A great clamor can be heard right now on the Italian media. The news item is the tragic one of an Italian policeman who got killed during a clash between hooligans (in Italy called: ultrà) in the city of Catania, after a match of the local team with the team of the nearby city of Palermo. As a consequence, the authorities decided to suspend all soccer matches until new restrictive laws will be put forward to avoid similar episodes in the future.
"Suspending matches for a weekend is not enough. Until we come up with drastic measures we won't start again" said the boss of the Italian Soccer Federation, Pancalli. Others have called for a one-year suspension of the games. A whole bunch of do-gooders pissed-off daddies is swarming right now on the media. One wonders where they were until yesterday.

Now, the clamor is quite odd. What's even more odd:
"Pancalli's decision to suspend the matches for an indefinite period on Saturday won the backing of Michel Platini, the newly-elected head of European soccer's governing body UEFA." You know why that's odd? Because Platini was the one who, as a player, advocated the decision to go on with the match during the massacre at the Heisel Statium in 1986, were many totally innocent people, caught in a hooligan battle, died or were injured.

It's all so odd because the Italian soccer championship was never suspended before, regardless the countless deaths and the incidents we had to witness in the years, during Sunday matches: and all the scandals of corruption and doping and cheating and so forth weren't enough to suspend the games. The championship wasn't even suspended after last year scandal, when it was learned that all the crucial games were rigged by corrupted managers and bribed referees.
Now they decided to suspend the games, because a policeman died, which is fine and right by me, also quite too late (plus I don't give a shit about soccer anyway) --but is still very odd.

One thing is for sure, though, the clamor has a reason (it always has a reason): and, wanna bet? because our politicians are now running around screaming for new restrictive laws to help the law enforcement in the stadiums, it will soon be discovered that "more technology is needed".
Here's the paranoid foresight, actually: The authorities will "realize" that it is now necessary to fingerprint all the people who enter the stadiums or who buy tickets; to x-ray them; to take more pictures of them, before, during and after the game; more cameras will be needed, in and around the stadiums and in the streets were the hooligans hang out; to give forms to fill in when one wants to buy a ticket, or, why not, board a train directed to a city where a game is held; I.D.s will be asked to people in the streets on the days of the game; a new large database wherein to put all the names and pictures and data will be needed, and the data will be cross-referenced with a lot of other data, like driving licenses, emails, telephone numbers, family members and partners and stuff; all the marvels of the technology we so adore will be put into place: we will learn that it is all for our security, of course. Old story already, just so that more and more portions of reality will be claimed by the databases.

Because that's the thing, with the clamor of the media: the clamor is there because something bad happened, but it is also there to push us all unto a psychological condition. This time is one more of those where tomorrow we are all supposed to be grateful for the surveillance and the restrictive laws. Wanna bet?

--In picture, above: during the war in Catania (courtesy corriere.it)

I hadn't noticed that the Guardian, and probably others, had covered the killings of Erba that recently where all over the place on the italian newspapers. The gist of it according to the Guardian seem to be that the couple murdered their neighbors because they were too loud (so also reports Italy Logue, where I first learned of the Guardian cover of the thing, and pretty much all the other media sources here in Italy).

Of course as always the truth is more complex, less absurd, and the real fun is not to simplify it. The truest things always come out if you look closely.

For example details of the story say that Rosa Bazzi, the killer from upstairs who apparently started the massacre dragging her husband into it, was raped when she was ten years old (if you can imagine that). Because forms of violence so often morph into similar or specular forms of violence later on, I see easily the same kind of brutal ignorance of the Italian province behind the two connected events: and the typical reserved and very-decent, extremely repressed behavior (that suddenly explodes) of the people of northern Lombardia in particular.

It's true anyway that "too loud neighbors" was the explanation the couple of murderers alleged for their "insane act".

Yet I think that everyone who wants to know knows, and particularly those who live in the same area or region of the event (a region where the infamous racist & powerful party "Northern alliance" was born), that a great deal of the reasons for this crime must be searched within the fact that one of the two murdered women, the main target of the attack, lived with a man from Tunisia.
And Rosa from upstairs cut the throat of a two years old little boy ("who was crying, and I suffer of headache" she said) who was the mixed-blood son of the said couple.
Not to recognize this simple fact, that they felt entitled to destroy that family because it was a racially mixed family, means to once again censorship one essential flavor of the Italian and European life of this century, losing yet another occasion to look directly at ourselves, our fading Italian world, what we really are.