"Oh, I know that there is no hope for my country: it is more than a knowledge for me, it is a condition, the condition of being italian -- this funny thing bound to decay and dissolution and without a hint of good future in the zodiac. Not just a spectator of this, mind you. Part of it. It is something that must be experienced to be understood. For this culture and for these people I know there is no hope left: something else will be called "italian" tomorrow and probably nobody will even know the difference. But I know. And I certainly make no exceptions to this gloomy vision because of a demagogic comedian who seems focused on attacking what is already so weak and without respect in people's mind-- trained by ten years of Berlusconi & co. to just despise the "small theater of politics" and everything around it -- so that he gets the easiest satisfaction, the easiest applaud. While the country keeps falling, steady."

-- yep, the discussion down at Blog from Italy continues. My rhetoric touches new peaks, someone should probably stop me.

What I wanted to say: I imagine a politician who would speak only about the greyness and ugliness and unfriendliness of our cities; of the diminishing of our culture, the crumbling of our fantasy and imagination; of the egoism and disruption and sadness brought by giga-malls or parking lots, or by a new soulless skyscraper; of the absence of the children from the streets; of how things are not simple but tragically simplified-- of how hard it is to recognize and keep love: and not talking these things as side issues in order to dramatize the supposed real deal, any football issue like corruption, war on terrorism, heritage of communism, gay marriage, global warming or unemployment or whatever.
No, I dream a comedian-politician that would talk only of such problems, such as they are perceived: problems as phenomena. The trees getting old and isolated. The many cars. The villages emptied out. The oppressive nature of the excessive order, and its contrary. The sweeping of death and decay and shit under too many rugs. The depressed faces of the people going to work and the sadness of the too dark clothes and of the leashed dogs. The triviality of the opinions. The everyday triviality of beauty. The too many things to conserve that are wiped out.
Without rhetoric and without arrogance and without pushing a sense of guilt in the listeners. Without advocating global projects and new authorities and key-words to open all the doors. Without looking directly in a camera and without looking elsewhere. Without making supernatural alliances with remote entities because "we are all in the same boat". 'Cause that would not be within the phenomena. I imagine someone able to speak about all these things without getting into the theoretical or into the partisan, not even by mistake not even once.

In other words, I imagine the weakest most unrealistic most absurd and most useless politician to hear or to support ever.
That one I would support, eagerly.

added at past seven a.m.: I think my political vision is kind of muddy.

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.

Mexicans remind me of Italians, and of course people from the U.S., in ways that disturb me and make me sad. It is especially about the music, the horrible music imposed on every one's ears, or maybe it's the popularity of cell phones, and fancy cars, and fancy clothes. Maybe it's the stupidity of junk food, of eating meat twice a day, and the stupidity of the fiestas, that are supposed to be noisy because they break everyday's calm, when in reality there is no calm, no quietness to break anymore, because no one is ever left alone by the new powerful noises of modernity.
But just like in other countries of central America I visited, people here have something we don't have, I mean anymore of course, something that they can't teach us and that no one could ever learn anyway. It's something you can only notice and look at, knowing it is out of reach. It is a form of innocence, I guess, and innocence can only be lost, just like we lost ours and just like everyone and every people is bound to lose its own in these times. Just like they have lost or are losing their own and it can't be helped. Nobody knows why this happens. Only to some it is clear how.
(Would I ever write these things if I wasn't here? Innocence? I doubt it.)

The first post I ever wrote on this blog was about me trying to go across the city to cut my hair. The theme is interesting, isn't it. This time I'm going to this place on the other side of the avenue, which is just a regular hair cutter like thousands in the city. I don't go very often for hair cutters. In the falling nation, hair cutting is the sole branch of commercial business to never go under some crisis, and this tells a lot about the shallowness and manipulability of italians.

