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.

Trenitalia, the Italian National railway company is a growing nightmare.
Types of connection that were once treated as equal, such as "Eurocity" and "Intercity", are now treated as different: this even though they still come with the same price, speed, quality of wagons and number of stops and are virtually indistinguishable to the traveler (Please note: Trenitalia already offers at least seven different types of trains and tariffs.)
So they told me that "Eurocity" now wants a mandatory reservation on any ticket, but the traveler can avoid to stamp the ticket before boarding the train. Instead if you happen to take the "Intercity" or the "Intercity plus" (same train with new wagons) which would happen because you are taking it, say, at 6PM instead than 5PM, the reservation is optional, but to stamp the ticket is still mandatory with or without reservation.
It must be noted that until a while ago both kind of trains needed a "supplement" with the regular ticket, so that you had two different tickets to stamp: and the fact that the "supplement" has now been abolished, finally gulped by the main ticket, is bragged by Trenitalia as a "simplification". Not at all as the necessary step to be taken for the new 2006 big increase of the tariffs.

"I have to take the intercity," I explain to the man behind the counter at the station of Venice, "should I make the reservation or not?"
"Not really. You can sit at the numbers from 71 to 86 of every coach, we now advice passengers that we never reserve those seats."
This is supposed to make up for the fact that Trenitalia cannot pay anymore for someone to put small paper signs above any seat to indicate whether the seat is reserved or not.
"But this way those compartments will always be crowded even when most of the others are deserted. This is not a good advice. Who write this stuff anyways?"
"Most likely those at the office for the complication of simple affairs" the man answers seriously.

This was an old Italian joke, but outdated. The main sexual drive of Trenitalia isn't complication anymore, it is sadomasochism.
End of the rant, puff.

So corriere.it says that Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn in the green zone of Baghdad. Well I don't really care for his personal destiny, besides I am persuaded that this was his doppelganger, with his beard-hazed face and those crooked teeth and the wide opened eyes.
Anyway if they want to send to death criminals they should at least show it to the people in the open. Why being merciless without shame, and yet being ashamed of showing what this actually means? (fear to die, cries, rhetoric of the authority, dangling jerked body, the snap of the neck breaking, hangman's hood, etc.)

Corriere.it should say how I can always be shocked by reading the usual things about the falling country instead: like those who die waiting for some ER to open for them. This item reminds me of an eleven months old boy I know (already mentioned on this blog a while ago), who fell from the stairs and smashed his head against the (luckily wooden) floor five meters below-- just two weeks ago. Few minutes after the accident he was hoisted on an ambulance which then waited 45 fucking-minutes in front of the house calling every hospital in the city for a neurosurgery with some vacant space slash time for him (luckily the little boy is recuperating now.)

And corriere.it should say how much I am disgusted to read about Somalia again, of course.
The hypocrisy and lies bubbling all over the phrases of the journalists.
The "cheering crowds". The others who already miss the "Islamic courts" and throw stones to the peaceful military convoys.
A Somali supposed-president escorted by Ethiopian soldiers! It would be like calling the Israeli army to protect Egypt. Only the U.S. could think of such a perversion. To Support the "lords of war" that everybody fears and detest (tribal leaders only respected by their closest circles), and to call in the old enemy to help: millions of people who have been starving and fighting and escaping for fifteen years are offered this as the only way out.
I wonder, is there a real choice, for the starving and traumatized and forever wounded, between the endless war (American way) and the ordered arrogance of the Islamic rule?
But the thing is, the Islamic rule proved to be able to bring peace and law --if only because not based on corruption like any other fighting part-- to a people who forgot even the meaning of those words. Corriere.it doesn't even try to understand why.

Railway station of L.
I board the "intercity" train to Milan, exceptionally leaving on time.
I find my seat after the hassle of having to mind for the seat number, which wasn't necessarily until a while ago.
The train leaves quickly and I don't even have the time to watch the platform glide out the way.

In a little while, though, I am reminded by the harassing canned female phony voice of the loudest intercom that the train will indeed "arrive in a few minutes to the station of L."

So what? I live in a country where even when a train isn't late-- it is assumed to be late anyway.

At the flea market I always end up poking among old photos and postcards. Not that I usually buy anything. I just pass by and occasionally stop and look at the old portraits, and wonder: is that the same humanity I am part of?
All the faces and bodies in the pictures seem so different. What was phony back then, and what was sincere, and what was a caricature. Everything seem to be made of another material. Some of the ladies look like my grandma looked like, a little. But she was real. They seem to be invented by someone else. Some of the men seem to have bodies out of proportion, probably due to the unusual fashion.

