Oversensitivity flu...

A small mid-week check-in to just shake my head at the world. Why? Well…

Bea Arthur died. The world is now a much less funny place. Goodbye Bea, and thanks for being a friend, even if virtually.

An Israeli rabbi is upset that the name “swine flu” is offensive because it’s not kosher – he is suggesting “Mexican flu” instead. Because clearly, that’s not going to be offensive to anyone…

I know there was something else, but maybe it's better that it's not coming to me right now...

Maybe it's the agnosticism talking...

Two very different events have preoccupied the news to varying degrees in the past few weeks. Although completely unrelated, I find myself asking what we can gain by contemplating the earthquake in Abruzzo and its aftermath alongside proposed changes to Afghani law that would affect women’s rights in the country’s Shiite population. It’s a stretch, I know, but bear with me…

On April 6th, a powerful earthquake (measured at 5.8 on the Richter scale by Italian geological groups and 6.2 by American ones) hit the Abruzzo region, with an epicentre close to the city of L’Aquila. The shock was felt all the way to Rome and beyond, and the damage has been immense – almost three hundred lives lost, whole towns literally wiped off the map, tens of thousands of families left homeless, and of course a considerable loss of cultural heritage in crumbled historical buildings.
The emergency rescue and outpouring of support for the region have been outstanding and, with a very few exceptions, lauded without reservations. Pledges have been made to rebuild as quickly as possible, to construct new towns, and to restore life to normal in Abruzzo as soon as possible.

In the midst of such devastation it is not surprising to find a broad range of reactions. There is, instinctively, despair for the losses and gratitude for what is saved, as well as a healthy amount of anger. Calls are already being made for inquests to determine if knowingly shoddy construction contributed to the extent of the destruction. It’s one thing if a medieval building crumbles during a substantial earthquake, it’s quite another if a building constructed just nine years ago, like L’Aquila’s main hospital, sees an entire wing crumble into dust. Along with California and Japan, Italy is one of the most seismic regions on the planet, and yet that doesn’t seem to have been taken into account in modern construction. It has been bitterly pointed out that were a similar scale earthquake to take place in California the likelihood is that not one life would be lost.

So what about Afghanistan. Green lighted by President Karzai, changes are being passed that would impose aspects of Islamics law for the country’s Shiite minority. These changes include clauses that make it illegal for a woman to deny her husband sex, by extension condoning marital rape, and make it illegal for a woman to leave the house without her husband’s permission, inclusive of school and medical reasons. Karzai is apparently approving these laws in order to endear himself to fundamentalists whose support he’s courting in upcoming elections. Problematically, Karzai was essentially installed by and subsequently held up by the Americans, who are not terribly happy about these developments. There has been considerable international outcry, but here there is the delicate issue of political and cultural self-determination – if a thing is done democratically, it is difficult to protest. Moreover there does appear to be popular support for these changes – the 300 or so people who courageously took part in a recent protest in Kabul against the new laws were surrounded and harassed by about 900 who condemned their position.

So what do Abruzzo and Afghanistan have to do with each other? The first we can log under ‘acts of god’, in the sense of an ungovernable force beyond our control or abilities to predict that periodically reminds us how powerless we can still be in the face of the natural forces that surge in this planet. The second we have to log under ‘acts of man’. Based on religious conviction, basically one half of the Shiite population will be legally disenfranchised, deprived of their fundamental rights of self-determination over their bodies and their freedom.

The effects of the Abruzzo earthquake are tragic and irreversible. This was loss of life and the means of living that was unpredictable, but perhaps preventable. We can only hope that in the future seismic activity will be taken account before construction, and not after. On a certain level there is an aspect of comprehensibility to natural disasters. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we accept, because we have to, that we live on a planet that we cannot fully control and against which we sometimes have to protect ourselves.

This somehow makes these changes to Afghan law even more incomprehensible. This is a willing and voluntary denial of liberty, arguably the most precious thing we have after life itself. There is a kind of awe and self-reckoning that comes after a cataclysmic natural event that shows us just how fragile we are. For me, that awe pales in the face of the utter shock that comes from the possibility of the legal enslavement of women, even more so as it would be entered into democratically, and for some, voluntarily. Maybe it’s the agnosticism talking, but my disappointment in humanity runs much, much deeper than my disappointment in god.

