Thanksgiving 2011
The American owner of the pizza restaurant in my neighborhood put on a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner for a group of 35, most of whom were English language students of my friend Roseanne. The menu included turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas, pumpkin mousse, and cranberry sauce. For dessert there was apple pie and a brownie a la mode. Of course, in Italy there was wine too. I was given the ceremonial task of carving the turkey. I also gave in English (speaking very slowly) a short talk on the history of Thanksgiving. A very pleasant evening.
TV Treasures
Instead of buying a new flat screen TV, I opted, at least for now, to buy a simple, inexpensive decoder so my TV will work with the new digital signal. I was surprised to discover that instead of about 18 stations, I now get over 100! Of course more than a few of them are special interest ones like the 24 hour Italian poker channel, the Italian version of the Home Shopping Network, and TV Padre Pio dedicated to Italy’s most popular 20th century saint of whom I have written before. I also get 20 radio stations over my TV including a classical music one that I cannot get on my radio in the apartment.
(We are still in Italy. With the new system when you tune to a station at bottom of screen often there is a momentary display showing the current show and the next one. About half the time, this information is incorrect.)
At the big electronics store where I purchased the decoder there was a big pile of decoders that had been returned by customers. Obviously these were not all defective ones; I assume very few were. Instead these were ones that the customers could not make work with their TV sets. Why? The decoder requires a certain type of connection at the back of the TV and some customers may have had TVs so old that this connection was not there. More probably, however, was a slight defect in the instructions that I discovered when I hooked up my unit. With the decoder, you run the TV signal through one of the Audio/Visual sub channels on the TV. Once you turn to that sub channel, you tune the stations with the remote control of the decoder. The instructions did not indicate this necessary first step.
Gettysburg in the Italian News
Naturally my American town of residence, Gettysburg, is not a big news item in Italy. On November 19, in the local paper it was featured in the “This Day in History” which recalled that on November 19, 1863 President Lincoln made the famous Gettysburg address. The line quoted from it was the one about the soldiers shall not have died in vain. In fact, the most famous line is that of government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. It is always fun to note to Italians that the most quoted speech in American history is only 300 words long.
Speaking versus Reading Italian
I have many friends who have lived in Italy for a long time and are much more fluent in spoken Italian than I am. If, however, I am looking at a newspaper, I can almost always find words in the newspaper than I know but my friends do not. This is because these words appear in written Italian but rarely in everyday speech. I always continue to study new vocabulary in Italian.
Occupy Wall Street
I watched a documentary on Italian TV about this movement. It gets extensive media coverage in Italy. Street demonstrations and movements that occupy a space for protest purposes are more common in Italy than in the USA. The Italian political spectrum in general is to the left of that in America. As a result, the typical Italian is more sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street group than is the case in the USA.
Why Did Berlusconi Finally Resign?
He said he would never resign unless forced to do so by a vote of No Confidence in Parliament. As the Italian bond crisis escalated, it was obvious to all but him that he had to go to stem the damage. According to reports in the press, the advice and pleas of his political advisors were not the impetus for his departure. Instead he resigned after one of his top financial advisors told him that the stocks of his companies were going into the toilet, and he had to resign in order to stop the deterioration of his financial empire. It is probably impossible to verify this scenario of the events, but is consistent with the theory of many of his opponents that Berlusconi entered politics not to help Italy but to benefit and protect his financial interests.
Citizenship for Children of Born in Italy to Immigrant Parents
Currently children born in Italy to immigrant parents can obtain Italian citizenship when they become adults or when their parents achieve such citizenship. The President of the Republic of Italy has proposed that such children have citizenship by virtue of their birth in Italy. It is not clear whether this would apply to all immigrants or only to immigrants legally in Italy. The proposal does not appear as broad as birthright citizenship presently in the USA, but is clearly a move in that direction at a time when many in the USA are discussing moving away from birthright citizenship. I doubt that Parliament will adopt this idea.
Reinforcing Stereotypes
The idea that Italians, and Mediterranean people in general, are more temperamental than northern Europeans is an old one. It may well be a stereotype that would not survive serious analysis. If we have a stereotype in mind, we always note instances that seem to reinforce it and ignore those that don’t. Here is one for the hot-headed Italian stereotype.
