Lists

A couple of days ago a site called listaouting published the first of a series of promised lists. The list contains the names of ten Italian politicians who have voted consistently in favour of anti-gay legislation, despite being, according to the people who've put the list together, gay themselves. The idea behind the list is that the ten politicians deserve to be outed not as gays, which is nobody's business but theirs, but as hypocrites. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. When a bunch of right-wing politicians here in Italy organised an event called Family Day, with the aim of defending the traditional family (sic) against the destructive and disordered forces of civil unions, a number of journalists published the marital escapades of the event's promoters - most of whom had been divorced at least once, and many of whom were currently living with their partners, unmarried or in sin, as we used to say, in blithe indifference to the rules of the Catholic church to which they all, at least nominally, belonged. They weren't being exposed as divorcees or adulterers but, once again, as hypocrites. Nobody seemed to feel that this offended their human rights. People who say one thing and do another, in that case at least, were seen quite rightly as fair game. No magistrate investigated the publication of their names or suggested that some heinous crime had been committed. Nobody talked about defamation, or presumed that the journalists in question suffered some form of mental illness. Nobody talked about media lynching or the need to protect individual privacy. These men, with their talk of the sanctity of the family and their strings of ex-wives and illegitimate children, were politicians. Being exposed as phonies was one of the risks that went with the job. The church, to which all paid lip-service, didn't seem to mind, after all. So why should they?

So it's interesting to see how differently people have reacted to the publication of this list. It should be said at once that the list offers names, but no proof, but that's hardly surprising. What would constitute proof of gayness, other than a statement from the person in question or a compromising photograph? (Or a wire-tapped conversation? In the land of tapping, I live in hope.) The former ain't going to happen; the latter is likelier, and would certainly be more fun. So we can ignore the whole business or take the list on trust. Certainly, the reaction of the blogosphere seems to confirm the claims. Maurizio Gasparri, Berlusconi henchman and not the sharpest knife in the box, appears to be known as Culetto d'Oro (Golden Botty!). Roberto Formigoni, governor of Lombardy and leader of the cattolicissimo Comunione e Liberazione, an organisation that has sewn up more tenders for its members than I've had hot dinners, is rumoured to have had a quickie with George Clooney. Lucky Roberto. Gianni Letta, the power behind Berlusconi's throne, if that isn't too dignified a term for it, has had so many face-lifts he makes his boss look rugged. Roberto Calderoli, the charmer in the photograph and Minister for Simplification - something he does whenever he opens his lovely mouth - is the kind of man who keeps wild animals in his garden and wears T-shirts with Viva la Gnocca (Long Live Cunt!) written on them. If further proof is needed, it can, apparently, be provided. Paolo Bonaiuti, Berlusconi's well-oiled spokesman, is also on the list, as is Ferdinando Adornato, who started out as a left-wing intellectual and is now neither left-wing nor intellectual. Then there's Luca Volontè, also cattolicissimo and fetchingly jug-eared, who has stated that 'the founders of modern psychology describe homosexuality as a clinical pathology'. On the grounds that the lady doth protest too much, along with a whiff of the 'no smoke without fire' defence, I rest my case.

And, in one sense, the fact that they're gay or not is irrelevant. Because what's shocked me about the whole business is not the reaction of the people on the list. They've been lying (or refusing to answer questions deemed embarrassing )  for decades - why on earth should we believe them now? It's the reaction of others that worries me. Mara Carfagna, ex calendar girl and now government minister (and an old favourite of this blog), has talked about a 'defamatory attack'. Defamatory? In whose eyes? It's good to know that Ms Carfagna, whose mandate is to ensure equality of opportunity, considers an 'accusation' of homosexuality to be defaming. She isn't the only one. If I could have a quickie with George Clooney (just saying, Roberto) for all the people - on the left and right of the spectrum - who've talked about unwarranted invasion of privacy and the need to separate the political and the personal, and all this hogwash that's being used to swill away the central point - that the political actions of these men interferes directly and constantly with the private lives of others - well, George and I would be pretty much fucked out by now. Good night, George.

The worst offenders are, guess who? That's right, Italy's gay organisations. I won't list them here - they aren't worth it - but to hear them talk about the outing of homophobic legislators as though children were being thrown to the lions is the most sickening thing of all. Whose rights are they supposed to be protecting? The rights of men who deprive me of my rights? Of course people have a right not to come out, if they think it might harm them, sad though this is - I'd be the last person, for example, to defend a list of gay footballers (much as I'd like to see it). But that right simply doesn't exist when those same people, for the lowest and most squalid of of motives, use their power to cancel the basic human rights of others. The squirming sanctimonious behaviour of Italy's gay spokespersons as they fall over themselves to defend the hypocrisy of their masters is further proof that Italy remains a profoundly authoritarian country, terrified of raising its voice against the powerful, constantly in search of a crumb from the table, grubbing for scraps of advancement, ultimately behaving itself because it's only through submission to the dominant culture that privileges can be won. It's a lickspittle reaction and the people who represent the public face of gay Italy should be ashamed of themselves.

