Di
Bella affair, the 35 working hours and the purchase and sale campaign of
football teams are the three tesserae of a single Italian mosaic (planetary,
although different, more probably) that takes us to the title's concept,
that is to say to the extremely risky triumph of indistinction. Let's start
with a little article (extensionally, certainly not “intensionally”) recently
published in the cultural column of daily “Il Corriere della Sera” written
by a well-known philosopher, Carlo Augusto Viano who also wrote, I remember,
a pamphlet against weak thinking (“Va' pensiero...”) about ten years ago.
The article's title was: “Health and work, escape routes as a therapy”,
the subheading: “The experts are declining. The reasons of protest are
triumphing. Two recent cases: Di Bella and the 35 working hours”. The Di
Bella effect and the 35 working hours hypothesis are immediately understood
as “something” that answers nothing, or an excessively heavy negativity.
I used here an adverb that
is crucial for me in my brief thinking: immediately, that is to say without
mediations. And in this particular case who should play the “mediator”
role but the press, the informers, communication (the sharpest readers
will immediately think of the third tessera of the mosaic, “transfer market”...)?
As the people responsible for such task did not play an “ontological”,
cultural and political role in the mediation “before”, I mean before the
Di Bella case and before the 35-hour option, they cannot clearly perform
it now “after” the public acquisition of the two hypotheses that are both
therapeutic for health (cancer) and for work (unemployment).
The meaning of “before”
is a serious, free, hard, not selfish attention and information pertaining
the health care conditions in this country.
Hiding it, in fact, would
be useless: the image that our public opinion has about health care and
its managers is awful and it has nothing to do with “collective unconscious”
or other subliminal reading but rather with clear statements of fact (just
think of the Poggi Longostrevi case or to Policlinico Umberto I). Just
as awesome is the desperation of the unemployed and the problem of thinking
about oneself workwise in the future.
Di Bella and somatostatin,
just as Bertinotti and the 35 working hours seem “immediately” to be the
bad conscience of such “immediate” problem.
No reasoning is being made
about the therapy of the Modena physician and about the pros and the contra
of shorter working hours: most of the people are taking sides with the
“scientific nature” of the official therapy or with the “barrenness”
of shorter working hours, that involves the minority instead. And it is
exactly for this reason that I protest, especially when sides are taken
publicly, via the press, because rationality, criticism and petty distinctions,
in fact, should have already been used for the previous situation (in the
health care and work fields), that actually was not very rational.
Even Viano himself contributed
to fuel this misunderstanding by opposing “the escape routes as a therapy”
to the two central issues. Their rationality degree is - I believe - very
shoddy inside themselves, besides being unsatisfactory as it is giving
rise to such answers. So: Di Bella is to our health care level as the 35
working hours are to the contradictions of capitalism might be the equation
to be used to replace the attitude of “taking sides”. Within this general
context, the press is playing a ruinous role that multiplies the worse
due to a lack of “criticality”.
And often of truthfulness.
The most fitting example of little criticality and low truthfulness is
the information on the transfer market.
Everybody knows that it
is completely made up but it has wide circulation and conventionally “seems
to be true” for a readership that “does not want to know”.
Let's give readers (and
television viewers) what they want, say editors and publishers. That's
the principle lying at the basis of corruption.
So, everything's all right,
isn't it?
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Italian
Mensile di Economia, Attualita` e Cultura
