“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

OK, it’s funny ’cause in Italy and everywhere in the world, the less is understood about politics (sometimes I think that there’s almost nobody left to understand politics) the more seems to be a necessary paradigm in life to judge the world around us politically.
I mean, it is less lame to discriminate for someone’s zodiacal sign than for his or her political ideas, if only because the zodiacal sign is a scientific certainty (< - irony). What happens in the end is that most of the people in my country need this paradigm to just go on with life. Take decisions, have sympathies. Delude themselves to hold the key to recognize between friends from foes. Value everything throughout the political sieve.

So, that’s why in this post I will briefly go over what is my political position in life, what are my beliefs and positions and so forth: so that later I will be able to link to this post from the FAQ for all those who need to know in advance what political territory they are moving into when they start reading this blog.

I dislike politics. I am probably what in Italy is called a qualunquista, whose perfect translation would be “whateverist”. I have inflections of anarchism, but also a vaguely progressive common sense. I admire conservative attitudes as well as the desire to change and undo. I am obsessed by politics only in the sense that I feel that I am surrounded and harassed by evil political ideas and wicked ideological behaviors, which I recognize everywhere around me. I had political convictions in the past, but they were wrong. I was ready to barter true with false to turn them right, to make right what didn’t add up (just as I had seen my parents doing all the time) and this is enough to say that those convictions weren’t for me.

My vision is that at the present moment there is but one great struggle going on, and this is not the struggle of the poor against the rich, or the struggle of order against chaos, democracy against anarchy and so forth (although all these oppositions and many more are always happening). At the center of things, I see nothing less than a struggle of the middle class against the elite. The “elite” being all those who consider themselves a sort of aristocracy, running the game behind the facade not necessarily knowingly or by conspiracy (although I do believe that conspiracy and propaganda are the way of the world), and also not by merit but for a form of heredity of power –which is pretty sick.
Anyway. Since forever the elite has wanted to rule out the middle class: they love the idea of having to face a large mass of illiterate slaves better than having to face an educated and ambitious middle class, which keeps the things fluid and which doesn’t renounce to educate itself and to master things instead of being mastered by them (occasionally kicking kings and rulers out of business without the need of a “revolution”.) There are many examples of how this can happen, but I’ll live that for the comments if necessary.

Needless to say, to destroy the middle class it is not good for the oppressed classes as much as it is good for the elite (the distance to reach it becomes impassable). Thus the leftist dream as it is can be put aside. And to embrace the elite and its rule as the sole chance for civilization is equally wrong, because the world the elite imagine for us is one without freedom for most of us (to say the least).

So where am I? In the end I believe in a democratic republic with a good balance of powers, but not because it is the best thing or because it is anything decent, but only because it is a non-static system: because it can always change into something better if enough efforts are put into it and if its institutions are somewhat preserved. Because into it a middle class can thrive, helping the other classes from becoming rigid in their distant positions (slaves and masters).

Of course a democratic republic, if one does not put enough attention to it, can also turn also into a technocratic neo-fascist madness where terrorism is used as a fear-mongering tool against the people and newborn babies are implanted with forever tracking microchips (all my fantasies of course) and everything under the sun belongs to some brand, and this is why I do believe in participating, criticizing, protesting and fighting for new lifestyles or new values and etc.
Yet I am personally not very good at it: and this is because I am also a conservative and a pessimist, but chiefly because my political attention is not natural, but a mere defensive mechanism triggered by the fucking reality.

OK and this was it, if new political definitions of myself will come to my mind I’ll update this post.
And yea, I hope that my next post will be more human –or personal.

when I walk down the
streets and
it’s cold outside,
I have a paper scarf to
wrap my neck with–
all written by fingers of bees
all drawn by drools of slug.
when into the cones of lamplights and moths
the scarf waves about me and I read–
bits of phrases and pictures minute
yet I still have to get
what my paper scarf is about?
is it a story?
is it a classwork note?
is it just about my neck?
what should I do with those lines and dots?
Oh and I know
not the wind nor the cold will rip
my paper scarf–
but my clumsy hands.