It's funny how there usually are one or more ladies having their hair done while I'm there, and I think that never once in my uneven career as a hair cutting customer I was able to witness one of those ladies to actually have her hair done, pay and leave. I always have my hair done while they're there, and I leave before anyone of them ever leaves. They sit there with tinfoil hats and gossip magazines, are moved from area to area, are washed and blew dried and they always have different persons attending to them and there's always another thing they have to undergo after the last one and they never leave.
I look at them sideways in the mirror and they seem victims to me. Probably I transfer on them my own victimized feeling, but they usually they have such morose and alert faces, hate to be looked at while they're there, browse magazines with aggressive turning of pages, and they never seem to be wanting to get out of it. No nostalgia for the outsides. They always give me this mixed feeling of sympathy and actual sadness, trapped as they are for so long under the hands of hair cutters pushing on them new styles and ridiculously overpriced products, and they're bored to death, besotted. And they also give me a bitter feeling of distaste and hate for their laziness and passivity and active participation in the general lie, that so effectual negation of death and crappiness of things, and for the selfishness of all those caring energies devoted to them. Makes me want to slap them in the face, slap them again. Drag them out to the sidewalk, kick them in the ass.

The radio at the hair cutting place is often as loud and silly as a silly radio can be, and conversations beneath it, outside of 'how do you want your hair done' rarely mean anything. Or they never mean anything. But they have to be yelled out anyway to win over the loud voices of the radio and the blow driers. I look out the window like a child kept in the house for his homework on a sunny day, and all around is the chaotic horn of stupidity having its moment, and having its moment again.

At one point today the girl wanted to ask to the young foreign guy if what she was doing with the razor was hurting him, but she couldn't speak english, so she turned to her colleagues. Nobody could help her. Nobody could speak english. My hair cutter guy said he could manage it if it was french. But nobody knew how or wanted to ask the guy if he spoke french anyway. Others said, 'I can manage to speak english but I don't know how to ask that question'. Soon the issue, probably just for the fun of it resembling life, was extended to all the customers in the room, ladies glued to their chairs and hanging to their gossip magazines included. No one knew how to ask that question, so I finally came out of my cocoon and asked it myself. Oh, it was fun. Following my exploit I joined for a while the animated nonsensical exchange of words going about as a disordered wave in the room and it's true, I felt less lonely and trapped and desperate and old.
And it was ludicrously tragic too. I mean, at least fifteen italian random people in a room, and only one of them is able to ask does it hurt? in english? Pretty amazing. To his credit, the store manager tried a "is bua?" a couple of times, seriously convinced that "bua", the slang word used in italian with children for pain, could be some international kind of word. It really was momentous the look on the face of the foreign guy when I asked him the dreaded question. "Does it hurt when she does that with the razor?" The guy hastily denied he was caused any sort of pain. By that time he probably was expecting some serious italian question and was getting worried. Afterwards was only incredulous.

At the end of it, or at the beginning sometimes, hair cutters want my name. I don't give my name to stores. I never do. I think nobody should, but it's too late for that. Hair cutters pester you for your name more than anyone else, because they're the more powerful and they know it. But I am not caving in. "If you want, I'll give you a fake name" I say to the store manager. He looks at me uneasy. Repeatedly he points his finger to the computer monitor, mutters, "I have to put your name into this." "I don't want to be filed, I'm sorry." This being Italy, there's always a way around rules, and this store manager is a nice guy. He fills the form for a guy called Uomo Di Passaggio and writes the same name on the card he has to give me. "So you get a discount after ten cuts" he explains. I am thinking I won't come back probably. But the card registered to Uomo di Passaggio is actually memorable. "I love this card, I'll keep it dear", I say to him. There, he's uneasy again.

Oh, I hate italian hair cutters. Which are the only hair cutters I know by the way. It's just that you always have to cut your hair before you leave, it's the rule.

