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Time,
whether you regarded it as a conviction or as a convention, whether
you listen to St. Augustine or to (St. Emanuele) Severino, has carried
away the second millennium too, without particular clamour. Of course,
during his brief year-end speech, President Ciampi has in substance
told politicians to have better manners, or form, in dealing with each
other: what has substance got to do with it all? It has nothing to do
with his message, and in any case it was they, not others, who sent
him to the Quirinal (and that was for the best, don’t get me wrong,
for goodness’ sake!). And Cossutta reproached Ciampi for not mentioning
racism, in short for not mentioning Haider. Yes, in closing the Jubilee
year, which will end on Epiphany day, the day dedicated to peace, the
Pope condemned racism; he did not evoke Haider, he did not mention the
amazing case of Salvador da Bahia, where a wall has been built to hide
the 10 thousand miserable souls and their favelas from the sight of
tourists driving along the main road to the airport. And nobody criticised
him (or rather Him) for this omission... I am not quite sure that we
have struck the right road with Haider; I feel that he is spoken of
too much and above all “badly”, mainly from an ideological point of
view, rather than from the more arduous “Marxian” point of view, that
is that of the old, but not old-fashioned, class war, a phrase which
may be regarded as obsolete today but which I feel is bound to be karstically
brought back to light, sooner or later.... Should I provide an example?
I’ll provide an example from my own personal experience, dating back
to a day on which I had personally attended a morning audience with
the Pope; an experience I shall never forget, which however was especially
significant in connection with the above-mentioned issue. It was a Saturday
evening, and that day His Holiness had seen the nationalist leader Jorg
Haider, giving rise to political scandal and incidents in the streets.
It could have been 9.00 p.m.: coming out of one of those old alleys
which connect the heart of Rome, the three roads branching off from
Piazza del Popolo and holding together part of the old town-centre,
namely Via del Babbuino, Via del Corso and Via di Ripetta, in the pedestrian
area I found myself in Via del Corso. A street which was beautiful,
at one time, with an astounding history starting from its name, which
refers to the horse races, and with a strip of sky demarcated by the
tops of century-old buildings; it is a street which makes people shut
their eyes and plunge into the recent past, without going back to Imperial
Rome. But in shutting my eyes, which I kept wide open, I could see quite
a different scene: jeans shop windows everywhere, hidden in the afternoon
by multitudes of promenaders, and which in the evenings made the clearly
visible house and church fronts even more unfamiliar; a distinct and
final sense of filthiness on the pavement, among waste paper and rubbish;
small and therefore visible colonies of passers-by, mainly teenagers,
who bulk up during the day but are again single at night, and who, despite
their kinetic drive, appeared to be motionless, inanimate, automatic,...automatic?
Like robots? Mutants? Blade Runner? In the meantime, two Maghrebis tinkering
around their football-scarf stall that it was time to dismantle (too
late, few customers, fear, possible Haider followers around?), caught
my eye as the only “living things” in that inhuman environment. I sadly
stood there wondering whether anybody actually realised what had happened
to us, and reflecting about how that night view was associated to our
behaviour models (consumer laws), about the connection with Haider,
about the foolishness and the coarse and self-defeating exploitations
which the self-proclaimed left-wing has made of the Haider case, in
Parliament as well as in the streets, wearing a suit and tie or the
welfare centre overalls, about the great difficulty involved in finding
guide-boards and a direction which is not only His Holiness’ slightly
extraterritorial path ... Do you see what I mean? Do you see my fears
about Bahia and Blade Runner, rather than about Haider himself, who
was democratically elected by a nation which is a member of the European
Union, like us, who are so good at criticising and so careless about
our own transformation into mutants, a transformation which is taking
place before our very eyes - short-sighted, longsighted, or astigmatic,
as the case may be? (traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)
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