"1 The pleasure principle So (over) secure are Italians in their masculinity that they permit themselves to indulge in a little light metrosexuality. There is an underlying Epicurean wisdom here: enjoy your clothing and you enjoy life. What is more, the ladies love it."
2 Investment of intellect The Italian male is not ashamed to put thought into dressing, and to be seen to have done so. He regards the British lack of engagement with such matters as witless.
3 Formality with sprezzatura The word above, like many of the best ones, has no exact English equivalent: in Baldassare Castiglione's 16th-century Book of the Courtier, it is used to denote a certain studied carelessness. Thus, even when both suited and booted, our hero is, as La Scarpa notes: "never rigid, always easy". He wears his clothes, rather than said clothes wearing him."
Berlusconi - the longest Italian ruling politician since Benito Mussolini - is the epitome of a deeper Italian malaise. The manifestation of a cultural and social disease. He would have never been able to rule the country for so long without the full support of more than half of the population. Thus, it's "Italian-ness" itself the real problem, not simply Berlusconi. Berlusconi is just a sympton. The pathology is widespread. The real enemy is "l’Italia alle vongole: the rustic, messy, slippery Italy, akin to the classic pasta with clam sauce, which Berlusconi represents, in all his wily hedonism."
Ariel Levy's recent, outstanding article on Berlusconi clearly and cleverly identifies the real issue at stake. As she reminds us, "Italy also gave birth to Mussolini, Amaretto, and the Mafia" (Levy, 2011).
Here are fifteen reasons why Italy's social, cultural, and ideological problems go way beyond Berlusconi:
1. normalized machismo: "Other Berlusconi enthusiasts in the tent were there not to protect democracy but to defend their vision of the male prerogative. An affable seventy-six-year-old named Michele Lecce, crisply dressed in a light-blue sweater under a navy blazer, explained, “If a woman comes with no clothes on, with her tits showing, you can’t say he has committed violence.” (Levy)
2. the cult of consumerism - succesfully replaced the existing vcalues with the "greed is good" mentality with the aid of television, advertising, and politics: "Lecce, a retired union leader, said he considers Berlusconi “a brilliant man,” adding, wistfully, “If only I had the money he has, I’d be on the top surrounded by beautiful girls. Maybe I’d drop, but it’d be a beautiful way to go!” (Levy)
"Minetti has been so besieged that she fantasizes about leaving the country; she loves New York City, which she visited for the first time last Christmas. “I loved the sales in December!” she said. “I went to Barneys, I went to Bergdorf, and Saks. I bought three Juicy Couture sweat suits.” (Levy)
"After the show, Mora’s driver escorted him back to his car, holding a manila envelope full of cash, his payment for the evening. Mora used a disinfectant wipe to clean the lipstick kisses off his cheeks. “Did you see how people love me?” he said. “I can go with all the most important, famous artists in all the clubs, but people always want their picture taken with me. Most of the time, with a scandal you get much more fame than with hard work.” Mora picked up his envelope. “There is an expression in Italian: not all bad comes from bad.” He shook the money. “All this is thanks to Silvio Berlusconi.” (Levy)
3. normative homophobia: "[Lecce] smiled sweetly and yelled across the street at the demonstrators, “You guys are all gay! We have the men who fuck!” Then he turned to me and said, “I see you are a girl—I want to kiss you!” He pinched my cheek and concluded happily, “This is nature.”" (Levy)
4. nation-wide corruption and deception - nobody expects you to fully comply with the Law. If you do, you are considered "stupid": "Until recently, many Italians forgave Berlusconi’s loose relationship with the truth. In a country that has long been burdened by an almost perverse bureaucracy, there is little contempt for the Artful Dodger; Italians evade paying taxes on a quarter of the economy" (Levy)
5. normative rule-bending: "Berlusconi, who had made a fortune building suburban housing developments, began buying up local stations and broadcasting the same content on all of them. In order to comply with the letter of the court’s ruling, he staggered the broadcasts by a few seconds on each network." (Levy)
6. a-critical acceptance of Americanism: "Italy had a culture of austerity,” he said. “ ‘Rich’ was a dirty word; they didn’t want to create incentives for consumption.” Berlusconi, however, believed that appetites existed to be stoked and sated, and he imported both American entertainment and the advertising environment that supported it. “I’m in favor of everything American before even knowing what it is,” he once told the Times." (Levy)
7. normative mysoginy: "If your only information about female people came from Berlusconi’s channels, you would likely conclude that they exist specifically to be sexually humiliated in public. And yet when Berlusconi won his first election, in 1994, the majority of his votes came from women. He was the richest man in Italy, and he presented himself as the hero who could rescue the country from political chaos." (Levy)
8. normative nepotism: "[Berlusconi] gave political posts to several women who had started as showgirls on his programs; some were suspected of being his lovers. [...] In April, 2009, Berlusconi announced his nominations for the European Parliament. They included a lingerie model, the female star of the Italian version of the reality show “Big Brother,” a soap-opera star, and a former Miss Italy contestant." (Levy)
