I admit that by nature, by culture or by both, consider it an extremely weak thought, even as a boy I never found it too easy to divide the world in good and bad.
Even a mere brief filmography such as that of the western movies of my time suggested some caution.
And I smile when I think that forty years later I read that the fashion of scalps was not the work of red Indians, but had been borrowed from the cowboys who hunted Indians for money. But let us take a few rudimental and summary steps forward. At university, as an active member of the Students’ Movement at the Faculty of Italian Literature in 1968, I was looked on with suspicion as I practiced athletics at a competitive level and I rushed off to practice whenever I could. “He is partly a right wing”, commented the most enlightened, basing my “rightwingness” on Mussolinian gymnasts.
Then when I stated, always with suggestions typical of bars where sports are discussed, but in public, at meetings and in noisy, crammed classrooms that between a left wing rascal and a decent right wing guy I would any day have chosen the latter, I unfailingly risked lapidation (figuratively or little more).
Coming to our days, just imagine how I am taking the shallow waters of bipolarism, the majority party’s ‘wall against wall’, the Ridley Scott type duellists, Berlusconism and anti-Berlusconism. In short, it is a referendum without interruption between the good and the bad. Today I am resorting to the same football metaphor I used ten years ago when Mario Segni summoned the Italians to the polls, following the growing need for change (“whatever” according to me - they were so fed up they would have preferred even Buddhism to the proportional system). I would like a country that knows to stand in an orderly manner on the terraces, who certainly supports its own and wants them to win, but not at the expense of a fair match; a country that wants an uninfluenced though fallible referee, grounds in perfect conditions, a logistically acceptable stadium with really standardized safety measures, “escape outlets” and so forth. Instead, and now I get to the title of this note, all around I see only blind or self-interested fans, interested in work, money and power. All seem to know who the good people are, themselves, and the bad ones, the others, with the exception of enjoying certain loopholes the “others” enjoy.
Let me explain myself - if an actress and an intelligent woman such as Lella Costa, who, even legitimately thinks the worst of Berlusconi, then supports her work by advertising in the purest Berlusconian or sub-Berlusconian style; or if “Berlusca’s” invaluable critics such as Michele Serra, who has, probably with reason, decided that the good are only on one side, and has for years collaborated in the shows of Celentano, Morandi and members of a “free market”, which I repeat, probably with good reason, they do not define as such, but which offers them money in an absolutely Berlusconian logic; if all this is the order of the day, well…, I think they are acting as Indians selling alcohol to them…. If things stand like this, just imagine how the figure of the courtier can develop in such a fertile breeding ground, in this Italy, as it is weekly described on Sette, the Corrierone’s magazine, edited by Claudio Sabelli Fioretti.
On the other hand the latter has skipped my introduction (by nature, culture or whatever else?), moving directly to the courtiers. How about discussing the matter next time?

Translated by Interpres sas