Guns Controlled Ltd.

We all know the facts about the killing at the school of Newtown, Connecticut, on December 15. We also know a lot about the perpetrator's background and conditions. There is little to add. Many responded advocating stricter gun control and I am among them. Strong limitations to purchase firearms would get my unconditional support. Furthermore, industries that constantly foster suspicion and hostility simply to sell more weapons should be brought to shame. Tom Diaz, senior analyst at the Violence Policy Center and author of the book Making a Killing: the Business of Guns in America gave an illuminating interview to NPR about how the NRA has been dangerously fomenting violence and xenofobia simply to support the gun industry. However, I am not convinced that so many killings are due only to gun ownership. Canada has more guns and far less killings, I am told. It is time to consider other factors.

A different topic can help understanding my point. I learnt about the existence of date rape in my early thirties, when I started teaching in this country. One of my students was the unfortunate victim of it. She was devastated. Horrible, I thought, horrible and senseless. However painful, I found it necessary to contain my sense of revulsion and appeal to clear critical thinking. On the one hand, I thought, why spoil a whole evening of good company and prevent any future relationship, of whichever kind, with an act of violence? On the other hand, if the ultimate purpose is to be obtained even by violence, why hours after hours of hypocrisy?

While looking for an answer, my mind went back to my high school and college days. We had our own flirts and passions, of course; but a night out would have never degenerated into rape. Our girlfriends were also our best friends, our schoolmates, the sisters of other friends, the daughters of families we had been knowing for years... They were a huge part of our personal lives, of our happy or awkward encounters, laughter, cries, conversations, silences. They had nothing to do with...

Then came the operational word: countable results.  This American life is extremely goal-oriented. We live to work, to keep the machine moving even if nothing comes out of it (or at least nothing bringing any advantage to us). The first American students I met in Italy, in summer 1985, were attending a university summer program with no particular fondness for it. They did it simply not to have a blank in the CV, which would have looked bad when job hunting. Countable results were to be produced at all costs, health included. They are ends to their own means.

Results are important, but even the highest goal makes no sense, if it makes us forgo our love for life itself, its rites of passages, and, most important, its belonging to the present. Living in the present means recognizing those very people we see out of our windows for the dignity and immediacy we all share in living together as human beings; and for the joy such recognition brings. Is it so illogical? Is it so contrary to our lives' goals? Or should not those goals aim at the ultimate, collective purpose of living better?

The young man responsible for the school killing had already lost his life since long. He did not live, and could not bear that others did--children, especially. We cannot allow ourselves to be deprived of our love for life. But loving life means also (most of all?) feeling empowered to change it, and learning to live together, to share, to be part of a community. The pursuit of happiness entails that either we all partake of it collectively, knowing that our happiness must be part of everyone else's, or it is simply a fake, compulsive smile covering our deepest sense of alienation. President Obama's tears at the children's deaths were sincere, but they risk to be useless if we do not learn to love life by becoming empowered to change it deeply.

Berlusconi: Exercises in Violence

I am starting my blog The International Files (an English-language equivalent of America al bar) by reposting an old piece on Berlusconi and Italy. Given that Mr. B recently announced his possible candidacy for the coming elections in Italy (and that he has now done steady with a girlfriend forty-eight years younger than he) I thought it still might be of interest.

In his recent book on Berlusconi (translated as Mamma mia!) Beppe Severgnini (who, like all journalists, does not want to alienate anyone's sympathies) omits a fundamental feature of the Italian former premier's supporters: they often recur to violence. Giuliano Ferrara, Vittorio Sgarbi, Maurizio Belpietro, Maurizio Gasparri, and all other journalists or members of the Italian parliament in substantial agreement with Mr. B, often talk on to other people, always patronize, and at times vehemently disrespect the rules of civil conversation. I always wondered whether such ways would not be counterproductive; lack of manners usually grants reproach.

In Italy, it is quite the opposite: violence is a major asset. Italians always try to be on the bully's side. The stronger the bully, the better and safer they feel. Once they understand that might makes right, they immediately submit to it, and accept all power as self-legitimating. Whenever Berlusconi makes a fool of himself in international meetings, he obviously does not care for any international audience: it's his supporters at home that will like his idiotic jokes, and suppose that, when it is the time to talk turkey, Mr. B. will eventually be efficient, as much as he was in building his empire. 

Shortsightedness? Tunnel vision? Indeed. Yet... Italy was fascist for twenty years, and switched sides only after three years of war losses, allied bombing, and, probably most important, food cards. Had Mussolini not decided to intervene in the war, Fascism would have lasted at least some twenty years longer; it did in Spain and in Portugal, after all. 

Giorgio Gaber said that he was not afraid for Berlusconi, but for what he represented for the Italian nation, for the kernel of Berlusconianism that, according to him (and to Severgnini), all Italians have. I admit I do not have one ounce of it, and I have worked so that Mr. B could be voted out of power. But I lost, and he won.

An escort declares: "Women would walk all their way to Arcore to be in front of Berlusconi... Beauty has a price that deserves to be paid." It reminded me of a line in Marco Bellocchio's film Vincere, about Mussolini's supposedly ignored wife Ida Valser, later committed to a mental asylum. One of the nuns-nurses says to her: "You have slept with the man that all women would like as husband and lover: that is enough of a boon." I heard similar words from many Italian good-looking women and, more frequently and indicatively, from their mothers. To a young woman who asked how she could have enough to have a family, Berlusconi replied that she should consider marrying a rich man, possibly his son. The young woman felt disgusted, or so it seemed. I wondered if her mother would have been equally disgusted. (Now an even younger woman seems to be cuddling the old guy, so...)

Italy is a conservative country, Catholic and God-fearing, like Spain and Portugal. In 1929, Pope Pius XI said that Mussolini was sent from God. Many local curates have recently expressed the same judgment about Berlusconi. The post-WWII conservative way to democracy was, in Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana, however internally diversified. The opposition found expression in the arts, about which no one really cared: "Young man, that's only a movie..."

Nowadays the Holy See accepts anything from Mr. B: "He is a sinner, like all of us." Italian conservatives feel relieved, if not forgiven, and have dismissed all moral scruples. Everything is on sale: bodies, souls, promises... The country is theirs, and it will be at least until Italy will be in such dire straits that people will need food cards. Since Italians are currently saving on Christmas gifts to pay their household bills, it might actually happen soon.