9. sex discrimination: "Ninety-five per cent of Italian men have never operated a washing machine. Until 1981, a “crime of honor”—killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex—could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders; as late as 2007, a man in Palermo was sentenced to just two days in jail for murdering his wife after their children testified that she had been disrespectful to him. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, Italy ranks seventy-fourth in women’s rights, between the Dominican Republic and Gambia. Women constitute a smaller percentage of the workforce in Italy than in any other country in the European Union, apart from Malta, and those who work make barely half as much as their male counterparts. Emma Bonino, a Radical Party leader, told me, “When I was Minister of European Affairs, in 2007, I had to prepare a report on the status of women in Italy. The data came in, and I remember that I rejected it twice, saying to my staff, ‘That’s impossible: it cannot be so bad.’" (Levy)
10. normative commodification of social relationships: "But Berlusconi has given many of his friends staggering cash gifts; Fedele Confalonieri has received millions, in addition to his salary and bonuses"
11. mammismo: "[Italy is" a culture in which motherhood is a prerequisite for women who seek a measure of power or respect is not a culture that understands women as fully human. You can have an intense case of mammismo and still fail to grasp why sexual assault, or gender discrimination in the workplace, or the relentless depiction of women as bimbos on television is a problem." (Levy)
12. deeply-rooted racism - beneath a layer of democracy (or, rather, demagogy) lies a widely shared fascist nostalgia: "Mora has won seven Telegatto awards—the Italian Emmy—and his golden cat statuettes are arranged on a row of shelves next to a wall of television monitors, interspersed with a collection of Mussolini memorabilia. “Mussolini did a lot of good things for Italy, and he’s seen only for certain ugly things that his people did—the traitors!”(Levy)
13. "l'talia alle vongole" - the wildly corrputed, unreliable, chaotic, Italy that Hollywood never portrays: "the rustic, messy, slippery Italy, akin to the classic pasta with clam sauce, which Berlusconi represents, in all his wily hedonism." (Levy)
14. nation-wide hypocrisy - caused by a mixture of Catholicism (the separation between State and Church in Italy never really took place), consummate opportunism, and moral apathy: “I don’t think that this issue is that important to Italians,” she said. “On a moral level, Italians are extremely tolerant.” Forgiveness, of course, is crucial in a Catholic culture. And, whether or not Berlusconi repents, it isn’t just his defenders who think a sex scandal is not enough to bring him down. Emma Bonino told me, “What I try to say to my friends on the left, who will never listen to me, is we will never beat Berlusconi on morality—let alone in a trial.” (Levy)
15. Italian culinary racism: Italians - even intelligent ones (!) - firmly believe that the local cuisine is "the best in the world" and they consider all other gastronimc expressions as "inferior": "Berlusconi always served a tricolore menu. “Mozzarella, basil, and tomato, and three pastas—pomodoro, pesto, and a white one with four cheeses,” Mora said. “For the meat, roast beef, red; mashed potatoes, white; salad, green.” (Levy)
Not discussed in the article
16. Bamboccioni: More than half of Italians aged 18 to 34 still live at home (source: The Guardian)
"Pull the rug out, though — or rather, pull out the solid floor, all suggestions of support, and stand on layers of glass — and something else happens. You become a vulnerable observer. You look at the city and its expanse, but you can’t settle into complacency or reflective mapping. You end up feeling, along with the amazement, an all-too-human unsteadiness. You are part of that city of course, and are even relying on its technological achievements by standing in this elevated spot. But you also recognize just how unusual and vulnerable those advances are. The city might attempt to transcend the human, but it also readily reflects it. Spend a minute on the glass Ledge, and you feel that in your bones." (Edward Rothstein, The New York Times)
"Whether or not he is guilty, it is unlikely that Berlusconi will serve the three-year sentence that comes with the crime of paying a minor for sex. (If he had slept with her for nothing, there would be no trial: the age of consent in Italy is fourteen.) But Rubygate could be the scandal that ends his political career. Though his term isn’t up until 2013, his approval rating has dropped to thirty per cent, an all-time low, and he could lose his parliamentary majority if deputies start defecting en masse—which may become politically expedient. “We are living day to day,” Deborah Bergamini told me. Two weeks ago, the P.D.L. suffered historic losses in regional elections. The mayor of Milan, for whom Berlusconi had campaigned vigorously, was forced into a runoff, which she is expected to lose. It would be the first time in more than a decade that Berlusconi’s party had lost control of his home town." (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker)
"On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the northwest of the city. The first news of its arrival was brought by a nearby farmer and subsequently confirmed by the local newspaper reporters and the police. Despite this the majority of people, myself among them, remained skeptical, but the return of more and more eyewitnesses attesting to the vast size of the giant was finally too much for our curiosity. The library where my colleagues and I were carrying out our research was almost deserted when we set off for the coast shortly after two o'clock, and throughout the day people continued to leave their offices and shops as accounts of the giant circulated around the city" (J.G. Ballard)
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