Values

As of two days ago there is a new right-wing party in Italian politics: Il Popolo della Libertà (Pdl).

The creation of the Pdl could mark a major turning point in contemporary Italian politics…or it could mean nothing at all, a total flash in the pan. A coalition-cum-party, the Pdl fuses Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go, Italy!) with the Alleanza Nazionale (the National Alliance – a party that traces directly back to fascism) led by Gianfranco Fini. The head of the new party is, wait for it… the Cavaliere, Berlusconi.

The upshot of the creation of the Pdl is that Italy is now governed by a party that no one voted for. Interestingly, something like this almost happened in Canadian politics in January of this year, but the request (yes, we do have to ask the Lieutentant-Governor for permission in these things – Canadian politics has its own deeply rooted…quirks…) was roundly thrown out.

In theory the Pdl is a significant development as it unites the majority of the centre-right conservative parties under one banner, ostensibly moving Italy closer to a two-party system. That said, the party could collapse in no time due to internal conflict between Fini and Berlusconi. Moreover, while similar, the Pdl depends heavily on the personality cult that fuels Berlusconi’s political success, rather than on a clear party platform.

That the newly face-lifted right instead depends heavily on propaganda and deep-rooted prejudice is evident from the main statement on the Pdl’s new site (http://www.forzaitalia.it/ ), the so-called ‘Charter of Values’.

According to the Charter the Pdl is rooted in the Judeo-Christian base of European culture, a relatively benign statement that betrays its more sinister side further along, where it is stated unequivocally that one of the core values of the party is “the security of our identity in the face of immigration.” Xenophobia, check. The close ties of the party with the church are evident in their family ‘values’ – namely that the family that they vow to protect is the ‘natural’ one, made up of a man and a woman united in marriage with the intent of raising children. Homophobia, check.

The Charter reaches its apex of rhetoric and hypocrisy when it lists the values for which the party stands: “the dignity of the individual, liberty and responsibility, equality, justice, legality, solidarity…”.

‘The dignity of the individual’ means something to the Pdl that it apparently does not to the Italian people. Despite the opposition of a majority of Italians, the Berlusconi-led government has just approved a law on biological wills that makes it legal to completely disregard an individual’s stated wish to forgo life-support in the case that they are left permanently incapacitated. ‘Liberty’, while evoked over and over again in the Charter, is a heavily, heavily qualified value.

As a side note, the Pdl also have a deeply skewed view of ‘equality’ and ‘justice’. Speaking at the massive meeting held to launch the party a young female supporter, the face of the new Italy, stated that what “we [young Italy?] want are more women at work and fewer feminists on tv.” I’m not sure what channel she’s watching, but I’m fairly certain she either has no idea what a feminist is, or gets foreign cable…

In an attempt to see a silver-lining in the birth of the Pdl this would be my hope: that in the attempt to create a party that represents the majority of conservative Italians, the coalition will be forced move closer toward centre, moderating the discourse in order to maintain the support of less radical voters who would have been uncomfortable voting for Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale.

Like the Pdl, my optimism is seriously shaky from the outset. It’s hard to hope for moderation from a man who, at the same launch party, claimed that the Italian left is still made up of “millions of adorers of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.” And who says that the Cavaliere deals mainly in fear mongering…per carità…

Welcome to Italy...

On a fairly regular basis I get myself worked up into a great lather about whatever I read in the newspaper or see on tv and send off a quasi-incoherent, ranting message to my Virgil of Italian politics, looking, I suppose, for affirmation that I’m not missing something simple that will make the whole thing less crazy. On an equally regular basis he sends me a simple response:

‘Welcome to Italy...’

There is undeniably a deep-rooted fatalism here about politics and in particular the willfully obtuse and obscure back-room and caviar-lunch beast that is government and, even more so, civil services. Why worry about the current political calamity when there was something equally mad yesterday, and will probably be something at least as mad tomorrow!

Possibly the best (in absolutely the most bitter sense of the word) example of this is the so-called lodo Alfano. Enacted into law July 22, 2008 the lodo Alfano establishes penal immunity for the four highest positions in government for the duration of the term, namely to the President of the Republic, the President of the Senate, the President of the Camera dei Deputati and the President of the Consiglio dei Ministri. Basically, for the entire period that they are in office, these four individuals are above the law. Given the equally obtuse laws regarding statutes of limitations, in the sense that a case has to make it through the courts within a certain time limit, this means that an individual who has a case pending against them when elected (this is not as unthinkable as it sounds; for an excellent interview see: http://www.justresponse.net/berlusconi_pacitti.html) may see the whole thing disappear in a puff of paperwork during their mandate.