As this story goes, the Italian polyclinic “Umberto I” in Rome, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, after having outsourced in these shortage years to a bunch of private contractors all its maintenance, today doesn’t even know the exact number of its employees anymore. That’s why the mythic journalist Fabrizio Gatti posing as a cleaning man managed to easily infiltrate the Hospital.
Every Italian will immediately grasp the reason why to infiltrate a public Hospital in this fashion, especially by a journalist who in the past has infiltrated and documented places like detention camps for illegal aliens and Mafia’s slavery fields. The reason is the unbelievable condition of neglect in which Italian hospitals are generally left. Dirtiness, untidiness, broken stuff left around, abandoned toxic material, private files left open, generally run down infrastructures.
Every patient and medic knows that this is the normal background of Italian hospitals, especially in big cities.

Although not worn out at the levels of the Polyclinic Umberto I in Rome, the Polyclinic of Milan is not much better. Old and rotten in most parts, scarce of staff and certainly easy to break in, given that day and night anybody use it as a crossing way from one part of the city to the other, it could make a nice subject for another infiltration documentary.

Fabrizio Gatti has done a good work, as always: documented with loads of videos this time. Everything can be accessed here.
I am not going to translate the entire article, but here’s a taste:

The storage facility for cultures of bacteria and viruses of the Department for Infectious and Tropical Diseases has no lock: without surveillance, with test tubes potentially infectious in the open, it is always accessible to anyone. For three days nobody cleans away the excrements that the Night of St. Stefan a stray dog left in the corridor used to move patients from a unit to another. Nurses and stretcher-bearers often smoke even when they move the infirm around with wheelchairs or stretchers. Every time the patients, even the most critically ill ones, are moved from Intensive Care or from the Emergency Room or from the operating rooms, naked under the sheets, intubated or with oxygen, they follow the same path of the garbage. They end between black bags and yellow cardboard boxes amassed in the basement, or lined behind the trash carts. And when the operators wash down the remains of garbage with jets of water, the wheels of the stretchers get soaked with sewage, and then pull the dirtiness along to the wards.

If I have to criticize something of this article, it is only its ending: “Tonight as always the waiting room of the Emergency Room is crowded. They are forced to wait for the work pace of the public health. And to have faith. They are not called Silvio Berlusconi and none of them can afford to be recovered in the United States.”
Now, although as an Italian politician Berlusconi is directly responsible for this shame altogether with a bunch of other oligarchs, the polemic against him has not much sense in these terms. He is certainly not the only one who goes to the United States to have a heart-replacement operation. There’s enough people in Italy rich enough to be recovered in the United States if they have to, only they probably will recur to it as a last resort, just like he did. We always tend to overlook how much rich people there is here, and how much rich is a western European country in general.
Also, to say “recovered in the United States” like if that means tout-court having a better health care seems optimistic to say the least. Although hospitals are undoubtedly better kept there, as far as I know infections caused by permanence at the hospitals are fairly common, and good infiltration documentaries are or can be certainly done there too.

note: I wrote this post when I came back from visiting my father on Xmas. However I am publishing it now–

My father says that I am always sleeping. My father says that I believe in everything. He says that I have too much imagination, and that I believe in everything I fantasize about.

I think he’s right. I am a victim of my own imaginative talents: I know it might sound cool but in fact it is a tragic weakness.
For one thing, I can’t really rationalize to the point of discerning improbable from probable, because everything is equally probable too me. Be them news from the TV or stories of relatives and friends, I tend to participate with my imagination without any reasonable limit.
I can even feel physical pain –or the most intense emotions– to the simple thought (I’d rather say ‘vision’) of what can happen to someone else, somewhere else, by the simple evocations of the surrounding details.