There are, thank God, exceptions. For those of you read Italian, here's a piece by Aldo Busi.

Words

If I had a thousand pounds for every time I've heard people complain that the use of the word 'gay' to describe what these same people tend to refer to as the 'homosexual life style' had deprived them of the only word available in the English language to talk about the really important things in life, like, oh I don't know, party lights, streamers, summer dresses, just general joy and loveliness, I still wouldn't have enough money to wrest the term 'tea party' back from the misinformed bigots who seriously believe their pathological state of unreason to be 'political'. This thought came to me as I sliced into a rather good cake earlier today and wished that I had a few good friends with me to share it. A tea party, I thought, how nice. How nice that would be.

The Slaughteryard

Assuming you know nothing of the work of the nineteenth century Argentine writer Esteban Echeverria, you can approach this book, one of the Friday Project’s Library of Lost Books, in two ways. The first is to cut to the chase and read the beating and rather bloody heart of it, the long short story, entitled The Slaughteryard, a vivid, in many ways chilling, account of a cattle butchering and its disturbing aftermath in one of the four slaughter yards of Buenos Aires during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It’s a powerful, and memorable, tale, packed with information and colour, observation and, above all, political indictment. Translated with enormous vigour by erstwhile Borges collaborator and translator, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, and Susan Ashe, it provides an insight into a world that’s both recognisably modern and tantalisingly ‘other’, which is just what you’d expect from a classic ‘lost book’.

If you stop at the story, you’ll already have had value for money. If you decide to read the rest of the book as well, you’ll come away not only wiser, but also irresistibly entertained. It’s packed with gems: historical details about slaughtering methods, the use of the lasso, and, more worryingly, the mazorca (you’ll have to read the glossary to find out why this should be worrying, but Edward II might provide a hint), the practice known as the slippery dance, the other, less musical meaning of the violin y violon; and, underlying all this, the tragic oppression of one faction by another, in a Swiftian parody of political schism and reversal that, as these things tend to do, resulted in the deaths and torture of thousands. On top of this, you’ll have contemporary accounts of butchery in Buenos Aires by the famous, such as Darwin, and other less well-known travellers, such as a certain Major Alexander Gillespie, according to whom “negroes [...] have generally a predilection for food very salt, and even tainted”.

The book as a whole, in other words, not only introduces and contextualises one of South America's greatest stories, but delights on its own terms. I recommend it.

Recycling

The town I live in, Fondi, has a brand new town council. Well, not quite brand new. The freshly elected mayor (with over 55% of the vote) is a Mr De Meo - you may remember him from the election material I posted some time ago; he's the one with the unnaturally blue eyes, bald head and air of enthusiastic idiocy, as though he'd like to take your children's toys and smash them to bits with a hammer. This might be his first shot at mayoralty, but he's not exactly unused to the corridors of Fondano power: he was responsible for town planning under the previous council, the one that resigned before the government got round to dismissing it for mafia infiltration. De Meo, not surprisingly, appears as a suspect in the accusatory documents - town planning is mafia shorthand for one of those magical pots of gold - you know the kind: the more you take out of them the more there's left to take. He's not alone either. Eleven of the new department chiefs in the new council, responsible for all kinds of lucrative civil activities, have simply been recycled from the previous one, as though re-election had the same kind of cleansing qualities as full confession (and, who knows, perhaps it does). The photograph above is of my local bins, which also preach recycling but don't seem to know quite how it's done.

Vatican update!

The Vatican has been having a bit of a rough time these past few days. News arrives from Poland that the 'miracle' needed to sanctify GP2 smells a bit fishy, news that has been roundly denied by B16. In 2006, it was claimed that the wandering Pole had cured a French nun of Parkinson's disease, described by GP2 as 'another sign of God's creativity'. Now it looks as though the nun might not even have had Parkinson's disease, suggesting that the creative one isn't God, but his earthly representatives. They'll have to fish around in the tub of other purported wonder cures to see what they can find. Maybe evangelist Benny Hinn has one he can spare, when he's finished talking to his divorce lawyers and counting his money.