When you believe in things that you don't understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain't the way

-- Stevie Wonder

On the Italian police website, or maybe it was the U.S. embassy web site, they refer to it as the new "biometric" electronic passport. Well, whatever "biometric" was going to be I knew I was ready to be disgusted by it and that I had to show all my disgust to them. So I went to the police station stressed by the task and in a challenging bad mood.
But on the surface, in my country, having your new electronic passport done isn't that painful after all. It doesn't mean you are "biometrically scanned" or anything. I guess they infer some algorithmic data out of the pictures you give in when you apply for the passport, because the procedure is still the good old grumpy italian one.

You wait for your turn standing in a stark corridor with a group of other people, without a number or anything, just waiting for the calling bark from the other side of the door. You step in, reach the counter. Talk to the young distracted policeman who doesn't seem to listen to you at all. Give in all the papers and watch him slowly cut the border of the pictures, fill in the forms, take your signature here, and here, and here, (grumpy mumbled thanks), and behind the picture, (another grumpy mumbled thanks). Have him acknowledge your payment of €44 to the PO, let him slowly cut the quittance and give your half back. Watch him as he attaches the €40 stamp you gave him, and the picture, and the quittance to the forms and as he stamps all over them; Let him slowly interpret the e-ticket you printed out of the email the agency sent you. Try in vain to suggest him to skip the printed headers on the top of the page and check the all capitals instructions at the bottom. Finally watch him highlight the correct departure day on the top of the papers, and attach the e-ticket to it all too; Finally watch him as he invalidates your old passport, stamping "annullato" on every page of it --and take it back.

Everything happens in the quiet Police Station near Corso XXII marzo. The offices are at the ground level, but there is no traffic in the narrow residential street outside. The naked walls welcome all the white light pouring in from the tall windows, and there's a peaceful atmosphere around that maybe depends on the fact that there are no computers, no cameras, no office noises of any sort.
Next to me a couple of tobacconists are applying for a gun license for personal defense and another policeman is instructing them about the bureaucratic procedure. They endured a robbery already so they are qualified.
The police force seems so reasonable, carefree, unaggressive when seen from here.

I always thought that the residual charms of this falling nation were all in its underdeveloped, neglected parts. All the parts which have not been "upgraded" are what makes this country precious --at moments. Exactly the contrary of what most of our politicians usually assume.

I get out of the Police Station with a small piece of paper in hand, cut off a bigger one by the young policeman. There he wrote down to come and get the new passport two days before I leave.
Outside, the sun shines wildly and the bodies of the cars are reflecting the light with their limited range of colors. The avenue down the road is busy with traffic but from where I am standing, in the empty quite street, all that traffic seems so odd, and its frantic pace so distant.

Funny how blog celebrity Beppe Grillo commented yesterday the story of the couple of Erba who killed their neighbors, and by doing it he used the same, chief, well-tested and reassuring interpretation of the mainstream media about it. One wonders then, what a blog like his one is needed for if not, once again, for straightforward, hugely reassuring purposes.

(And obviously the only reason to remark this fact is that Beppe Grillo's blog is so fantastically popular. So far I took this as the most significant evidence of the unfortunate, blatant average backwardness of the italian blogland: not really for what Grillo writes, which is at worst trivial or predictable, but for the plebiscite of links and readers and comments that surrounds him : Plebiscites are such a boring, bad sign.)

Babsi today wrote about a typical milanese episode (I've lived similar episodes also in Rome, but to me this sort will always be associated with Milan, like a certain damp cold weather and the smell of monoxide).

It's the one where the ticket controllers get on a bus in a small commando team and start checking on the tickets of the passengers, behaving like bullies and blatantly treating certain categories of passengers differently from the others.
They yell, they drag around, they use the force and a whole range of intimidations, or they limit themselves to sermons about the importance of always carrying a "good ticket". When they cannot bully you and yell at you (because you're a citizen) they can always make you fell ashamed of yourself in front of everyone.
The trick always worked and will always work, because many middle-class citizens mistake their own radical fear of being put to shame in front of the others for instinctive respect of the law, although the truth probably is that they would sooner break the law if only they could resist or be indifferent to shame (cf. Kafka's Process). Or, as it is with tax cheating in this country (and a lot of other stuff), if only the crime itself wasn't considered a shame.