So it happens that my envy or empathy or jealousy (all lousy kinds of feelings) can turn out gigantic: because I feel the relative difference of experience between me and the people involved in the story in the most intense way.
Usually I cannot really limit myself to hear a story about someone and consider it as a story: I transform it in my mind in a collection of very solid (and mostly invented) experiences, just like a betrayed lover does thinking at the beloved with someone else: I see dust on the windowsill, sweat, faces, I hear voices and smell smells– I rub a stain away from the glass, and close the window left open– all the secondary stuff which is usually omitted from a story when we hear one (Saddam Hussein’s double before the hanging defecating on the WC in the cell, reading a book of poems while from the outside come fainted voices of the city; the dust and flies and weird bird songs on the streets of the village where my stepbrother kills a cow with an axe; Leni masturbating thinking about some guy; small incidents and gross jokes at the conspiracy reunions for the latest terrorist scam, things like that).

Sometimes I can go on for hours or days consumed by visions like this, especially if I somehow feel robbed or cheated by them. Although I sometimes argue the basic credibility of many things created by my imagination, they remain too real to be fought with simple rationalization.
My father, who is a crazy and dangerous person persuaded to be rational, warns me: I am being irrational, I am morbid about the stories I hear because I need or want to prove similar experiences myself. We talk about this because he cannot talk of anything else regarding myself, the sum of it being too negative to be told.
My excited imagination, he implies, becomes so excited because my experience isn’t excited at all. I think that that’s what my father is trying to tell me. Because I have organized my immoral life trying to have more and more time to think and imagine, it is fatal to become cretin for too much brain activity.

He’s probably right. Also he doesn’t know that with all these ill talents in my pockets I notice a lot of things that usually go unnoticed, all petty stuff that distracts me and possibly –who knows? including beauty and drama.
However I don’t know how to be without that (the preceding phrase should not be ungrammatical).

— in picture, above: snoopy’s imagination (1951, I think)

Venice. In San Pantalon a seagull is yelling as it lands on an eaves of an house near the bridge. Soon as it settles the yell is morphed by the gull into a sort of meowing lament, so strikingly similar to that of a cat that an old man, crossing the bridge ahead of me, mumbles “here, kitty kitty” by himself. On the other side of the small campo another seagull has started meowing the same way now, apparently answering to the first one.

A little boy and his father enter the picture crossing the bridge, directed to school.
“what’s that!” says the boy.
“A seagull, mona“, answers the dad.
“what’s he doing!”
“He’s just bragging that this is his territory and all”, explains the dad. All the documentaries are working. “They do this with their voice all the time”, he says.

Down the bridge we enter the large campo Santa Margherita. Few market stands are setting up their display of foods here, the air smells like chimney smoke and is damp– above the gray gray sky is rugged and broken.
Behind our backs the church bells of San Pantalon start blaring, and halfway to the other side of the Campo, the bells of Carmini start blaring too, very loudly.
I don’t know if the little kid is ever going to ask his dad what’s that, even thought it is, not metaphorically but literally, exactly what the seagulls were doing.

Trenitalia, the Italian National railway company is a growing nightmare.
Types of connection that were once treated as equal, such as “Eurocity” and “Intercity”, are now treated as different: this even though they still come with the same price, speed, quality of wagons and number of stops and are virtually indistinguishable to the traveler (Please note: Trenitalia already offers at least seven different types of trains and tariffs.)
So they told me that “Eurocity” now wants a mandatory reservation on any ticket, but the traveler can avoid to stamp the ticket before boarding the train. Instead if you happen to take the “Intercity” or the “Intercity plus” (same train with new wagons) which would happen because you are taking it, say, at 6PM instead than 5PM, the reservation is optional, but to stamp the ticket is still mandatory with or without reservation.
It must be noted that until a while ago both kind of trains needed a “supplement” with the regular ticket, so that you had two different tickets to stamp: and the fact that the “supplement” has now been abolished, finally gulped by the main ticket, is bragged by Trenitalia as a “simplification”. Not at all as the necessary step to be taken for the new 2006 big increase of the tariffs.

