Bunnies
“Bunnies,” Ana Bagayan
This is only a short note. All the real, ah, “meat” in it is summed up in the nice painting of bunny cannibalism by the Armenian-American artist Ana Bagayan, shown above. You can see others of her works (here).
The “political crisis” we spoke so sniffily about the other day is now presumably over. While it would be too much to say we predicted this, “Upper Italy” is anything but surprised that it turned out to be the dampest sort of squib.
Romano Prodi’s resignation as Prime Minister has been “refused” by the formal Head of State, the President of the Republic Mr. Giorgio Napoletano. As a result, Prodi will return to Parliament some time in the next few days with precisely the same set of ministers he has now to seek a new vote of confidence. This will presumably be obtained and things will then continue to stagger on more or less as they have up to now.
The Prodi government is a shambling affair and any stiff breeze can – and probably will – knock it over, but just for the record we would like to mention that the particular issue, or pack of issues, that brought it down now has essentially to do with how to manage relations with the United States.
The entire Government is more or less officially anti-American. The news coverage on the State-owned RAI television network in anything unrelated to the Catholic Church and the Pope could probably give points to Al Jazeera – see (here). Government ministers of all flavors vie in publicly blaming the U.S. – and that country’s President most especially – for just about anything from avian flu to insufficient snow on the ski slopes to, oddly, the weakness of their own coalition.
So the question is not really one of whether or not to be against the Americans, but rather of how to go about it, a battle between the talking-out-of-both-sides-of-the-mouth politicians who would like to slither between the cracks and at least maintain written treaty obligations – sort of – and the more-than-pure-at-heart who will have no truck at all with scum capable of winning the Cold War and then bragging about it.
That is on the surface, where things appear to turn on renewing the appropriations that maintain Italian troops in Afghanistan and keeping a promise made to allow an American military base near Vicenza, in northeastern Italy, to build a new airstrip.
It happens though that the extreme attention on these non-issues – “non” because there is no real choice in the matter, both must happen – has also helped the Government out of a terrible hole it had got into over same-sex and “common law” marriage. The present majority made some excessively clear electoral promises about this issue – one we have of course already spoken about (here) – then insisted on the question even after the elections, and finally discovered to its horror that the Vatican had decided to seriously flex clerical muscles over the whole thing.
Though we will see how it goes in practice, Mr. Prodi has – on paper – patched up his leaky majority with a twelve-point plan that expresses a list of priorities on which his coalition is now theoretically bound to move forward in lock-step.
Last week’s number one issue, some form of civil marriage that is not marriage but is otherwise indistinguishable from the institution, somehow did not make the cut and, in the confusion, has disappeared from the list. Every dark cloud has a silver lining.