Decadence, Italian Style

If you're not into politics, but only live for fashion and style, you're probably getting on with your ordinary daily obsessions nowadays. I personally can’t just think about fashion because of what has recently been going on in my home country.

I've always been very passionate about politics and spent quite a few years of my life writing political pieces. One of the politicians I used to attack was (and still is) Silvio Berlusconi.

Then came a time in my life when I felt I needed to stop writing about politics because my health was deteriorating and I decided to ignore this pathetic dictator wannabe, this clownish fake emperor, this ridiculous satyr called Silvio Berlusconi who is accidentally also our Prime Minister.

Unfortunately for me, though, there is no day that passes in my life without hearing the umpteenth silly remark coming from Berlusconi. Since he decided to launch his political career and start a party that abuses of the word "freedom" without really knowing what it means, he has been perennially behaving during official political meetings like a silly and immature boy on an end of the year school trip, telling silly jokes, embarrassing his foreign colleagues and constantly denying of having said something 2 seconds after he actually said it. This would be embarrassing enough, but it's not the worst, in fact he has also escaped the law hundreds of times, while offending Italian magistrates by portraying them as a mass of blood thirsty communist vampires ready to bite him.

The last few weeks have been simply fatal, not for Berlusconi but for me: I sincerely hoped he would have ended up in jail with David Mills, but he avoided it thanks to the Lodo Alfano, the "Save the Prime Minister" measure created to make sure no laws can hurt an outlaw like him.

Then there has been the whole scandal about going to the 18th birthday party of mysterious Noemi Letizia. Aspiring model and starlet, daughter of a friend of a friend, innocent teenager caught up in a Communist ploy…by now we have heard everything about her from Berlusconi except the truth. Now Berlusconi is also investigated for using state funded flights to take guests – among them faithful crooner Apicella and a flamenco dancer – to his party at his villa in Sardinia. But don't be afraid, nothing will ever happen to him, he recently told his voters (unless he dies while having sex with an underage teenager, you could add…).

I honestly admit that, deep down in my heart, I wished this girl was an illegitimate daughter, mainly because I couldn't think that a 17 year old girl could ever think of calling "daddy" the 73-year-old Prime Minister of her home country who, being also the richest man in Italy and owning a few private TV channels can also give her a hand in becoming one of those semi-naked women who stand in the background of Italian TV shows, usually introduced by vapid and tanned male presenters.

I'm starting to think I was a strange child: in my times you would grow up dreaming of marrying a member of a rock band, not of inviting the Prime Minister to your birthday party. As I grew up I became a "strange" teenager, developing two "dangerous" addictions, music and books and, inspired by my idol Noam Chomsky, eventually started dreaming of writing a non-fiction book about ordinary people with lots of interviews à la Studs Terkel's Working. Maybe my parents should have sent me to a psychologist because I didn’t want to be a showgirl or maybe my parents themselves should have been sent to psychologist since, at 17, they would have never allowed me to go with a friend of mine to a party organised by the country’s Prime Minister in his private villa.

Among the various revelations that came out in the last few weeks, it was also said that Noemi Letizia was at an official dinner organised by the Italian government to celebrate the so-called "Made in Italy" . Interrogated about the beautiful stranger, the Prime Minister simply said she was a daughter of some friends from Naples, she was in Rome for an internship and was at the dinner since she wanted to know the protagonists of the world of Italian fashion. I'm amazed that none of the fashion entrepreneurs present at the dinner turned to her and tried to explain that the world of fashion is not just about glamour and parties, but, like all the other industries, it involves working a lot to establish your name as a designer, model, photographer, fashion critic and so on.

But, you see, there isn’t only a financial crisis in Italy, there is a crisis of moral values, a crisis of consciences and of political motivations, there is a huge social crisis, otherwise a Prime Minister wouldn’t call one of his female ministers “zoccola” (“bitch”) at his party's conference and then deny of having done so (reinforcing in this way the impression in young Italian males that calling a woman "zoccola" is fun, trendy and cool, almost "poetical" in an Eminem kind of way…)

There is a huge crisis of moral values if a 17 year old girl starts thinking she can use her beauty/body and her friendship with the Prime Minister and start calling him ‘daddy’ to enter the mediocre world of Italian showbiz. This huge crisis has generated i
n my home country what I can only describe as a form of generalised decadence.

There is decadence when people from the lowest classes of the population decide to vote for Berlusconi because they think they can become as rich as him, the epitome of the self-made man (mind you, we would all be successful managers with tons of money coming from dubious funding companies), or because they hope he and his party can protect them from the "bad and evil" immigrants coming to steal their jobs.

There is decadence when young people grow up watching reality shows, thinking you MUST be vapid, good looking and semi-naked to end up on TV, and you must become rich as fast as you can, no matter if this implies selling drugs or pimping your body, to really count in this world.

There is decadence when unemployed people or people who have lost their jobs decide to sell their freedom and accept to vote for somebody who promises them a job, because they need that job to support their families.

There is decadence when in other countries the local Members of the Parliament resign for inflating their expenses while in Italy you can have Mafia affiliations and still happily sit in the Parliament, you can steal from the taxpayers who struggle to get till the end of the month with their wages to have your own court of jesters entertaining you on a state-funded plane.

There is decadence when you're fired from your job for not thinking, saying, claiming and stating what one man wants, only because he has the money to make you say all the "right" things.

There is decadence when they rebuke you for attacking the Prime Minister, stating you're just being envious at his success while you’re just invoking justice.

There is decadence when people decide to get into politics not for the sake of the country, but for their own sake.

Last but not least, there is decadence wherever and whenever women are treated like unintelligent entities, bodies with no minds, useful to satisfy a man’s sexual needs and are given in exchange a job on a TV show or a seat in the Parliament.

There is decadence now, but I can only hope things will be different tomorrow, because if this dangerous anomaly called Berlusconi, this strange post-modern melange of Mussolini and the Big Brother gets lots of votes at the European Parliament elections, decadence will spread like a virus from Italy all over the European continent and, in our troubled times, a clown in the European Parliament is really the last thing we need.

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