“I have to take the intercity,” I explain to the man behind the counter at the station of Venice, “should I make the reservation or not?”
“Not really. You can sit at the numbers from 71 to 86 of every coach, we now advice passengers that we never reserve those seats.”
This is supposed to make up for the fact that Trenitalia cannot pay anymore for someone to put small paper signs above any seat to indicate whether the seat is reserved or not.
“But this way those compartments will always be crowded even when most of the others are deserted. This is not a good advice. Who write this stuff anyways?”
“Most likely those at the office for the complication of simple affairs” the man answers seriously.

This was an old Italian joke, but outdated. The main sexual drive of Trenitalia isn’t complication anymore, it is sadomasochism.
End of the rant, puff.

sitting at the green
table again, night fallen upon
the falling country
marroquin boy carries away our garbage– Milan has long spent
its love at 5AM

I am still in chains to the city who says
bury yourself in plane site and do not cry
all the wishes are done with, all loves spent
all clothes are hanging to the wrong wires

heat the steel kettle, pause the droning computer
easy because she also sleeps
di là in this wrong house (her house)

how was Padova? why didn’t you come?
quando scopiamo?
I fear for myself –if I see the chains
Yea I cut them hair, Milan said they
were definitely too long.

In Piazza del Duomo the bars are open, and under the arcades to Corso V.E. people crowd the street performers and the stands. There’s the silver cowboy on a podium who produces odd whistles and mimic stuff, and the couple of mustached accordion players playing Bach (one of the two accordions has only buttons on both sides).
There’s the fortune teller, who reads the hand, the tarots and the horoscope for singles and couples (but there’s only the table, two chairs and no sign of him) and there’s a bunch of portraitists some very good and some lousy, who all look like solemn Afghan goatherds: some of them copy pictures pinned to the drawing sheets, scrupulously and unfaithfully repeating in big the unaware stupefied faces of the portrayed.
There’s a young fellow who makes the circus thing with the pins and nobody considers him, and the little stand of the Lottery where from until a while ago an half blind old man used to yell “lotteriadilmerano” with thundery voice.
There are the Chinese, who paint names on grains of rice or sell scarfs and plastic toys with all the lights and the sounds, and there’s a long line of phony stands of supposed authentic stuff. There the Milanese disorderly wait their turn to grab free samples of authentic phony cheese and salami, or poke among the authentic phony Latino-American craft work. I wonder what is with us that we can’t wait in line, but we are only capable to throw ourselves at the counters hoping to be the first ones addressed by salesmen.
Everywhere flashes go off and tonight I am one of the notable fellows in the back of at least five snapshots. Corso V.E. in fact is a long stout parade of modern prisoners enslaved by their new Xmas mobile phones who command them to stop and picture their friends and relatives every few steps. There’s a father photographing his daughter across the window of a bar (she smiles directly at the camera) and a bunch of women posing in front of the enlightened symbolic plastic trees.
Few steps forward there’s a TV troupe waiting for the link to broadcast directly from the Corso. At the center of a circle of smiling witnesses a young man by the melancholy look faces a camera under the aggressive floodlight, microphone in a hand. He wears a long blue dress and a blue hat covered with golden stars. Nobody is saying anything.

This central Corso, now called V.E., was formerly known as Corsia dei Servi, “Lane of the Slaves” after the captive Slavonic people who lived and worked in the city, just like in Venice there’s a “Shore of the Slaves”.
But it’s sad to think that nobody will ever name a street after us modern slaves because we don’t even have the time to know what we are.

It’s the first day of the year (actually I am writing in the second day already, and superstition wants that because of that I will be writing less this year, which is just as well) and the square with the cathedral and its surroundings seem to be the only area alive in the city.
As soon as I walk away the streets are so quiet and dark, and the perpetual city-garage of parked vehicles is interrupted by many vacant spaces, and sidewalks and streets are littered with the remains of fireworks launchers and bottles of spumante and beer.
I cut through the Polyclinic, which day and night is opened on both sides almost completely without surveillance. Directed to Via Orti on the other side, I pass by the “Guardia II” pavilion, where the mental patients are held and where from they often yell to the passersby, or spit on them, or throw cigarette butts at them.
But tonight also the “Guardia II” is quiet.