As if this wasn't enough, tapes have just been published of conversations in which a Vatican chorister (correction: ex-Vatican chorister), a certain Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, known to his friends as 'Mike', has been pimping men at the rate of two or three a week for Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of his Holiness (correction: ex-Gentleman of his Holiness), known to his friends as 'Brenda', and deeply implicated in the latest wave of corruption scandals to fail to rock Italy*. Balducci's tastes are eclectic. Among the men that seem to have been procured by Ehiem are two black Cubans, a RAI dancer and a professional footballer, not to mention assorted seminarians. Still, he doesn't seem that easy a man to please. Ehiem's sidekick, Lorenzo Renzi, apparently told one of the lucky hookers to take the Viagra and not to touch the Gentleman's (correction: ex-Gentleman's) balls. Fussy! In a possibly related item, the Ratisbonne boys' choir appears to have been a hotbed of under-age sexual abuse under the direction of B16's brother, Georg, who ran the show from 1964 to 1993. Now why does the name Georg ring a bell?

And there's no cake without a small and delectable fruit perched on the top. In this case, the cherry is the news that money squirrelled away by Diego Anemone, one of the leading figures in the Italian Civil Protection corruption scandal and currently enjoying the comforts of a cell not that far from Balducci's, has been found in the safe of don Evaldo Biasini. (That's don as in catholic priest, not mafioso. I know, I know...) Something like a million euros was hidden behind a religious painting in the office of the priest, who just happens to be responsible for the financial affairs of an organization called the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Ever-so Precious Blood of Jesus. Where do I start?

* One of these facts about Balducci isn't true. Guess which!

Fuck off, Binetti

Good news for all those people, like me, who know that the best way of getting rid of Berlusconi is to concentrate votes on the Partito Democratico (PD), but just can't stomach it while Paola Binetti, fundamentalist catholic and - alas - member of the Italian senate, is a PD member. Well, she's gone. That's right, gone. After announcing her opposition to the candidate chosen by the PD for the regional elections in Lazio, Emma Bonino, she's taken her obscurantism and intolerance where it belongs, to the UdC, a party I can't bring myself to describe after a decent lunch. She ought to be a lot more comfortable there. Among her new chums is Rocco "Buttplug" Buttiglione, an orang-utan lookalike and self-styled catholic philosopher, who was forced to resign from his role as EU commissioner some years ago after making a homophobic speech, and then whined about freedom of expression and ungodliness until he was fobbed off with another sinecure. He was working for Berlusconi at the time, without any noticeable spiritual unease, whore-mongers presumably being less disturbing to the soul than the idea of civil partnerships.

Binetti has made a number of previous appearances on this blog. You can find one of them here, along with a picture of her favourite item of jewellery. And while I was looking for a picture to grace this post (and found the one to the right, where the senator is caught discussing that specific item), I came across Binetti's blog. As you can see, it was rather short-lived, withering away after only four posts. I wonder if the little poll she ran (see right, beneath the profile link) discouraged her. She asked her readers if they wanted the law permitting abortion in Italy to be 'modified' (theodem newspeak for 'revoked'). Of the 26 people who bothered to vote, 84% said no. That's the trouble with the internet; it's just too bloody democratic.

Personality politics

Local elections are coming up in Fondi and the walls of the town are plastered with advertising for the candidates for town mayor. They tend to appear in pairs, like teenage girls on a first night out. They use as few words as possible and prefer those words to have purely feel-good value. The bald man on the top right, for example, is saying yes to transparency. Beneath him the woman with the pleasant smile is suggesting that we start again, though to do what isn't specified. The man with the glasses on the bottom left is saying yes, you can, which is very generous of him, although, once again, I wasn't aware that his permission was needed. The girls on the top left have nothing at all to do with Fondi, or politics for that matter, but I felt like including them, if only to contrast their very focused plea with the vote-catching vacuity of the mayoral candidates around them.

What's even worse is that, in their frenzy to attract the punter, these mayoral candidates haven't seen fit to indicate their political allegiances. Where do they stand on all that other duller stuff, like job opportunities and how local money is spent and, sorry though I am to bring this up, the role of organised crime in local government? I mean, I'm all in favour of transparency, but not if it's the transparency of De Meo's spiritual father, Saint Silvio of Berlusconi. And knowing that yes, I can might make me feel empowered at the outset, but it starts to lose its appeal if the person enabling me thinks money-laundering, or illegal parking, or building a villa on public land, are some of the things I'm empowered to do.

I think I'll vote for the Faith Tones. They not only have fabulous hair - I know where they stand.