Few days ago I was at the flea market of Bollate (Milano), located just next certain horrific "modern" projects that plague that lousy part of the town. There, just like in any other italian flea market actually, the pictures of the times of fascism were the majority. And not only pictures: statues, posters, memorabilia.
Mussolini and his acolytes were everywhere, in pictures and on any little thing from those times. Buttons, pins, boxes, the usual. And there were also other pictures, where no "fascist authority" was present but, in small details like a black handkerchief in a pocket, or a military hat, or a certain advertising in the background, or a certain way of the men to pose in front of the camera, everything still spoke about the times of fascism in Italy.

The times of fascism. That was when my miserable falling country manifested the will to make of its typical cowardice and its worse defects an implacable force. It happened that once and we are still thinking about it.
What was that force? it was a gigantic, inevitable, shameless, black Mafia that pervaded the country and screamed itself from the balconies and the bullhorns instead of hiding in the villas or at the outskirts of town. It sung songs, and wrote poems on itself, and celebrated its new order as if people had expected it for long, when in fact nobody had expected it. Like any other mafia, it brought injustice disguised by justice, and ferocious illegality by peace and order, lies by adamant truths. It got rid of all the other mafias because there ought to be only One-National-Mafia.
Then it faded away, leaving behind    the bare bones of a raided country,    starving, deadly wounded and corrupted forever and covered with shame.

And evidently it also left behind a stubborn army of nostalgic individuals that went on sharing the shreds of that propaganda for decades, passing on the mania to sons and nephews, until today.
Such were the memorabilia at the flea market: in the end, a nauseating collection of phony poses, of silly objects, of unintelligible dialogs of mysterious faces ornamented with propaganda chasing you away from the stalls, able to extend their rule over the past memories for absence of concurrence.

-- in picture, above: one of the few glorious almost-non-fascist pictures found at the flea market. Unless the little boy's hat is in fact the very fascist military d'annunziano alpine hat of his father.

Italy presented yesterday its long-awaited plan to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2008-2012 to the European Commission (Yawn. I know. The not so boring part comes in the next paragraph). Together with other countries of the EU Italy is putting itself in line with the new rules to fight pollution and "global warming". This is applauded everywhere, just like the other law that recently passed at the EU to norm the use of toxic chemicals in industry.
As Europeans we are proud of our battle against pollutions of all sorts.

There's a but, of course, and it's pretty gigantic.
Nothing is more hypocrite of these laws, even if they are themselves very rightful. The reason I say this is that while they cause more costs for the European industries, they don't really imply a sacrifice, because the same industries are outsourcing the polluting productions and refinery of raw materials to countries like China. So Europe can preach to the world the faults of industrialism from its wealthy garden, while its big brands, whether they are French, German, Dutch, British, Italian or Spanish can afford even more polluting lines of production in far away countries without regulations. So in the end the only ones who pay for these laws are those smaller local industries who cannot or do not want to outsource. Not a great result.

My opinion is that sacrifices should be done for reals, not for show. We should really produce less and consume less, changing our lifestyle beyond the naive 'doing good to ourselves and our garden'. Until then, to see rich and "progressive" German or Italian yuppies enjoying the newly found pleasures of compatible products and cleaner air and rivers, while blindly buying other products "made in China" without considering if they are compatible or not (and I mean not only superfluous products, but also necessary products like a fridge, or toys for the kids), will only be one more reason to be depressed, and disillusioned about the whole European thing, let alone "progress" in itself.

Take the case of Viganella. With the prospect of another winter in the dark -- until the 2 of February -- they found the material and the money and placed a giant mirror to reflect the sun down in the village. Light comes from the wrong direction, but who cares as long as it dries things up a little. The only problem is that the reflected sun light is very limited, and at its peak covers at most the central square of the village, in front of the monument. The houses surrounding the square are lucky, but certainly other villagers must have grumbled. At most they can take a walk to the square to catch some of the light... which is undoubtedly better than having to wait until february anyway. And think how much chit chat this thing can produce down in the village. For generations. That's money well spent.

So what this teaches us? That no matter how dark the winter to come is, with little ingenuity there's always a way to warm up a little? That science and tradition can coexist? It teaches us that Archimedes had a melodramatic way to conceive technology?
To me, it just make me think that I wish I had a giant mirror placed in the right position, so that I could send my limited love to those whom I have turned my back to, or who turned their backs to me.