This attitude, in part shows a certain arrogance; the people of other countries patting themselves on the back for having such a sane and well run country and for having a group of politicians that would in no way fiddle their expenses or the system. It seems it is still easier to point out someone else’s failing other than your own. It also happily conforms to the stereotype of the disorganized Italians. This is just one example of the lazy pigeonholing of foreigners that almost everyone, to a larger or lesser extent, still tends to do unless they make a conscious effort not to.

If we go back to Italy, lesser-known is that whilst the number of changes in government was undoubtedly high, the Christian Democracy party was the largest single party in the parliament from 1946 to 1994 and many of these changes of government were really reshuffling of coalitions with the same Prime Minister being reappointed immediately. Even less well-known is the fact that the CIA were in part responsible for giving that party a boost and keeping them in power. This was done after the war, much the same as it was in Greece, to stop a communist/socialist alliance becoming elected.

Despite outside meddling, throughout the 50s and 60s the standard of life in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, improved considerably for most people and it was in part due to the gains in this period that now many Italian families, and not necessarily only the well-to-do, have a second home, usually by the beach. The mess that Italy is in now means in fact that many people are trying to sell these second homes, but as everyone is in the same mess they are finding it hard to do so. These second homes are not however a sign of real wealth. So many Italians are now unemployed, underemployed or earning considerably less than the legal minimum wage that another of the stereotypes about Italians living at home with their parents for too long is becoming truer by the day.

Nowadays, the Italy joke has changed and it is difficult to think about Italy without its “crowning turd in the waterpipe”, Silvio Berlusconi. There is baffled incomprehension all round as to just how this man can survive scandal after scandal and still remain in his position.

Financial and political corruption, prostitution, any number of gaffes and yet he is still there. How is it possible?

Well, I have spent some time going back and forth from Italy and it is too easy to say that the answer is to be found in the lazy stereotypes of corruption and incompetence.

If I could compare with the UK for a moment not too long ago there was a megalomaniac PM who believed (or said he believed) that he was on a mission from God, who invaded several other countries, whose party was involved in corruption allegations (Formula 1 money, cash for access, cash for honours etc) and who most people professed to hate. He also consorted with other war criminals. And yet, this man won every election he entered. After the unnecessary and illegal wars and most of the sleaze, people were still voting for him. In part this was due to his cosy relationship with the major media magnates.

In Italy one of the obvious and oft-cited factors in Berlusconi’s survival is the fact that he controls the media of that country. This has been a major factor in his success. As well as owning the major private broadcaster (Mediaset), his government has the power of appointment over the state broadcaster (RAI). Sky were beginning to stick their nose into the market in much the same way they did in the UK, much to the annoyance of the Berlusconi, by buying up the football coverage. However, recent events have meant that Sky has been occupied elsewhere and there is less talk of this now.

Despite controlling most of the media, the coverage isn’t as crude as something like Fox News in the USA. When the Replublicans are in power Fox revert to the role of cheerleader, when it is the Democrats they are vicious watchdogs. In Italy it plays rather differently. The Berlusconi media do not run constant Silvio Our Saviour stuff, even if there are one or two rather crude examples of that. No, instead it is a constant attack on the opposition. This has led to an attitude in many Italians of “Silvio is an embarrassment, but the others are worse”. Although the specifics are different, this attitude is similar to the one that saw Britain’s Tony Blair consistently re-elected.

And in many places he is hated in the way that Blair was. For example, he has consistently talked about building an enormous bridge from the Italian mainland to Sicily. The polls in Sicily have shown that the Sicilians simply do not want this bridge for entirely sensible reasons. They don’t think it is a good idea to build a bridge between two earthquake zones, they would rather the money was spent on the roads, trains and general infrastructure in Sicily, they are proud of their island status, and finally, with things being the way they are in the South of Italy, they are not sure that the thing would be built properly without money being creamed off to some god-knows-where. Consequently, when someone threw a miniature model of the Milan Cathedral at Berlusconi and broke his teeth, the big joke on facebook was “ora un ponte se lo può fare ai denti” (now he can make a bridge for his teeth). There are also daily protests and mini-strikes that mostly pass without mention.

Whilst he is consistently mocked at home, the mockery and derision from the rest of the world towards him has in a certain sense actually helped Berlusconi. Whenever he is attacked on the BBC or in the major news media there is some statement about how this is an attack on Italy and not on him specifically. There was a period of diminishing returns on this strategy but the recent Merkel-Sarkozy affair has allowed for a reinvigoration of this tactic.