Fear and loathing in Empoli

This sign, which forbids entry to all Chinese who don't speak Italian, can be found* in the window of a clothes shop in Empoli, near Florence. In an Italy that seems to have woken up and found itself racist and can't quite work out why, this looks like just one small tile in an increasingly large and ugly mosaic, if that isn't too colourful a term for the phenomenon. But there's an interesting and, to my mind at least, partly mitigating, story behind the sign. The owner of the shop, Gino Pacilli, says that he's sick and tired of Chinese customers coming into the shop, examining the way the clothes are made, trying them on, refusing to speak Italian when he asks them if he can help, leaving without buying or saying Grazie. He claims that they're simply checking out the competition and looking for items they can profitably make copies of, undercutting the legit producers from whom he buys his stock (almost certainly made in China). It's certainly true that there's a massive presence of Chinese sweatshops, invariably both illegal and exploitative, producing clothes in the Florence area, and that the Chinese community is the least interested of all ethnic communities in integration, to the point of concealing its birth and death rates from the local authorities so that documents can be recycled (Chinese immigrants to Italy rarely die, in official terms at least). So, while there's no doubt that the sign is ostensibly racist, there's also a sort of exasperation and anxiety behind it that shades the issue grey, just as the Rosarno riots two weeks ago were shaded grey by the social context in which they took place, the presence of organised crime, the absence of the state, and so on - a presence and absence from which both local people and immigrants suffered on a daily basis, and in which they were all, without exception, complicit. In this type of situation, blanket accusations of racism may be as compromised, and ineffective, as the racism they're attacking. In the meantime, Pacilli says that no more Chinese customers have entered his shop - a sure sign that they do in fact read Italian. If that were the case, of course, they could enter with impunity. But whoever said fear and its consequences were logical?

* The sign has now been taken down and Pacilli has apologised to the Chinese community about any offence he might have caused. Which solves precisely nothing.

Man meets small spiky object. Object wins.

Berlusconi's bloodied nose is already an exquisitely political space, populated on the one hand by those who see the Capo's body as sanctified ground and therefore untouchable (i.e. his supporters) and on the other hand by those who see his body as sanctified ground and therefore untouchable (i.e. the opposition). Of course no politician is going to say that small spiky objects should be thrown at one of the caste, and I don't expect them to. But it really shouldn't be that difficult to point out - as so far only two politicians have done - that Berlusconi has devoted the last 25 years of his life to painting his opponents as evil baby-boiling communists, a violence that has been greeted with a Jane-Austenesque meekness by a series of opposition leaders, most notably Walter Veltroni, the man who adopted spinelessness as an ideological stance and lost the last election as a result.

As a man of the 20th century, Berlusconi, and his advisers, know full well that violence can be instigated through the kind of name-calling populism he's based his political career on, and Piazzale Loreto - not to speak of a certain Romanian balcony - is proof that it can, and usually does, backfire on the instigator. And it's odd that, during the act of Berlusconi worship performed by yesterday's main news TG1, no one saw fit to mention the fact that half an hour earlier in Piazza del Duomo he'd been screaming Shame! Shame! to a bunch of hecklers, whipping himself, and his relatively modest audience, into a frenzy of hatred. Chi di spada ferisce, di spada perisce, as they say in Italy.

The two politicians are Antonio Di Pietro (Italia dei Valori) and Rosy Bindi (Partitio Democratico), and I take my hat off to them both. And if a small plaster model of the Colosseum bounced off the head of Daniele Capezzone one of these days I wouldn't be the least bit upset. (How's that for instigating violence?)

Love came down

Are you enjoying the latest cat-fight as much as I am? I'm talking about the one between the Vatican and the Northern League, after Roberto Calderoli, minister for simplification (and they don't come much simpler than Calderoli) criticised Milan's Cardinal Tettamanzi. Tettamanzi upset Calderoli by suggesting that in God's sight all men were equal, or something equally inflammatory, and forgot to add that obviously he wasn't referring to those born outside the mythical state of Padania, where men are men and have tigers in their garden, not to speak of she-bears and the odd wild pig. Calderoli's the man on the left. He's the man who took off his shirt on TV to reveal an anti-Islamic tee-shirt and then ran crying to Mummy when the Muslim world reacted badly, the way bullies always do when their bluff is called. He says that it isn't the job of priests to 'be political'. You know, the old 'Give to Caesar' line.Which didn't stop the Lega drawing on the Vatican's persuasive powers when it came to throwing out the idea of living wills in this country, or getting on its high horse about 'Christian traditional values' when the EU told Italy to take its crucifixes out of the classroom. Well, Roberto, one of those traditional values you hold so dear is hospitality to strangers, not clubbing them over the head and deporting them to Libya. Christianity isn't just for Christmas, Caldy. And I don't just mean White Christmas.

Mind you, Tettamanzi's words would ring a little truer if the Vatican bank weren't under investigation for money laundering.

