Ethically overwhelmed by the war in Iraq (as I am writing it’s in Iraq, at least for the time being…), politically fragmented, offended from a logical perspective (for whoever has a grain of logic sense nothing really adds up here, including the pre-war lexicon, with the word “preventive” involving in Italian a much closer link with the financial mean of “preventivo” = estimate - on post war reconstruction interests…), I indulge with imagination and with a minimum of impressionism on the state of my country: in these cases, the most incisive figure of speech is metaphor. These days, or rather I should say for some time, for some years now, I tend to get regularly involved chiefly with two metaphors, which I would like to share with the reader, possibly spreading them around like a virus in the worldwide web. The first metaphor is that of the plane. The geometrical plane. In Italy, things are usually planned and discussed as if the country were level, placed on a horizontal plane. Let us take the Rai (Italian State Television) vicissitudes.

Rai is the most important cultural, editorial and communication enterprise in Italy. It can be no accident that for several five-year periods now, things get worse whoever is in charge of handling the matter. Whereas it is true we are not “dwarfs riding on giants’ back”, since at least recently we have not really seen many giants around, we should at least try to understand why we are “dwarfs riding on dwarfs’ backs”, and the whole thing degrades whoever arrives (or almost so, it’s a metaphor…).
Well, in my opinion, this happens because the country, and therefore Rai, which in this respect significantly represents it, are not even, or at least are not on a horizontal plane: they are placed on an inclined plane and are therefore doomed to tumble down, whatever the nature of the people or of the action that happen to rest on it.
We would need somebody who can, or is at least legitimated to, place the plane on a level surface, to rebalance it so to speak, so as to be able to see things as they are and not as they tumble down. But who, and when, and how? The other metaphor relates to the theatre and to the tongues of flame. Italy is a theatre featuring its ruling class, with the Italian people sitting in the stalls, in the circles and in the boxes. These are people with different backgrounds. Italian people are increasingly less interested in the performed pièce; this has been going on for some time now, and it is reflected by people’s couldn’t-care-less attitude, by their indifference (electoral? political? cultural?), by their distance from the forestage by all means.
They are not looking for a better performance, for a play that has been written better, directed better or acted better; they want to be on-stage, or get their children there, who however usually find the stage has already been occupied by the children of the (self-proclaimed) ruling class, perpetuated by taking on assignments within Rai and Eni, Enel and Mediaset, Telecom and whoever comes next…. Every so often, but not that often, we have a politician (such as Bossi) who, having a good nose for the situation, plays the first act on-stage, and then (during the interval?) takes a walk among the stalls, or rather reaches the gallery, to get an idea of the mood and get people “to identify him as one of them”; but that’s all. What is today’s novelty, that makes the so-called difference between legal country and real country, between characters/actors and the public, even worse and criminal as Pasolini would put it? It is the fact that part of the theatre is on fire, and somebody, too few in my opinion, have realised and are screaming for help, the fire brigade is not arriving, the show goes on, and the people sitting in the front rows show their annoyance as they ask the rest of the public to shut up and not disturb the pièce… This, I am afraid, is Italy, with its inclined plane and burning theatre.…
Or am I being melancholic, because I am not particularly excited about the war?

 

Translated by interpres sas