The lodo Alfano has already come into mind-boggling effect. Almost exactly a month ago, British lawyer David Mills was found guilty of accepting a hefty bribe of $600,000 to withhold damning testimony against Berlusconi in a case in which they were both defendents. Berlusconi was also found guilty (and must be responsible for the bribe somewhere along the line, even though the name of the money-provider has not been released), but thanks to the lodo Alfano he can sleep easy, no one is going to be knocking on his door with a warrant.

Berlusconi’s explanation of why the lodo Alfano was necessary is a peer-less example of spin; he defines the law as: “the minimum that a democracy can do to defend its liberty.”[Reuters, 24 luglio 2008] The President has long lamented that, basically, the courts are out to get him – he proudly claims to be the most investigated man in Italy, as proof that the judiciary system is ‘activist’ – against him.

The lodo Alfano is also the reason that Concia and Gottardi will take their case against the President to the European court based out of Strasbourg – in Italy, his liberty is unassailable. Apparently, it’s the least that a democracy can do.

Welcome to Italy…

Forget the mimosas.

At the end of February, a bleak month by most any definition, two Italian politicians, Anna Paola Concia (Pd) and Donata Gottardi (Pd-Pse), announced that they will file a complaint against President Silvio Berlusconi with the European court in Strasbourg. The intend to accuse him of violating articles 8 [“Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”] and 14 [“The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.”] of the European Convention on Human Rights “due to [his] continued and repeated declarations of scorn for the lives and dignity of women.”

[The explanation as to why Concia and Gottardi have to take recourse to an international, rather Italian court, is the absolutely mind-boggling item of law known as the lodo Alfano, which will have to be the subject of another post.]

The case will not be hard to build. Some examples, all from within the past few months:

1. At a recent press conference given by Berlusconi and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Berlusconi ‘quipped’ to Sarkozy, that he “gave” Sarkozy “his woman.” (Sarkozy is married to native Italian Carla Bruni). Although slipped in just out of mic-range, French journalists quickly deciphered Berlusconi’s line, which had left the French president visibly taken aback. (For the record, Berlusconi’s camp says that the President actually said “Tu sais que j'ai étudié à la Sorbonne”, “You know that I studied at the Sorbonne.” Apparently B. took a summer course there…)

2. Until several weeks ago the Italian press was entirely gripped by ‘the Englaro case’. Eluana Englaro was 21 years old in 1992 when she was involved in a car accident that left her in a persistent vegetative state. After 17 years on constant life support her father petitioned the courts to allow his daughter to die. Bepppino Englaro’s request was granted in 2008 after several trials, sparking vicious polemics in the government and the press as the Vatican-backed right fought the order, to the extent of hinting at emergency changes to the constitution. In the end Englaro’s support systems were withdrawn and she was allowed to die. The issue of Englaro’s exact physical and mental state were the subject of intense debate in the weeks leading up to the execution of the court’s order, and it was in that context that Berlusconi argued that Eluana should continue to be artificially sustained because she was “a living person, who breathes autonomously, whose brain cells are alive and also send electrical signals. She is a person that could also have a child.”

3. Finally, there was Berlusconi’s recent ‘joke’ legitimizing his decision to put more military in the streets as part of new anti-rape measures, namely that “to avoid them [rapes] would take as many officers as there are beautiful girls.”

So, to sum up: women are still male property to be exchanged; the physical ability to reproduce is enough to be considered a valuable female life; and rape is somehow incited by female beauty.

It shouldn’t be a hard case to make.

Italian politics are particularly bad for women. No one flinches at the rhetoric behind what are commonly referred to as le quote rosa, “the pink quotas”, namely the number of women in a given party or alliance. Italy is, in fact, last in Europe for the number of women in positions of command.

All of this is particularly relevant today, since today is the Festa della Donna, or Women’s Day. Birthed by the Socialist Party of America at the beginning of the twentieth-century, this now-international celebration is dedicated to all women. The tradition is to give mimosas, those odd-smelling bunches of crayon-yellow puffs, to the women you care for – mothers, lovers, sisters, wives, grandmothers, daughters.