Punished for good behaviour

If you're in Rome on 5 December you might like to take part in No-Berlusconi Day, the product of a viral campaign to eject the Buffoon from power before he does any more damage. Don't be put off (or encouraged?) by the fact that the demonstration is now being referred to, rather unfortunately, as nobday. It looks as though it's going to be a big event, although I detect a certain indignation fatigue setting in among people who, three years ago, would have happily ripped down the walls of Villa Certosa with their teeth and nails. Indifference, even if feigned, is both a pretty extraordinary way to react as things go from bad to worse and, at the same time, explicable precisely because of the decline from malgovernance to mafia that we're witnessing at the moment. It's a long story and others can - and will - tell it better than I can, but it's emerging from confessions made by mafiosi pentiti (grasses) that a series of terrorist attacks in Rome and Florence may have been instigated by two politicians - Marcello Dell'Utri (looking cultured in photo), B's right-hand man and already convicted of collusion with the mafia, and the Buffoon himself. They had political reasons for this and it doesn't take too fine a mind to work out what these might have been. But nothing comes without its price, and it appears that Berlusconi has been less than loyal to his old friends. A series of laws should have been revoked or modified to give the mafia more wiggle room. This hasn't happened, for reasons that we can only imagine. But it's ironic that the shit should hit the fan because Berlusconi has failed to keep his promise to the world of organised crime. The fact that the pentiti are now spilling beans to magistrates with what seems to be the approval of Cosa Nostra can only mean that it's in the interest of the latter to shaft their old comrade-in-arms. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, as the proverb has it. Which is rather a pity, because Berlusconi is getting more and more heated by the day.

Not very well known people in important places

A lovely piece of self-fulfilling reporting yesterday on RAI One's evening news. They were talking about the appointments made by the EU for president and foreign minister. After telling us that neither Tony Blair nor the Italian candidate for foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema, had been selected (for which relief, much thanks), they showed a brief clip of Cathy Ashton going about her business in a smiling and competent manner, followed by a photograph of the new EU president, Herman Van Rompuy. Not much is known about him, they said. You'd have thought this was the cue to tell us a little more about him, other than that he's Belgian, but you'd have been wrong. They had other, more important fish to fry than sole à l'Ostendaise (a Belgian speciality, if you were wondering).

To slightly redress the balance, here's a photograph of them both. Van Rompuy is the one in the coordinated blue shirt and tie (a Top Man deal) in the front row, staring ahead and obviously concentrating on raising his European profile, while the great and good of the continent think about their own affairs all round him. Berlusconi doesn't appear to be present, although judging from the 'Not now, Silvio' look on Ashton's face and Sarkozy's widely spread hands I suspect he's behaving badly just off-camera.

Shame

This cleverly designed bag with the handy noose-shaped handle might be the closest we'll ever get to seeing justice done in Italy. It's the old story. You've read it here on this blog a tedious number of times and pretty much anywhere else that's talked about Italy in the past twenty years. It's the one that begins: 'In any normal western democracy...' and then goes on to describe the latest exploits of a governing class that has never quite grasped the concepts of shame or accountability (in other words, the guardian angels of any democracy worth its name). It was bad enough under the Christian Democrats, who regarded the electorate as ignorant and tendentially obedient subjects, cowed by the authority of their masters. These days, under Berlusconi, we're simply tele-customers and it would, indeed, be more than fitting if the tin-pot Duce were to meet his end on the side of a shopping bag. What continues to astonish, though, is the extent to which shame has been excised from the body politic. You probably remember that Berlusconi's most recent attempt to wriggle out of the various court cases in which he's the accused was blocked by the supreme court a couple of weeks ago. But a couple ofweeks is all it takes to come up with a new solution. This time a bill has been proposed which exempts all ex-cruiseship crooners with hair transplants from prosecution, as long as their surnames begin with B. I'm joking, of course, but only just. It might have been better if such a law had been proposed. It's obvious that Berlusconi will never serve a day in jail, so legislation which really is ad personam might be the simplest option, howwever hard it is to swallow. Because the worrying consequences of this new proposal are that the putative prison doors will be flung open not only for our wily hero, but for all other kinds of equally serious evildoers, who will simply walk away scot-free and ready to re-offend, secure in the knowledge that they'll almost certainly walk free again, however many people they rip off. These are white-collar criminals, which means they're up there with Bernard Madoff, destroying lives while feathering already gilded nests. In my wilder days, I'd have called them filthy capitalist scum, and, guess what, those words still work for me. These people will be practically guaranteed immunity under the new law, which imposes time limits on trials. The more complicated the trial - and financial crimes are necessarily complicated - the less likely it is to be concluded within the time allotted. Oh yes, illegal immigrants, while fulfilling all the conditions of the measure, whose presence in this country is not a crime but an infraction, will nonetheless not be able to benefit from the law. The banker who squirrels away the savings of a thousand pensioners, in other words, will emerge unscathed. The Filipino woman who wipes their arses will find herself doing time. This, you won't be surprised to hear, is a sop to the Northern League, which tolerates, indeed encourages, large-scale business malpractice but doesn't like black faces cluttering up its super-sized shopping malls.