Apart from the media, the craven and/or greedy behavior of the opposition parties in Italy has constantly helped him to survive. Parties in his coalition have supported him in confidence votes despite criticizing him in public. In other cases, if one party has jumped ship from the coalition another one has jumped aboard in return for a few promises and therefore kept him alive.

The good news is that, he is on the way out. He will not survive another election. One of the reasons may not be politics or economics but in fact, religion. Much is made of Italy’s Catholic heritage but I am not quite sure how serious the majority of Italians take it. For example, if you go around any city in Italy you will find condom machines in plain sight outside of every chemist, and not short of customers. Divorce is for the most part not considered bad and abortion, while still controversial, is broadly accepted.

Abortion is though, still an important issue for voters and the parties must on some issues be seen to do what their base wants. For example, there was an enormous fuss made when the EU tried to have crucifixes removed from public school classrooms. The Italian government argued that these were a cultural and not a religious manifestation and should, therefore, be allowed to stay in the classroom. Berlusconi has pushed this too far however. The recent sex scandals are for a lot of people less important than the political, legal, and economic mess he has created or at least worsened. But a large part of his base came from voters of the now defunct Christian Democracy party, and they will not vote for him again in the light of these scandals.

Recent polls suggest that a quarter of the Italian electorate still support him but with the economic crisis worsening the last card he can play, “I’m a successful businessman, I understand the economy,” is not going to make win the game.

Who will come after him is the big question and unsettlingly it may well be the Lega Nord. The Lega are a far-right party that also wish for secession from Italy. At their rallies you can see England, Ireland and, unfortunately for me as a leftist independence supporting Scot, Scotland flags being waved. They maintain they have some sort of Celtic heritage. The fact that their politics are absolutely nothing like those being enacted by the Scottish government doesn’t stop some people making another lazy comparison in this, and this is despite the facts that the economic, cultural, political and historical situations are radically different. Also, it is debatable at this point how much of a desire they really show for secession. It is certainly shouted a lot at their rallies but as part of the Berlusconi government they seem to be more about following neocon economics with a shedload of racism thrown in than actual separation.

The left have a lot of work to do and there have been a few false dawns in their regard. Time will tell.

To finish, certain people should stop laughing at the Italians. The normal Italian person is Berlusconi’s victim, not his supporter. Even if he has been more supported in the past than he is now, the world is full of people who consistently vote against their own interests. One doesn’t need to look to far from home to find them.

In the specific case of Berlusconi, if I am in Italy and someone asks me about him then I always say that he is a clown but unfortunately he is not a harmless clown. Before the most recent round of scandals, Slavoj Zizek called him about right:

Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism, Berlusconi’s great achievement has been to reconcile the two, to embody both at the same time … This is perhaps the saddest aspect of his reign: his democracy is a democracy of those who win by default, who rule through cynical demoralization.
…
In today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the bourgeois, [and Berlusconi and the Bourgeouis] openly exploits it as a means to protect his own economic interest, and who parades his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show.

As it happens, when he is gone, which won’t be long, like many of the people who have been kicked out of the Grande Fratello house, it seems he will have the chance to (re)start a music career.

Therefore moments like this are always difficult for me. Should I completely ignore the upcoming royal event and, however minimally, reduce the amount people talk about it, or should I come out swinging and talk about parasites and outdated institutions and so forth?

The ludicrous justifications that are given for maintaining the monarchy when there isn’t an event on the way are well-worn and I don’t want to go through them all here. But there is one that I would like to mention and that is that they “bring in tourists.” This is still continually used. When confronted with it I always point out that France is the country that receives far more tourists than any other. I have heard it said, (I think it was Mark Steel) that it is difficult to imagine many people saying: “Well, I was going to go to France but they don’t have a monarchy so I am not going to go there.”

But back to the event. As someone from a country where the primary source of news is the BBC, then the thing that myself and other like-minded people are dreading the most is the outpouring of sycophancy that goes along with these things. When these things come around, the BBC goes into overdrive in its attempts to pretend, against all evidence, that everyone in the UK is all part of the same big family. The deference and obsequiousness are vomit-inducing, at best.

An American friend recently said to me though, that it was amazing how much interest this was getting. In America? Really? For a second I thought that, for all your faults, you had at least gotten over this problem, and I asked myself why this sudden regression was happening?

But with a little more thought I realised that you haven’t gotten over it all, have you?

You have your own royalty. They are the celebrities that you allow to “walk through the raindrops” whilst they simultaneously p*ss all over you. Millions of Americans live their lives vicariously through the celebrities they wish they could be like, or at least have their money, or their stuff, or their houses or their “don’t give a fuck” attitudes. It doesn’t matter if it is sports stars, heiresses to titles, heiresses to fortunes or actors. It is all the same distraction.

