Sometimes you have to answer to such a simple question like “where are you from?”. You can work around difficult problems, but you cannot do the same with simple ones.
“Where are you from?”
Even on my own blog, I would like to skip the question. Because, if you are an Italian, you live in a state of constant embarrassment.
That is, of course, linked to articles that flood the international press (everybody knows some of them here at DLD, Munich): Surreal…, New York Times, The Mussolini…, GQ, The Caligulan court…, Telegraph, La fiesta…, El Pais, Les filles invidées…, Le Monde, Woman tells…, Sydney Morning Herald, Italy sees macho self…, The Times of India, Rubygate…, RomandieNews. There are so many pieces all over the world about the Italian prime minister’s allegedly damned behaviour that it really seems the international public enjoys them. But there is an unseriously tragic lesson in the Italian comedy. What the hell are Italians doing about all this? Not much. Why? You can have many answers to this last question, but none are likely able to solve the embarrassment due to the previous one.
Italians seem to react differently to this story. Of course, there are those that don’t accept it at all. Confindustria’s president, Emma Marcegaglia, said that there is a very different Italy, “one that goes to sleep in the evening and goes to work early in the morning”. She is the head of the Italian entrepreneurial association: she is not politically far from – nor near to – any party. She is talking about ethics, work, and civic values. She speaks to the élite more than she influences the majority of Italians, though. And there are entrepreneurs that like the way this government is doing, and pragmatically tend to forget about ethics: probably because if business ethics was always to be implemented by this government they would have less reasons to like it.
But what does the majority of Italians really think? What do women think in Italy about their government?
The public opinion, in Italy, doesn’t exist in the same sense as elsewhere. In his new book, “La Cultura degli italiani”, Professor Tullio De Mauro has some interesting figures. Only 30% of Italians are able to understand what they read, if they read at all. Functional illiteracy is a forgotten plague in Italy. But everybody watch television. That has consequences. Ilvo Diamanti, a sociologist, shows a strange phenomenon in the set of priorities shared by the majority of Italians: for example, changes in their worries about crime are not at all related to the number of crimes that are actually perpetrated in Italy, but they are very much related to the number of stories about criminal acts that are run by the news on television. The New York Times has written that Italians sort of live in a soap opera and have a hard time when it comes to separate fiction and reality: that seems to be laterally true. There are things that no country should allow: one is letting a single person own three national TV channels out of seven.
But that is not a sufficient explanation. Italians may be dependent on TV stories. But they are even more dependent on the State (while looking at the State as a resource to use, more than a set of institutions to serve, because their major institution is still the family).
If we accept the more optimistic figures about functional illiteracy we can think that a 30% of Italians don’t really know what happens in their country. We can also think that there is a 20-30% of Italians that are really connected to the world and are able to judge what’s going on: they work with the international markets all the time, their exports make the most of Italian wealth, or at least they are able to read and they are informed. But there is also almost half of the population that – whatever they know and think – they need the State to make a living: and, in my opinion, they tend to accept any government while silently hating politicians. They will wait for any powerful man to fall, while serving him when he is in charge. And they will develop a sort of cynical view of the world in the meantime.
I like Italy. I’m sure that most Italians are good people. But to earn a real respect, they should find some ingenuity.