They know no shame

As you may already know, Berlusconi brought down the Prodi government a couple of years ago by purchasing the support, if not affection (i.e. they fucked but refused to kiss), of several senators. One of the first to slide his bum across the polished benches of the senate was a human blowfish of no discernible talent called Sergio De Gregorio, who received a tidy sum almost immediately. The last, and most clamorous, example of ideology bowing to the siren call of cash was the defection of minister of justice Clemente Mastella (you can see what I thought about all this at the time by clicking here). His name was mud for a few months, but he received his reward at the last European elections and now represents the Great One's party in Brussels, where he's recently had the indecency to complain about the crap expenses budget. No moats for Mastella, apparently - hard for a man who's lined his nest and his extended family's various nests with government lolly for the past thirty years.

Still, yesterday was a good day, in a schadenfreudery sort of way, because both De Gregorio and Mastella found themselves, bluntly, in the shit. De Gregorio was threatened with arrest for a small matter of money-laundering. Mastella, and his wife, popularly known as Lady Mastella and the president of the region of Campania, on the other hand, are under investigation for fraud, tender-fixing, distributing favours in return for votes, creaming off the customary percentages, corruption. There's a subtle whiff of Mafia about the whole affair, so it's all pretty much run of the mill. Lord and Lady Mastella, needless to say, deny everything. Well, they would, wouldn't they? as a call-girl in a more gallant age once told a judge. The cherry on the cake is that Lady Mastella has actually been denied the right to reside in Campania and six bordering provinces, including, I'm delighted to say, my own. Her world, she says, has collapsed about her. Oh good.

Sniff, sniff

First item on the lunchtime news programme on RAI 1 today was a hurriedly organised photo opportunity for Berlusconi and Benedict 16 at Rome's second airport. B16 said it was a 'joy' to see Berlusconi, who responded with a cheesy grin and a comment about 'racing through the air' to greet the befrocked one, as though he'd flown there under his own steam, and not in a ruinously polluting plane of the kind he normally uses to shift his harem from one villa to the next. You'd have expected B16 to follow up this greeting with a few words on his latest edict (the word bull comes to mind, although it isn't immediately associated with papal), the one about the havoc wreaked on children by divorce and extended families. I'd have thought that a fair amount of havoc had been wreaked on children by catholic priests, but that's by the by. Still, there he was, the supreme head of the catholic church and noted theologian, tête a tête with a head of state, a divorced man who's about to be divorced by his second wife for consorting with minors, a man with a family so extended its limits remain unknown, a man who apparently phoned his pimp in Bari at least ten times a day before said pimp hit fan. Which moral figurehead would miss a chance like that to set a poor erring sinner on the straight and narrow? Well, B16 for one.

They talked about the credit crunch.

Shut yo' mouth, Part Three

Last Tuesday evening, prime time television on the main state channel (RAI 1) was devoted to Silvio Berlusconi,as regular readers of this blog will know. Alternatives to Berlusconi - with the exception of football on Sky - were cancelled or postponed, presumably to avoid our being distracted by more enticing but less healthful products. Ballarò, for example, a current affairs programme on RAI 3, was shifted to Thursday. Matrix, on one of SB's channels, was simply gagged, because no explanation was owed to anyone except the shareholders, most of whom are family members. I didn't watch the PM's show, ostensibly intended to celebrate the success of the government's rebuilding programme to house the victims of the earthquake in Abruzzo earlier this year. I say ostensibly, because what it actually showed was four families being rehoused in prefabricated structures paid for and built by a single Italian region, without government assistance. But let's not be picky. SB chose the plates, and filled the fridges - don't ask with what - and later made use of the opportunity provided so generously by the RAI to insult his opponents - journalists, magistrates, foreigners, the opposition - with remarkable vigour for a man of his age, as though rage at the impertinence of the subject world were a sort of moral Viagra.

The same old stuff? The usual depressing start-of-regime lament? Not this time. Because Berlusconi, the star attraction, drew a mere 13.5% of the viewing public, while Ballarò, two days later, had an audience of just under 19%. That's a difference in real terms of almost one million people. For someone who prides himself on his gifts as a communicator, this is very bad news indeed. For everyone else it's enough to make us get ready to dance in the streets.

Go to jail. Or not.

As a sop to the thirsty for blood electorate of the Northern League, who seem to regard anyone born south of Florence as, in the words of their noble leader Umberto Bossi, bingo bongo, the Italian government recently voted in a law that severely restricts immigration into Italy and establishes that anyone who manages nonetheless to enter the country will not simply be sent home, as was the case before the new law, but will be treated as a criminal and imprisoned. Italy's prisons were lightened of a small part of their human load by a much-criticised amnesty during the previous government, but have recently been identified - by the minister of the interior, no less - as among the most overcrowded in Europe. Still, joined-up thinking isn't necessarily integral to government, particularly when one of its components is run by a rabble-rousing zenophobe (pictured above with his intellectually challenged son, or dauphin, Renzo, as they audition for a deodorant commercial).

