politician. How this is supposed to make a change in a rotten society already based on criminal political revenges and mafia-style intimidations really goes beyond my ability or desire to see.

It is kind of lazy to just grab someone else's quote and re-use it like that, but I found this one so poetic and unusual that we can make an exception. Today, on Ceronetti's "Altrove" (his collection of almost daily quotes selected by him for the newspaper La Stampa), Anna Maria Ortese (note: I mean this quote to be "unusual" compared to what is usually quoted by Ceronetti himself and others on the italian media. It is quite straightforward in itself):

Sometimes I find myself looking into the pages of this or that history of a nation, or of all the nations, or just forgotten chronicles, and I watch emerging and passing by like lights faces of joyless women, yet more resistant than the others, faces of women braver than men, in the act of saying goodbye to someone or looking towards a aurora impossible for them. Women who left orders, flags, testaments, without whom each one of us wouldn't be a thing. Us, without these women, wouldn't even be. They are the woman, that is, humanity. Here is what I mean for being a woman: to be a part -- surfaced today -- of such obscure groups, of their bravery, to recall forever their ensigns of fire and light.

I hadn't seen coming such an amount of humor and wit and cleverness from George Orwell, whom I imagined more bleak and sorrowful and depressed than this. I'm almost done reading instead a (quite huge) book filled with precious reasoning and useful thinking and historical material, and some of the essays contained in it are small masterpieces of the genre. Many of the political ones are -simply put- still very useful tools today, when the authoritarian "New world order" and a "totalitarian world" are in my view nearer than ever.

One essay, dated 11th december 1945, is instead about the decadence of the english language, as Orwell saw it happening chiefly by the spreading of political and technical jargon. The funny and wittier part of the article is when Orwell picks or makes up pieces of bad writing and puts them aside with simpler and clear-cut pieces of literature (such as the Ecclesiastes, for instance). Quotes from communist pamphlets and psychology and history essays are put together to prove the ineffectiveness and the "slovenliness" of modern english, whose obvious faults are: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words.
Then Orwell puts down six simple rules to keep your written language at bay from contemporary decadence, and I thought I could share them with you. I personally saw in them all the potential and actual defects of my own writing.

1) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used in seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word were a short one would do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

In another part of the essay Orwell writes:

...political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck.. this is called elimination of undesirable elements.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

I mean, everyone can see how the examples Orwell gives (and of the bad use of the language that defends them) could not at all still be used in our world today, could they.

Just like the other one, this pope is stupid. He keeps coming out with stuff that has no sense, hollow words only full of the masonic meanings that few initiated can use to recognize each other.
When I lend him an ear, it's always like I'm hearing elaborated phrases about nothing: "hi corpodibacco, didn't you know it that today the purple hare flew to the castle of dung?". and I: "sure Ratzi, and the finned ship of pure rotten desire just sunk in the sea of radiators."
We can convince anyone that we know what we are talking about, since the hare and the radiators are a dogma.

One of the most gigantic idiocies we are forced to listen to over and over it's the one about the 'Christian roots' of Europe.

"Virgin Mary full of grace," asked the pope, "...be an ever vigilant keeper of Italy and Europe, so that from their ancient Christian roots the populace will be able to get nourishment to build their present and future." (from AGI)

It's the old polemic about the European Constitution not mentioning the Christian roots in its preamble. The pope speaks about the Virgin Mary full of grace when in fact he's speaking about politics, God knows if the Virgin will forgive him.
I'd rather have him going a bit into the details of the virginity of Mary, but that's what we deserve.

Now, I have nothing against the Christian European tradition. I spent most of my wasted life of student and teacher studying the Italian arts of the Renaissance and the middle ages. I can't think of anything more beautiful and living among the dead things of this country than an altarpiece painted by Tiziano or Bellini.
If it wasn't for the restorations (that's a too painful argument).

What would have been of that long moment of our history without the spiritual milieu that pervaded this land, which is the christian culture? If you go into the Basilica of Frari in Venice, and look and the mentioned Virgin Mary rising in the marvelous Tiziano's Assumption you must recognize immediately the power of spiritual faith, and the deep connection between the reasons and the energies of those pieces of art and the Christian culture.

That said, this pope is really stupid. There is no such thing as "Christian roots". And I am not even going into the pagan origins of our culture, from the Greek to the Romans to the dozens of other people and religions that made Europe what it is or what isn't anymore.

The point is that the History of a continent it is not shaped like a tree or a fungus: it has not the roots at the beginnings and the branches at the end. In fact, what are the beginnings? Where is the end of the branches?

It's the wrong metaphor.

The History of a continent it's like a slowed down gurgling tempest, or a noisy hurricane. It certainly comes down from some altitude and ends up smashing things at the bottom end, but that's about it with the similarities.
It is a sequence of countless contradictory events that only temporarily have the aspect of a path or a growth. And only because humans are small, busy or blind they cannot grasp its entirety, which is probably for good (we have limits)
Didn't the Romans had the same sensation? After all their tree was taller and their roots deeper.

Tomorrow we will have to hear the stupidity of muslim or jewish roots, or orthodox roots. They're all the same hollow wrong metaphors to me. Like it wasn't true that there isn't a single idea which hasn't be growing from another idea.
I'm not like Dawkins, I can afford to have a religion in my world. A religion is a poetic idea, sometimes even intense and alarming, or fruitful as the History of Arts can prove. I for once, am not at all sure about the origins of anything and I am open to the suggestions of spirituality.

But the religions of the popes and the churches it's not about spiritualism. It's about the privileged politics of determinism, and that's really depressing. And stupid.

...because he's a great writer and a convincing director. Even when the wine of his cellar is not perfect, there's always something unique in his work. Too bad for the ones that cannot understand him.

and for this we love him:
"As a filmmaker, I'm not interested in 9/11. It's too small. History overwhelms it. The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings.
So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other.
Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral - not important. History is the same thing over and over again.""
-- Woody Allen explaining to the German Der Spiegel and the NY Post why he is not interested in 9/11 -- source