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.

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.

(...) y sé muy bien que no estarás,
ni aquí adentro, la cárcel donde aun te retengo,
ni allí fuera, este rió de calles y de puentes.
No estarás para nada, no serás ni recuerdo,
y cuando piense en ti pensaré un pensamiento
que oscuramente trata de acordarse de ti.

-- Julio Cortazar, Futuro

Linate is the old claiming baggage hall, the dark grey and yellow interiors, the faces of the policemen saying welcome back to Italy, the guy from Modena coming back from Brazil -- he says laughing, welcome to the place in the world where it is the hardest to make love -- I stand there feeling dizzy for the twentyfive hours three planes flight, my bag sliding to me over the conveyor belt, opened from the top, the plastic bag with coffee from chiapas and oaxaca chocolate spat out few bags past -- a pair of pants from guatemala is there too -- I don't care, what's lost is lost, I throw it all above the plastic seats and repack the bag mumbling a welcome to italy to myself-- outside, she's there in a violet dress, others unknown crowding the picture of the waiting --the warmth of Milano's air around us is less intense but somewhat ready to suffocate -- the sky low over the airport, in hues of gray and blue too bright to be looked at -- our embrace is honest? it is honest--

me and Libi have sex inside the car outside of the airport of Linate, her body is in my hands, obeys in the old familiar hard way we know --she gives out high pitched shrills, I feel like eating and swallowing and digesting her body-- it's different from the other sex across the ocean. I think I can't compare. I warn her to be careful, because I have a half broken nose I should take to the hospital tomorrow or so-- not that I feel like it. I don't make up the story of how it got broken, I just leave out the detail -- of the girl I was with --I don't even let the thought get into my mind. I say I know, it doesn't look broken, but I can feel it, like it is harder to breathe with the left nostril -- also it creaks when I touch it-- kept together by the skin -- gives me a weird feeling to the stomach. I learned to talk about love with my heart and now I suspect I love two persons, or I suspected it. I wish I had the room to say that as well.

At home we talk and make love again few times, I am tired and what I see is confused at moments --though real. Later we are half naked on the pavement, I am pouring out the many presents in front of her, it's fun, but then the feast is over pretty soon. I missed Libi, and yet her picture in front of me is not entirely on focus. Now I just feel in need to talk it out with someone. What I can't say bothers me more than the need to sleep-- although pretty soon I fall asleep, and wake up at the beginning of the night -- and awake in front of the window I still try to keep down the thought that, all right, now I wish I could leave -- tomorrow -- again. The bulky memories, labyrinths of words and desires -- the thought of Martina and the bad bad way we said goodbye to each other is down somewhere too, and it's like when the story you want to tell or write about is so big -- too big -- you'll never find a way to begin the job to tell it all out.

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.

You're in total dark, and summoned by the voice you move forward, in line with few others. You keep one hand against the wall and with the other you waggle or drag the white cane nervously. You aim for the voice and try to follow it. Sometimes you're cornered, or stumble, or you run into someone else's limbs and must apologize. For the rest you fumble around. The space all around you at moment seems limitless although it is probably very narrow. You may have the impression of a very high or a very low ceiling above your head, but no doubt both the feelings are inaccurate because you have no way to tell. All you can see is total darkness, and some whitish blurry spots in your eyes that for a long while don't seem to want to fade. All the steps you take are incredibly short tentative steps and yet you have the impression of having walked a large distance. You passed a garden, where the canned birds chirped and few odorous plants guided you through; had your slice of traffic experience and went across a dangling bridge, a passage on a boat, explored a room with bas-relief pictures hanging on the walls and chests with mysterious objects inside. Finally in a bar you realized it ain't so hard to mix coffee and milk in total darkness, or to rip the sugar sachet, until you lost the plastic spoon, after which you were kind of lost yourself. You also realized that it ain't so obvious to tell between one coin or the other, let alone drop them right in the hand of the girl at the counter and take your change back.
After one hour and fifteen minutes you get out of the dark to the bright hall and suddenly you wonder, what all this light is here for? What's the use? You sort of was accustomed to the dark there. You were alert and your body and your senses were working at full throttle. It was amazing and challenging. Now you can't help but feeling that there's another bunch of experiences your other senses are craving to work equally hard for. Watching a movie. Playing a card game. Playing a instrument. Playing some sport. Writing. Climbing. Swimming. Hugging someone. Telling the facial features by touch. Groping your guiding voice who as soon as we're all out to the light appears to be a strikingly beautiful visually impaired 25 year old foreign girl, who works part time at the Istituto dei ciechi (Institution for blind persons) in Milan, for the permanent exhibition Dialogo nel buio (Dialogue in the dark).
Which, in case you haven't experienced it yet, is a must see.

Because I soon will have to fly, and the anticipation makes me quite nervous, it's probably not a coincidence that a post about Alitalia attracted my attention today.
It is known how Alitalia, the italian national airline company, will probably be privatized, due to its irreparable losses in the millions, bad management, waste of public money and atrocious inefficiency. Not even going into organizing rendition flights to take supposed terrorists to be tortured around the world.
Many in Italy grumble against this probable destiny, and they seem to imply that it isn't patriotic to get rid of our national airline company like that. They suggest, and many politicians among them, that the State should throw more money into the bottomless well to resuscitate the corpse (sorry for the double metaphor), because "Alitalia is a national treasure", "property of the people", etcetera.
Theoretically one could agree that it is never a good deal for the citizens to sell out public property, but the thing is the Italian State isn't capable to manage Alitalia. So I don't really know. It's essentially a problem of political feuds and clientele, which makes it ineradicable. Therefore the question seems to be either you sell at one price now, or you sell at a much lower price later.
Well I don't care much anyway, but I read a post today, and just in case you have any lingering doubts on what the right destiny for Alitalia should be, and like me you don't fly much so you don't know by your own experience, check out Alitalia as a ruler of my destiny, by Ms. Adventure in Italy.
I insist that nothing is more helpful to understand your own country than the impressions of the expat.

It’s a guy named Luigi (yes, Luigi) with an Alitalia lanyard around his neck, sitting in front of a display for Air Uzbekistan (no joke). (...) Luigi, our Alitalia representative, well, let’s just say that he is consistent with the level of Alitalia quality I’m used to. Which is, crap. He fuffs about looking for another flight before finally telling us we’ll be getting on the Virgin flight at 11.30. He takes a few moments to tell us about the amenities Virgin customers receive and a moment’s pause would have begged the question “Why is one airline’s customer service representative touting another airline?” but then again, this is Alitalia. (...)
10.30 Back in Terminal 2. “Luigi, we missed you.” Cretino, I feel like yelling. “How is it that no one made our reservation or even called them to tell them to hold the flight for us?”
“Oh.” Luigi picks up the phone to call his “supervisor” but he could be talking to a dial-tone for all we know. Pass the buck, m’amico.
Luigi glosses over the fact of what happened, and again recounts the luxuries that we missed by missing the Virgin flight. “What a shame that you missed it.” My fingers are itching, for his neck. “There’s a limo for first-class passengers, and if you’re really in a hurry, they use a motorcycle. It’s so cool!”

Details of rudeness and inefficiency in this story are comic and shameful. The smell of nepotism (incompetent people hired to badly do a job because they're connected) is all over the place.
The overall picture, quite depressing: because at the slightest snag (the obvious strike), Alitalia rates probably as the worst company to ever fly with.

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.