The problem, though, was that an awful lot of the illegal immigrants already in Italy weren't hanging around street corners selling hard drugs to children. They weren't, hard though this may be to believe, involved in prostitution or organ trafficking. I know, I know, I read the papers too, but you'll have to take my word on this. Many of them were picking tomatoes in inhuman temperatures, or making designer handbags in sweatshops, or building second houses on stretches of protected coastline. They were actually quite useful. But no, despite Italy's need for tomatoes and homes, and, er, handbags, the government stood firm. Do not pass Go, it said. Do not collect £200. Go to jail.

Unfortunately, and it didn't take people long to realise this, an even larger number of illegal immigrants weren't working in factories, or cellars, or acres of improvised greenhouses. They were living in Italy's cities, in residential areas, in some cases surrounded by Italian families. They were known as colf (short for collaboratori familiari) and badanti (carers). They were cleaning floors and toilets, and looking after babies, and wiping the chins and arses of grandparents whose children didn't have the time or energy to do it themselves; who could afford to employ someone else to do it for them. They were doing - in other words - all the dirty stuff that Italian people - including their representatives in government, on both sides of the spectrum - didn't want to do. Suddenly, the need to rid Italy of these parasitical delinquents didn't feel quite so urgent.

Hey presto! Amnesty for colf and badanti. Out of all the illegal workers in Italy, these two categories have been saved from the law. Out of all the illegal workplaces, the 'family' home has been singled out as having the only legitimate need for foreign labour. What's extrordinary about this is that the decision to operate such an amnesty has created an ulterior racism within an already profoundly racist piece of legislation. It's extracted one category from the mass of people affected by the law and decided that their work has, not more value than the others, but less; that their work is just so degrading no Italian could be expected to do it. With one stroke of the pen, it's institutionalised a domestic servant class in the country. What it says is that if you're an African and want to work in a factory or a field, you can fuck off because, officially at least, we don't need you. But if you want to mop shit from a floor, step right up, because no way am I, a white European (naturally, from Florence up), going to stoop to do it. That's quite a message. I wonder if Berlusconi made it clear to Gheddafi during his recent visit to Libya to discuss 'immigration issues' that the only welcome Libyans, apart from those bearing oil, are the ones who are prepared to nurse the old and infirm to death. Or were they too busy exchanging camels for skirt?

Shut yo' mouth, Part Two

Silvio Berlusconi has just taken the extraordinary step of suing Repubblica on the grounds that the ten questions the newspaper has been asking him (click to embiggen above or see here) since the Papi-and-Noemi shit hit the fan last February are 'diffamatory'. His argument, or that of his weasel-faced legal adviser, Ghedini, is that the questions are 'rhetorical' and designed 'not to obtain a response' from Berlusconi but to 'insinuate in the reader the idea that the person "interrogated" refuses to respond'.

This is the kind of casuistical horseshit lawyers are paid to produce - it ought to be clear to anyone that Berlusconi's refusal to respond is not an 'idea' but a fact - so we shouldn't be surprised. What is surprising is that Berlusconi should have chosen to kick up a legal fuss now, with Repubblica beginning to feel more and more like a voice in the wildnerness here, the RAI increasingly weakened by external and self-censorship and personnel changes, and his own house rags ever more virulently on the attack, slavering and snarling like cornered rats.

The last straw appears to have been a recent piece in which a number of articles from highly-regarded foreign newspapers are quoted, describing the man as a sex-dependent tin-pot dictator in the claws of the Russian mafia. SB, who continues to insist that he has brought nothing but lustre to the image of Italy abroad, a claim that would be laughable if it weren't so readily believed and repeated here in Italy, seems to have decided to try and clamp down on the right of Italian journalists to refer to the work of their colleagues in other countries, isolating the country even more.

In the meantime, the Viagra-riddled geriatric's plans to get a little Vatican cred by dining with some cardinal or other amid the rubble of L'Aquila have been blown away, possibly by Bossi's recent attacks on the Church, guilty of taking a soft line on immigration (!) and attacks on the Vatican-controlled publication Avvenire by the Berlusconi-controlled rag magazine Il Giornale. Let them fight it out among themselves, say I.

