Fifty years have passed, and Italy has shriveled. It has become a country without a state and without a market, dominated by nepotism, lobbying and consortia of all kinds.
Political debate is confused with chatter; the so-called leaders are born, rise and fall like characters in a soap opera. Even culture seems to be spiraling in the same direction, incapable of troubling anyone, prisoner to the expectations of readers and viewers, reduced to an appendage of the algorithms of Netflix and Amazon.
In general, the Movement is no longer moving. Indignation has become privatized. No one talks about caste anymore, and the names of relatives of left-wing politicians can appear in the credits of films without raising any indignant reactions at all.
To the President of the Senate, it seems like a good idea for RAI to buy back the rights that it previously gave to Giovanni Minoli, to the tune of millions of euros or new contracts. Instead, it seems appropriate to him not to acquire the seasons of Servizio Pubblico for free, and not to put those of Annozero online.
If I were to die, censorship would be an aid to forgetting. If Berlusconi were to die, that could accelerate the process of his sanctification.
In the meantime, to be as clear as possible, the PD has favored the reappointment of Mauro Masi, the former RAI general director, to the presidency of Consap, and has brought Cosimo Ferri to Parliament as its deputy. They are the two who plotted to silence my broadcasts. Ferri is the same character who was involved with Palamara in the magistrate scandal, which caused confidence in the justice system to plunge. At the same level as the trust in newspapers and political parties.
The country is at a standstill because of the pandemic. Only the institutions related to the emergency are moving, without any limits and rules to be respected. First we must vaccinate everyone, then we will see if it is the right time to start thinking again.
Civil Protection should be enough—instead, we are full of commissioners and virologists with extraordinary powers outside the purview of the law. Democracy is at a standstill as well. If you are not military, you count for nothing. Are you a civilian public employee? You have to wait for marching orders from Renato Brunetta to find the meaning of your role.
The colonels are coming, and they’re not brandishing guns, but syringes with vaccines.
In my mind, I go back 30 years. To those encounters with Valentino Parlato. He talked to everyone. Even with the enemy. Even with me.
He used to call me “the populist comrade.” With him, you first had to deal with the formalities on the agenda (getting a subscription, buying shares that were worth nothing, giving him €1,000 to keep the publications going), and then you got to spar. I particularly remember the New Year’s Eve of a terrible 1992. For Valentino, the First Republic was a solar system with the planets held together by the force of attraction of Giulio Andreotti alone. “Can’t you see that the setting of the sun is the beginning of the end?”
After the collapse of the Wall, I was full of hope, while il manifesto, of which I never missed an issue, seemed to me to be unable to think beyond the old parties. The great Communist church was going to collapse and we had to hurry to change. I thought doing away with false gods like Berlinguer, freeing ourselves from submission to the hierarchies of democratic centralism, would prompt people to become more secular and to select governments, council presidents and parliamentary representatives with more participation. “Valentino, you didn’t want to die a Christian Democrat and now you’re afraid of the future?”
I was wrong to predict that politics would necessarily come to think in a new way. The parties are done, but the apparatuses are not, and they have teamed up to survive, closing themselves off to the new generations. Like society itself.
After having fought so hard over public referendums, I went to vote, and on the ballot I found Bartolomeo Ciccardini, someone who was against divorce and abortion. The old electoral law that Letta still considers ideal!
What is unbearable is the false self-criticism of the left: “We haven’t looked out for people enough.” What the hell does that mean in concrete terms?
Define “people.” Once upon a time, we knew what a worker was, a farmer or a craftsman or a student, a banker, an entrepreneur, a merchant. Work, social position and income made us different, but it was ideas that united us in a real community.
Today, it is true that we are above all people, or rather individuals who cannot be replicated. But everyone is that, the masters and those under them. And we all represent ourselves on social media as we want to, we create our own stories and personal identity.
So what do you mean when you say you want to look out for me? That I’m some lowlife? That you know me, you know who my friends are and what my dreams are? Frankly, I don’t think a party should be looking out for me. If anything, I’m the one looking in, at the people in it, to find out if they’re anything like me. So let me know what you’re like and I’ll tell you if I’ll give you a like or not, if I share or not. Click.
I am not nostalgic for the years when there were massacres or for the 20 years of Berlusconi. But pain, bloodshed, censorship, were accompanied by great passion and participation.
I know that you have to go through “likes” to rediscover the taste of real life and the pleasure of the fight. The internet is the basis of social consciousness, the factory where each of us is working and is dispossessed of the surplus value that we create.
It would almost take a manifesto to change things.