And that is what it is all about at the end. The monarchy still exists because the pageantry provides a distraction from the reality of the difficulties of life. The same goes for celebrity culture.

The final defence of royalty that is usually given is that it is “difficult living your life in the public glare.” I have no doubt that it is. Therefore, why don’t we do the humane thing and make the position redundant and thus relieve them of the burden. We could do the same with celebrities who haven’t actually contributed anything.

I, for one, won’t be mentioning any of this again.

1. My friend told me that he would go with “cause for a contemporaneous lobotomy, disembowelment and popping of the vitreous humours with hot pokers.”

For smaller things there are theories that cosmic rays coming from within and outwith our galaxy are responsible for small changes in DNA code and therefore can alter the evolutionary process.
In a universe this dynamic and changeable it is heartwarming to know there are some things we can hold on to – some things to rely on.

One of those things for me is the near certainty that sooner or later the catholic church will make a bizarre statement which is likely to give me a good laugh.

True to form,

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

He explained that defending God’s creation was not limited to saving the environment, but also about protecting man from self-destruction.

What is particularly comical here is that he has decided to dress this intolerance up with science and sociology — that is doubly bizarre because the church still has an attitude to those subjects that is schizophrenic at best.

He continued,

It is not “out-of-date metaphysics” to “speak of human nature as ‘man’ or woman’”, he told scores of prelates gathered in the Vatican’s sumptuous Clementine Hall.

I don’t think anyone thinks it is out of date to consider that there are two sexes, especially given that human hermaphrodites are relatively rare, so what is he talking about?

“We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way.“

Ahhh. This is classic. “Meant in the right way” — right way according to whom? God, via the catholic church presumably. After all, they still have that infallibility thing — eating fish on Friday was wrong, but now it isn’t. And just ask Galileo who is happily in heaven now after receiving a papal sort-of-pardon — in 1992; they might not be fast but they get there in the end.

The BBC story also pointed out that

The Catholic Church opposes gay marriage. It teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are.

…which is something like a rerun of what they said to Galileo “we aren’t saying you are wrong, you are probably right, but you can’t go around telling anyone that or we will set fire to you.” [I am paraphrasing a little there].

I wonder if this means that they are going to be preaching to the 1,500 animal species that have had their gay behaviour observed? Probably though, we just won’t be able to eat gay animals on a Friday.

I have never had a gay episode in my life. I did once fall asleep in a gay bar in Seoul. I was there with some gay friends and the only thing of note that happened was that I was woken up by the barman an hour later asking if I wanted another drink.

But maybe I have been on the wrong bus all of my life because all of this struck me as a good way for gays to promote their culture.

The human race really doesn’t need more people at the moment. Quite simply, there are far too many of us already. So why not ‘Gay is the new Green’ campaigns. If almost everyone goes gay for 25 years then the population will reduce over time giving us an opportunity to feed, house and water the people already here and the ones to come in the future.

On many occasions the church has exhorted young men to lay down their lives in uniform for the greater good so why not encourage them to lay down their DNA in sequins?

It is an absurdity, but I am deliberately joking. The unfortunate thing is that these buffoons aren’t and this idea is not any less absurd than the next thing they will invent — did I say ‘invent’? Sorry, I obviously meant to say ‘receive by first class post from god himself’.

Fiscal Prudence: this is a nicer way of saying that you are going to cut social security spending. Prudent is a nicer word than mean. Ebenezer Scrooge suggested that he was prudent — not mean.

Special Relationship: The much-lauded “special relationship” between the US and the UK has many facets to it. At its origin, the relationship was that in exchange for bailing Britain out in the First World War, the British would agree to American control over much of the war effort. The arrangement continued during the Second World War, but this time the Americans insisted upon having some permanent bases on UK soil. It is a little known fact that from these bases the Americans can, if they so wish, launch nuclear strikes on other countries from British soil without first consulting the British Prime Minister. This could make Britain the first target for a retaliatory strike even though the British government or people may not have been consulted. Satellites would show that the missile was launched from within the UK. Finally, at this well-developed stage the “special relationship” has reached a new phase: everyone has to do what America tells it to, and the British get the special privilege of pretending they were in on the decision beforehand and can therefore contrive to save face.

Standing Shoulder To Shoulder With: this phrase is traditionally used in joint military ventures. To be “standing shoulder to shoulder” with someone means you are backing them up at a time of crisis. How you can back someone up whilst standing beside him or her remains a mystery.