Pathetically incapable of professionally doing their job by politely asking for documents and writing down the tickets and normally fine the passenger, using a normal tone of voice and human decency, the milanese controllers are very often ego maniacs who just adore the tough part of their job more than anything else, and have orgasms listening to the barking sound of their voices in the silent bus.
When I was a teenager those in my category where the favorite victims of ticket controllers. Youngsters by the shabby appearance where easily the ones to be mistreated if found without a ticket. Now, only a handful of years later, it is all different. Shabby youngsters carry iPods and cell phones, and the most undesirable of all passengers, the most vulnerable is obviously the immigrant, or B-citizen, whatever you want to call it.

Babsi tells her story with her usual efficiency, and I felt I had to tell about my own by commenting to her post. I am translating here excerpts from both the sources.

Babsi:

At the bottom of the trolleybus, a boy. The boy who's turning a blind eye to them and who has a wool jacket with patches on the elbows. Ticket, they say to him. Without the "please" that was reserved to me. The boy acts dumb. Hey, the ticket, kids one. Where are you from? Egypt? And where do you get the tickets? In Egypt? The boy utters a long guttural sentence: I am sure that he is understanding and he is insulting them. Or that he is cursing. Always the same one, almost pensionable; He is looming up in front of him, standing astride at this point, and insisting: or you just thought to come to Italy to fool the Italians, eh, dark boy? "Morocco", says the boy. "Morocco, not Egypt". Resurgence of national pride. Oh, Morocco. It's the same. Here it's paying for the ticket. The second interferes: so, do you or do you not have it? He doesn't have it. I don't know why he doesn't. Because he doesn't have a buck, probably, but I lived in London washing dishes and I asked for money at the Earl's Court subway station to pay for my tickets (...)
They're back to grill the boy with the patches on the elbows. I.D., says the old one. E-D? tries to parrot the boy. Oh, when there was Mussolini the things went all right, snaps the man in uniform... I clear my throat. Excuse me? When there was - who? I surprised him. He's looking at me resentfully. Don't you get in the way, miss. I don't get in the way. I'm interested in civility and good sense. I breath in despite the fever. "Apology of fascism, you know."
Now everyone is looking at me: the moroccan boy, the woman in pink, the six controllers, the one who's yelling in the cell phone no se puede. "When there was Mussolini, gentlemen, should be taught at school - I swallow - how much this country was violent and illiberal". Silence. "Not - I swallow - on the buses." My man in uniform is outraged: on the buses, miss, one should pay the ticket! That's all! (...)
Three controllers out of six make the boy get off the bus: the rough way.

Me:

(...) I was fined plenty of times during my junior and high school years. Once I was chased down half Viale Padova by a controller, up to the inside premises of school, many times I was grabbed by the jacket, yelled on my face, carried down the 56 or the 92 or the 33, underwent the sermons I hate, I lied and gave false identities and shrugged and laughed in the face and trembled of fear and shame.
Still today that I always pay the ticket in every city of the world, when I see uniforms instinctively I shiver and look for escape routes.
Always hated controllers because of their intimidating air. Never solved the ambiguity, whether the State was always right, even when it came with the shitty face and the bullying policeman-like behavior and all the rest, or whether it was never right, because of the great lie that was held together all around.
Finally, I don't care for the apology... I find the law-enforced anti-fascism very cretin (it certainly doesn't keep people from being or becoming fascist in new and old ways), but the way I see it bullying and barking voices are more than sufficient reasons to put oneself in the way, since they represent all the possible worse, all the possible fascism to expose and impede. If only to get in the way was anything useful-- or even if it wasn't useful at all. Provided to have clear in an instant which side one is on... and instead one loses precious seconds to understand it.