So it's nineleven again. Fifth recurrence of the stupid day terrorism made the rampant globalists ever more arrogant. The day the Global Technological Police State was given its well crafted perfect excuse to take over. Or if you prefer, the day of the greatest defeat ever inflicted to the Islamic world since the foundation of the state of Israel (it's a fact, not a opinion).
Nobody on earth is supposed to ignore this day. I wish so much I could ignore it. Truth is, I can't. Makes my blood boil instead. The lie running naked in the streets and being called truth makes my blood boil, on and again --even if I have been knowing it was a lie for the whole six years (since day one, actually).
The morons repeating it and drumming it carrying around banners made with fake videos and inconsistent evidence and disposed clues and unproved facts make my blood boil. I don't feel as much impotent as I feel discouraged in front of them.

Outside, it is really the end of summer. After a sunny day the evening streets of Milan are definitely busy--like any day of the year (schools opened this week). Maybe it's only because the days are getting so shorter and the pretty windows of the many shops glow brighter along the sidewalks -- the crowd moving in front of them casting more significant clouds of shade and light -- or maybe it's the cooler wind that now and then can be felt. If it wasn't for the propaganda, let alone nineleven from the point of view of Milan man-made end-of-the-world globalwarming wouldn't cross my mind. If anything because nothing like propaganda happens "globally" (in the same way all over the globe).

So it occurs to me this funny thing, that "everything is connected" like every cretin likes to say, only because propaganda connects everything. Otherwise the hell things are all connected, they are not. Our major weakness as individuals is exactly in failing to protect ourselves from forced connections between our lives and others'. To a certain extent, connecting dots and grasping common destinies is emancipation and is knowledge. Beyond that extent anyway it is a curse that instead of uplifting us individuals puts a burden on our back. The burden of remote things whose truthfulness can't be measured and whose reality can't be touched.

I think that the ambition to connect everything comes from a need for rationalization and control of reality that is actually impossible without descending into the pathological. It is a tool used by the gate-keepers to make everyone feel smaller than them.
Meanwhile walking down the streets without feeling that burden, of the remotest connections converging on yourself as terrible persuasion tools, is getting harder and harder by the day. Especially on stupid days like this one.

someone argued that a police state isn't very different from another more gentle state. that all the states are equal in being tyrannical in a way or another-- because a wall has two sides, they said, because war and violence are everywhere and were there before, and before the worse got started, another worse was there. they said we always were on the outside of the walls. but today those who are eagerly working for the police states, for the total surveillance, for the liberties washed into the fears-- they don't see how they're putting themselves --and ourselves too-- inside the circle of walls were graffiti aren't allowed.

(...) It's fine. And is also fine that those who cry and die are balanced by those who laugh and live; and the art (I don't know what that is) dances on its own, without looking from what direction comes the music. For the "intellectual world" besides, the war is a settled affair, save the outstanding moral matters, and aesthetic; its emotional capacity is spent, or at most awaits for something fresher and stronger. However it's a common case for large part of the humanity still on the lands - an unconscious blank "on what is going on", mistaken for strength of mind and vital bravery. Were they all eating rations since the beginning!
(...) To have the strength of one's misery and humiliation - the loyalty to face one's void: but maybe this would mean something too haughty and respectful at the same time.
I am not putting an end.

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.

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.

So my father cries on the phone with my sister. Fighting the tears he says that he cannot take the first step in my direction. He --cannot.
I understand him. All he wants is to be searched and proved love. Who wouldn't.
-- call him says the sister. The tears, she says. Good people in my family. Too bad their only way out is always the path of least resistance.
I try to imagine any possible outcome of a conversation with him. They're all dreadful. I'm calling him! Right now! says the voice. But I haven't thought any possible outcome before. So I can't.
Any possible outcome: All must be thought through in advance or without answers ready I will have things to regret.

What do you want to prove? asks the voice. What do I want to prove? Nothing. It is not about proving anything, it is about surviving. What do I fear? Everything: the violent man that he was, his voice, his disrespect for anything I ever wanted to be. What I miss? The witty laughs we had together sometimes. The evenings when he was in a good mood. What do I want to be admired for? I don't know. I want to disappear.
Is hypocrisy I can't handle? Yes I can't handle it. Makes me feel dead and cruel and coward. What is at the roots of it? I don't know. Possibly me refusing his authority since when I was twelve. Or anything else in his past taunting us, suicide of his father, repressive education, domestic violence, political revenge, Neapolitan madness. I did refuse his authority though. It's definitely the best thing I did for myself. Only I thought I could find my own way to be respected by him so that we all could be happy each in his own way. An that was a big waste of time.

Everything ends in hysteria in my family. Christmas in a week and I am in the perfect trap. Crawl to him and apologize, cry and humble yourself says the voice. Strange how really everything becomes suffocating in this occasions. Loves, life, family, vices and beatitudes. A dinner. Explanations. Her body against mine in the solidarity hug. Advices. More explanations. I know part of my mind is once again surprised that neither me nor my body are flying away from it all. Unfortunately most of the other anatomical chunks aren't really listening.

So I sit awake in the silent room built in the middle of the night. Listening to music and feeling like crying out of the stomach what I can't really cry (did I ingested a small plastic figurine of my father raising his hand?) At moments I am amazed by the fact that this is all so serious and not a joke. I suspect that those are the moments of lucidity. They cause chains of alas. Can't I really escape? In a laugh? In a plane? Can't I really fly away? Can I have my wasted time back? Must the calls be made? Must the guilt be such a burden? Must the songs be so wrenching? Etc.

And by the way, what about Afghanistan? Our very self-satisfied Foreign minister stated that Italy's military presence in Afghanistan "must be maintained", because after all,"it's not a military mission" (whatever you say, minister).

So Prodi is pulling out of Iraq, but has no intentions to pull out of Afghanistan. They get away with such nonsense because -- like everywhere else -- people here consider the Iraq war the 'wrong' one, and the Afghan war the 'right' one, the one really motivated by terrorism and so on.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In Afghanistan heroin production is soaring like hell, Talibans are on the rise, Osama is nowhere to be found (and by the way Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are much more involved in international terrorism schemes) and more importantly, conditions of democracy aren't anywhere in sight.
As with Iran, the main reasons for this war seem to be those meant to keep the Russian influence out of the area.

It seems to be that the great game is still on the table, or whatever else we should call it (shitty game?).
I suggest the captivating and exhaustive book by the same name (in Italian, "Il Grande Gioco") to those interested in understanding something of this very very old shitty matter.