A 72 year old man returned home to find a car in the disabled parking place in front of his house reserved for his car because of his wife’s disability. He called the police to come and give a ticket and perhaps tow away the car. Before the police arrive the driver of the parked vehicle came back. The 72 year old man began to shout at him. At this point it may have been that the owner of the car wanted to flee to avoid being attacked by the old man who apparently was beating on the car. It may be that the owner of the car wanted to flee to avoid the fine. It may be that the old man stood in front of the car so it could not be easily moved. What is clear is that the owner of car drove over the old man and killed him. Who was the owner – some violent youth? No, he was a 76 year old guy. One would like to hope that guys in their 70s could be a little more mature than the youthful characters in Romeo and Juliet.
Why Berlusconi’s reign should be a lesson to revolutionaries everywhere
( Interesting Opinion Piece from Washington Post)
By Anne Applebaum, Published: November 14 Washington Post
All political careers end in failure, a British politician once said. Even so, politicians rarely fail as spectacularly as did Silvio Berlusconi, who at long last resigned Saturday night, to the cheers of his countrymen (“la commedia è finita!” writes an Italian friend) and the approval of stock markets around the world.
Not that he is aware of having failed: On the contrary, Berlusconi clung to power — petulantly, angrily — until the bitter end. He finally left office only because “eight traitors,” in his words, failed to support him during a vote last week, and he lost his parliamentary majority. Had that not happened, he surely would have carried on, even as the Italian financial system collapsed in a hail of fire and brimstone all around him.
I leave it to others to puzzle out what will happen to the Italian financial system next, and I don’t envy them. A couple of weeks ago, I heard a senior European central banker solemnly declare that the future of the entire continent might well depend upon whether and when his colleagues would once again begin to purchase Italian government bonds. It is bad enough that Greece is about to go down in flames. But Italy? The fourth-largest economy in Europe? The eighth-largest economy in the world?
Yet even if one looks backward instead of forward, the conclusion of Berlusconi’s political career doesn’t look much more cheerful. On the contrary: His long reign at the very top of Italian politics holds gloomy lessons for would-be revolutionaries everywhere.
For, as not many now remember, Berlusconi’s political career was the direct result of a very dramatic revolution, one that I was lucky enough to witness at an early stage. In 1993, I went to Milan to interview Luca Magni, an Italian businessman who ran a cleaning company. After years of paying bribes to secure contracts, Magni had decided a few months earlier that he’d had enough. “I just wanted to do business without worrying about it,” he told me. So he made a recording of a government official who asked him for money, passed the recording to a public prosecutor named Antonio Di Pietro — and thus set into motion a chain of investigations that eventually led to the arrest of hundreds of politicians and political appointees.
In due course, the whole Italian political hierarchy collapsed. Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialist Party, escaped to Tunisia and never came back. Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat leader and former prime minister, was investigated for mafia connections and never returned to public life. Their political parties vanished.
Into the vacuum stepped Silvio Berlusconi. Though it’s hard to believe now, at the time he seemed revolutionary, too. He talked about releasing Italians from the chains of bureaucracy, corruption and high taxes. He brought a whole new group of young people into politics, all dressed in cashmere sweaters. He named his political party Forza Italia — after the slogan of the national soccer team — and for a brief moment, that seemed fun. For an even briefer moment politics became chic, even among the northern Italian middle classes, who had always stayed away. In Milan, I was told in 1993, it was rude to ask a man which party he voted for, much worse than asking him how much money he made. Berlusconi was supposed to change all of that.
But Berlusconi, who had accumulated his wealth under the old regime, was incapable of changing himself, let alone his country. Some people grow more mature upon attaining political power. Some grow more arrogant. He fell into the latter camp. Instead of heralding the new era, he brought the revolution to a halt. Instead of making life easier for the Luca Magnis of Italy, he avoided unpopular reforms, accumulated even more state debt, spent much of his time with fellow billionaires (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin among them) and organized “bunga-bunga,” whatever that means exactly, in his palatial residences. He remained popular enough to be reelected, in part because the opposition was so weak — when the old Italian political class was eliminated, nothing else emerged to replace it — and in part because he represented the material “success” to which many modern Italians aspire. But now the bond markets have caught up with him, and the prosecutors won’t be far behind, or at least I hope not.
Which brings me back to the gloomy lesson of his career: Occupy Wall Street! Libyan rebels! Spanish Indignados! Be careful what you wish for: The elimination of your country’s political class will not necessarily result in a better-run state or a happier society. Instead, if you are not extremely careful, you might get the counterrevolution — you might get Berlusconi.