this year I made propositions and didn’t stick by them and I am not going to do the same mistake –this year I envied a bunch of persons but less than the last one– I envied those who were living abroad and robbing me of their experiences– those who were making it in the city and those lost somewhere outside of it– I envied every writer for the beautiful phrases and for anything I didn’t think of–
I grew many plants and killed many plants and longed for a garden, for a dog and a tree– one windy day I texted someone and had a lover for months but I didn’t fall in love– I didn’t answered tens of calls– never those I really was waiting for– I masturbated everyday anyway, in and out of my dreams– one cold night I was attacked in a restaurant by a little man and later mobbed out of a lousy job by the same little man and so discovered God had given me enemies– but harassed by the thought I just considered them people to shun– even if my fingernails were livid for the excited emotion, the commotion, the woman said– someone said it was like at the Leoncavallo, it was sad– The little man is still out there in the city and the idea bothers me–
Friends disappointed me because i was too far out to be reached–
I worked on my English writing with desperation and never ceased one second to think that it was absurd– to write this language without speaking it everyday alive, every page was covered of that invisible shame unfortunately–
I almost had a child and lost it –no I never lost it, she did, I never had it– after three months of stupid fighting about abortion, about having a job or money– or disappointing her parents by running away to start a new life away– money, position, middle-class fear, it was all hidden there– I wanted the fucking baby? Sure, and I cried in the surgery at the maternity hospital and didn’t know I was about to– but I didn’t go on vacation because we were dismayed by the baby we finally had wanted, before the baby died all by itself and was flushed down the toilet –we went three times to the hospital and three times came back–
I was guilty–
I didn’t make a buck and I went on spending the money stashed– I visited my mother three times, handled the dogs and listened to her fading mind– I never went to visit my cousin in London, JD in New York, DC in Paris, my sister in Rome, V. in Moscow– I looked at Libi with suspicion because she wasn’t like me, ready for the flight– then I loved her again and betrayed her again and got back at her again– she sewed my clothes and I played the guitar for her– I put away the guitar and blogged so hard I got a story published on an anthology printed somewhere in America– I received the book by mail and my story was so bad I had to put the book away– nobody knows of it except Libi– I went on writing hard and always aghast by my inability to live intensely like I had hoped to– irretrievably every new year– with every summery falling star I wished the wrong desires, not feasible–
I endorsed all the paranoias available on the net and discarded them but stuck by them, I worried for the illnesses I was going to get for being alive– I hated my father for what I was–
I didn’t fucked much– but I played with Libi enough to be proud of us– without booze or drugs– us the inhibited ones–
I traveled alone into cities by resonant names and never felt really free except at night in the hotel rooms, the stranger beds, the yellow dim lights and the television sets– without any fear to die in my sleep–

“Everyone I know says that afterwards everything is different. More intense.” says she, as if thinking out loud.
“Everyone I’ve seen getting married got married out of the fear of being alone.” I say sarcastically.
But the truth is that I am flattered that she can wish to marry me despite all my failures.
And the truth is that I don’t want my life to take that route. I don’t like that door and I don’t feel like passing it. “The paper you sign cannot tell when and how things are changing”, I say, “why signing it then?”
“I could marry for the Italian citizenship”, I say, “that would be logic. But I have that already.”
I don’t want anything to happen because it is planned. I’m not sure if I love her (I think it is impossible to be sure), I’m not sure if I can live here with her or if it’s good for me and her, I’m not even sure if I will manage to remain alive long enough to give a meaning to what I do. I don’t want to stay stuck because I have to, or to transform into formality something which is graciously informal. I don’t need witnesses, priests, friends to live my love for me, and the approval of society makes me sick to my stomach. I want to be able to say to my hypothetical son “I didn’t married your mom because I didn’t need to.”
But Libi looks sideway with her beautiful black eyes and says: “it is formal, of course. But it is something you do to say that is good to be there. Like sewing a new dress.” (Libi is a dressmaker. I am not convinced.)

— In picture, above: detail of “sunday women” by John Sloan. I don’t know much else of it.