Criticized as increasingly commercial, the Festa della Donna should be an opportunity to reflect. We may have teste di cazzo as heads-of-state, and as Berlusconi’s continual ‘gaffs’ make clear there are still many, many battles to fight (foremost, equal pay for equal work). Yet today we enjoy freedoms every day that should never have to be regarded as such, like the right to an education and the power to vote.

So, should you be moved to do something for the women in your life on this Festa, forget the mimosas. Instead, donate something to an organization, local or international, that helps women in real need – women denied an education, women who endure violence as a part of daily life, women who are barred from the basic elements of a self-determined existence. The Festa della Donna is a day to think about those who are denied the things that we take for granted every day – the opportunity to have a full life both in and outside the home, the assumption that we have a justice system that will protect us, the right to pursue any career we wish, the freedom to read and write what appeals and what we think is right.

The Gossip Bird

L’uselin de la comare is the title of a popular Italian song sung in Milanese dialect; the title loosely means ‘The gossip bird”. The lyrics are cheerfully vulgar, drawing out an extended play on words that is fundamentally untranslatable: uselin, Milanese for uccello or ‘bird’, doesn’t have the same double-meaning in English that it does in Italian (namely referring to a certain aspect of the male anatomy that tends to rise up toward the … heavens…). Alighting first on the head of the unidentified lucky lady, in the course of several verses, the ‘gossip bird’ travels little-by-little downward, each step punctuated by the chorus, “E un po' più giù volea volare”, “And he wanted to fly a little lower down”. Sung, the gleeful emphasis is placed on the first half of the phrase, “E un po’ più giù…”, and it doesn’t take much more than those five words to evoke the whole song.

As it happens, this is also usually the phrase that pops into my mind every morning when I check in with the Italian news – “and a little lower down…” we go…

It seems that, on a daily basis, there’s something new to momentarily stop me in my tracks with a flinching sense of disbelief: some new ‘joke’ made by Berlusconi (“I gave you your woman”, “She can still give birth”, “there needs to be a policeman in the street for every beautiful Italian woman”, ad nauseam); a change to the law that is blatantly racist and xenophobic but passes all the same; another sign that the division between church and state is completely eroded, if indeed it ever existed. And a little lower down we go…

The ‘we’ of course in that last phrase is slightly misleading – I am not Italian, but rather a straniera, a foreigner who has chosen Italy as a kind of adopted homeland.

This is a choice that makes me question my sanity on a daily basis.

Why choose to engage with the problems of a country that is not your own to begin with, when you run the risk of always being considered an outsider, a dilettante, and perhaps even a voyeur? And, obviously, this is not a case of stark humanitarian need, in which case the above question does not enter into discussion.

I don’t have a good philosophical answer to the question, only a personal one stemming from a kind of academic guilt. I’m a historian of Italian art, a choice made in university based on pure aesthetic and intellectual inclination. I moved to Italy several years ago and came face to face with having to square up my own experience with Italy, removed and focused on the past, with the actual Italy that I was living every day. I wanted to understand Italy as it is now, in a sense to legitimize myself as an expert on its past. This is perhaps a fundamentally misplaced impulse, and certainly not an onus that all historians take on, for good reason. However, I am not alone in the ranks of people who have been seduced by the bel casino, the beautiful disaster, that is Italy.

My aim here is admittedly the same as most blogs – to create a kind of outlet for all the traffic that exists in my head. In this case the traffic happens to be Roman, another species of casino altogether…

So, probably once a week or so, I’ll try to get myself together and write something coherent from all the detritus that has accumulated in my head over the course of a week. I’m sure there will be recurring themes, with women’s rights, Berlusconi (the two are deeply, deeply, entwined currently…), immigration, and xenophobia at the forefront. Come to think of it, they’re all three pretty entwined at this point…

I hope that I won’t bore the bejesus out of friends and family who didn’t need or want a weekly sermon on Italian politics or whatever else might happen to catch my capricious ire in a given week. My aim will be to make it all relevant, and not just because I happen to be here, but because …well, there’s the butterfly effect. Somehow, everything affects everything.

We’ll see how it goes.