Ownership

I was party to a fascinating, albeit inadvertent social experiment a couple of evenings ago. We were still in Fondi, floored by the sweltering heat of the past month or so. Even our house, which has yard-thick walls and traditionally poky windows, had given up any pretence of keeping us cool. It felt like the only place you could breathe in the entire town was in the alley outside Maika's house, which somehow catches whatever faint breeze there is. Maika noticed this a couple of weeks ago and decided to take advantage of it by putting a small table and a chair or two outside. The alley's a dead end, just wide enough to get a car into, with a gate half-way down it. It's inhabited by local people, holiday-makers from Naples, an Indian family with their newborn baby.

It's not unknown for people to spill out of their houses into the street, although they tend to take the furniture back in when they're finished. Maika, though, left the table, covered with a cheery trattoria-style check tablecloth, outside from one day to the next. When she was there, she used it. What was interesting, and immensely cheering, was that when she wasn't there, other people did. The Indian woman brought her little boy and new baby out to sit there during the afternoon, when Maika was at the beach. A bunch of women from a flat at the end began to gather round it later on. One night, Maika came home from dinner out in the early hours of the morning and found a bunch of men playing cards round it. She asked them to make sure to leave the ashtray clean and went to bed.

What had happened was that Maika, by invading a public space, had created community. The first instinct is to consider this 'Neapolitan', this casual disregard for the public-private boundary, and that's certainly what it looked like, some scene from a De Sica film of the 50s. But the boundary in Naples, paradoxically, tends to be reinforced by this kind of thing, to favour the occupation of public by private, as though the two were inimical, as though what's ours is suddenly yours, or his, no longer shared at all.

What Maika's done, because it's in her nature, is to open that up, to allow the edge between private and public to be blurred into near invisibility, so that everyone has a sense of ownership, a respectful, even delicate, promiscuity, a sharing. It's only a folding table, a couple of chairs, a tablecloth, an ashtray. It could be anywhere. But it felt unique. People who wanted to get by as we ate our dinner waited while we moved our chairs. We were happy to put down our glasses, and stand, and smile at the baby, and moan about the heat. Nobody minded, or complained. I wouldn't have believed this tiny provisional utopia could exist if I hadn't experienced it myself.

The right of the strongest

There's a typically Italian kerfuffle going on here at the moment about the authorisation of Ru486, the pill that induces abortion. It's used pretty much everywhere in the developed world, but Italy's taken its time about saying yes, for obvious reasons. It's a political issue here (yawn), which is what women tend to become when their bodies,and their right to make decisions about them, are involved. I'd call the issue ideological but that gives too much weight to the knee-jerkiness of most of the reactions here, in the world of opinion-makers, inside and outside the Vatican, if such a space as 'outside the Vatican' exists in Italy in anything but the most virtual sense (i.e blogs). Because it isn't ideological at all; it's a question of who swings what, and where. It's party lines and party funding and who gives a flying fuck about individual women and their complicated individual lives?

For some people, for example, doctors and cardinals and their various acolytes and dependents (politicians), the use of the pill 'banalizes' abortion. At this point, it might not be a bad idea to cut the crap and introduce the proviso that legal abortion is available as long as it's accompanied by a public flogging and a rather severe haircut. That way the woman won't regard it as 'banal', and will presumably think twice before having sex. Because naturally, before having sex, she'll take into account the fact that she might be able to avoid a surgical procedure and replace it with a slightly less invasive sort of medication. Good God, who wouldn't risk it, knowing that? I'm surprised Papi Silvio doesn't slip a pill into the bustarella he gives the whores he entertains in his many villas. Banal, schmanal, as long as she doesn't do a paternity suit. The chance, as they say, would be a fine thing, despite Berlusconi's latest crack that he may not be a saint, but he fucks like a god. (Yes, this is the Italian premier speaking...)

But my favourite is the comment made by Bagnasco. He's the cardinal who took over from God's ferret a couple of years ago in a PR attempt to soften the rigour of the Prada-clad One, who is currently nursing his over-stressed wrist somewhere comfortable. In the photograph above, he's the one in the red sash sucking up to the boss, in white. They're quite a picture, surounded by all that sombre but not unsexy black. These colours wouldn't matter, but they have a hierarchical significance, rather like judo. And that's what makes me laugh about Bagnasco. His reaction to the decision to allow the use of the pill was to express his bitterness that it endorsed 'the right of the strongest'. Coming from a democrat this just might have had some weight. It's certainly true that a pregnant woman is 'stronger' than a foetus, if only because she's a reasoning autonomous being and not a mere cluster of cells. Coming from a man at the highest ranks of a rigidly hierarchical structure that regards all women within its bounds as lesser beings, deprived of decision-making power and doctrinal choice, a structure that will do all it can to reduce women outside its bounds, who don't even share its faith, to the same level, as unspeaking, unquestioning vessels of God's word and man's seed, it's no longer laughable. It's obscene.