Open Government: technically this means transparency in government. It is no coincidence that nearly all opposition parties promise some sort of freedom of information bill while in opposition then renege on it or produce an extremely watered down version while in government (see the 1999 UK Freedom Of Information Act and compare it to New Labours original proposal
while in opposition).

Doublethink: George Orwell described doublethink as “the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in ones head and simultaneously believe in both of them”. Therefore you must appear to be sympathetic about lives ruined by poverty and be tough on crime at the same time. You must talk about the evils of despotic governments and yet repatriate people who have escaped
from such regimes and accuse them of being “bogus asylum seekers”. You must be able to attack people in the name of peace, (in fact, as Orwell said, the policy is “war is peace”). Furthermore, you must believe yourself to be following the will of the public and setting an agenda for it simultaneously.

Frank Exchange Of Views: This term is used where participants in a fight wish to hide the fact that they hate each other and wish to make it appear that at least some communication occurred between them. A more violent variation is “Frank, bordering on direct” which means that someone had to mop up the blood afterwards.

Social Exclusion: This is the polite way of saying poverty. It’s a suitably vague political phrase in that is much less of a definite statement to say, “this government has successfully targeted the problem of social exclusion” than it is to say, “this government has successfully targeted poverty”. There is room in the first phrase for more obfuscation. The public can identify poverty but social exclusion is a more difficult concept to define therefore its harder for them to disagree with you in a cogent manner.

Pre-emptive Strike: this is the new term for attacking people who haven’t touched you yet. To put it in a more social setting it is equivalent to going up to a man in a bar and punching him just in case he happens to spill your beer later on.

Preventive War: this means denying everyone but yourself and your friends the chance to even buy a beer.

We Will See How The Situation Develops: we do not have the time, the money, or the inclination to do anything about this at the moment.

Liar/Lying: in the bizarre politics of the early 21st century one of the strangest manifestations in the language is that the one thing that the politicians are trying to outdo each other in is the one thing they aren’t allowed to call each other or accuse each other of (in the UK parliament).

Convention rules that even words such as “untruth” are frowned upon. Due to this some rather strange language has grown up around the subject. Lying has come to be known by such terms as “being economical with the truth”,
“putting an interpretation on events that was at significant variance with the facts”, “terminological inexactitude” (Winston Churchill) or even “making a press statement”.

“I’m glad you asked me that.”: that was the one question I hoped you wouldn’t ask me.

Hearts And Minds: These days we are often told that the battle for “hearts and minds” is more important than the physical battle with weapons. This seems a little confusing — presumably the western armies are hoping to pick
up the pieces of these hearts and minds from the towns and villages where they have blown them up? Any other explanation seems unlikely, as it is difficult to convince people of your good intentions when you are bombing them.

Or perhaps it relates to what Chuck Colson, former aide to Richard Nixon said, “When you’ve got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow”.

European Partners: European enemies

Multiculturalism: respecting the symbols, values and idiosyncrasies of all colors, creeds and religions — provided that is, that they can be co-opted into a neoliberal economic order and packaged in plastic and sold off. If it is not possible to do this then the adherents of whichever ideology it is
must be considered to be “depraved opponents of civilization itself.”

A Constructive Discussion: this means nothing at all. The phrase “a constructive discussion” is only used in circumstances where no agreement of any sort has been reached. We know this because if a solution is reached,
even if its during a conference about the width of traffic cones then it is still called “an historic agreement”

An Historic Agreement: see entry for “A Constructive Discussion.”

Collateral Damage: this means no more or less than dead people. This phrase released many politicians and military people from potentially difficult situations in that it is much easier to say “the operation was a success although we did sustain a small amount of collateral damage” than to say “we bulldozed our way through a civilian area and though we killed a few camel-f*ckers, we did get what we went in there for.”

Weapons of Mass Destruction: do you remember doing French at school? This phrase only applies to “they” not “we” or “I”. It’s like an irregular verb.

- They have weapons of mass destruction
- You are either with us or against us and
- We have strong defensive capabilities,
or if you prefer “we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.”

Strong Government: ignoring everybody else. Thereby when the country doesn’t want to go to war and you do, you can say you are not being bloody minded or a warmonger — it is in fact “strong government.”

We Are Putting The Matter To Consultation: This can mean one of 3 things,

1) We are hoping everyone will forget this unpopular measure we are proposing, and then we can bring it back when the media is concentrating on something else and try and slip it to them that way.
2) We, simply, hope the matter will go away.
3) Employ consultants that you know will agree with your initial hypotheses, and then when they report back you can claim your original policy has been vindicated.