Italian Political Humor
Sircana conducting economic negotiations
As we recently pointed out – (here) – Italy likes to take its time over political trends and is only now, a couple of decades later than elsewhere, getting around to asking itself whether having a strongly Communist component in the national government – (here) – is a good thing or not.
As is now true in much of the rest of the world, the really substantive part of the debate is no longer conducted in Parliament, but rather through the circuit of Internet joke distribution. This arrived today:
The story is told that when God created the world, in order that humankind prosper appropriately, he decided to concede two distinctive virtues to each of the nations to come. And so he decided that..
The Swiss would be orderly and law-abiding.
The English persevering and studious.
The Japanese industrious and patient.
The French elegant and refined.
The Spaniards cheerful and welcoming.
When he reached the Italians, he turned to the angel who was taking notes and said:
“The Italians will be intelligent, honest and Communist.”
When the Act of Creation was completed, the recording angel then reminded God of this specification:
“Lord, you have given each nation two virtues, but the Italians have three. That means they will be able to dominate all the others.”
“Dammit! That’s right… But divine virtues once granted cannot be taken away. Let Italy have its three then! But no single individual can have more than two at the same time.”
And so it was:
The Italian who is both honest and a Communist cannot be intelligent.
He who is intelligent and a Communist cannot be honest.
And whoever is both intelligent and honest cannot be a Communist.
As is often the case with this kind of joke, it seems to be most appreciated by the people it is told against. For one, it is rather old-fashioned in style, so they don’t have to take it seriously. It also has the virtue of neatly summing up the “broad brush” view that the Left takes of its own leaders, considering that the smarter ones (and both we and they are mostly talking about Italy’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Massimo D’Alema) – (here) – are not perhaps of shining honesty, and that the sincere ones (like Mr. Pietro Fassino, the Secretary of the neo-Communist Democratici di Sinistra – “Left Democrat” – Party) are not always thought to be particularly clever.
Just for the record, the Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, is not a Communist, but is considered to be both sincere and a dim bulb in his own right.
Now we’d like to sum up the main themes presently moving through Italian political life, keeping in mind that the current dynamic of government here is generated by interaction between the intelligent-but-crooked and the sincere-but-stupid, each side rowing industriously against the other.
At the moment, newspaper front pages are dominated by two political stories. The first relates to the Government’s Chief Spokesman, a nice man named Silvio Sircana, who was photographed in his car on a hot summer night engaged in a discussion – presumably about economic matters – with a dramatically transvestite streetwalker.
When it became clear that, despite strongish pressures to the contrary, a number of papers were going to use the photographs, this country’s sleepy “privacy authority” suddenly woke up, discovered that someone’s personal life was being invaded, and issued a decree forbidding their publication, a thing it had never done before. At which point – with utter predictability – the papers first published the white space where the “censored” snaps might have appeared and then a few days later ran them anyway.
The second issue, closely related to the schizophrenic debate over whether Italy is part of the West or not – at least vis à vis Islamic extremism as an attractive alternative to American “hegemony” – see (here) – has to do with emerging news about the terms granted to Afghanistan’s Taliban in exchange for the release of Daniele Mastrogiacomo, a kidnapped correspondent of the “progressive” Rome daily “La Repubblica.”
In a story which appears to have stylistic points of contact with the seizure in Iraq of another leftist journalist, Giuliana Sgrena – (here) – 
Mastrogiacomo, a tall, bulky blond with blue eyes, was taken while swanning around the Afghan countryside attempting to make contact with the “Resistance” and improbably disguised as a Pashtun tribesman. For some reason, there was apparently suspicion that he might be a spy…
The Government, very sharply under fire from its own, internal leftist “opposition,” was absolutely terrified that the affair might trigger its fall – for the second time in nearly as many weeks – if even one of the journalist’s golden locks was in any way damaged. As it happens, the Taliban then cut off his driver’s head, possibly as a gesture of good will, since the Italian Government reacted by deciding to propose a big international conference starring, yes, the Taliban as the good guys, as well as arranging for the release of significant number of very senior, ahm, “freedom fighters” from Afghan prisons. The number is imprecise because, while the official Goverment figure is five, the other half of the same Government which was not amused by all this then let it be “semi-officially” known that the total number was “well over twice” that.
The related Italian figures of speech are that the Goverment “ha dato via il culo or “ha calato le braghe” with respect to the kidnappers’ demands – respectively, that they “gave away their ass” or “dropped their trousers” to the Taliban, both obviously with a similar sense.
Italy has over and over again given its word to allies that it would stop buying off kidnappers, a promise it finds difficult to keep. The US, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands have all protested sharply about the deal the Italians cut to re-purchase Mastrogiacomo and the US has further gone on to suggest that offering to legitimize a bunch of cut-throat opium dealers by way of a big international peace conference is probably a “bad” idea. There is naturally some thrashing around about all of this in Italy, further because there is suspicion that even worse details may emerge. Just for clarification, the President of Aghanistan, Mr. Hamid Karzai, now says with regard to the whole mess that he would not be party to such a deal “another time.”
As an aside, it might be mentioned that Mr. Karzai’s role in the matter is hard to decipher. It is difficult to see just how the Italians could have twisted his arm into doing something as stupid as releasing a particularly alarming lot of senior Talibani officials without his bothering to mention the issue to any other of his foreign allies. A really cynical person might think the Farnesina – the Italian Foreign Office – got taken to the cleaners by a wily oriental who found an elegant way to cover something he felt he had to do anyway, if over the dead bodies of his other Western friends.
Finally, to get back to Italian domestic politics, there is a third major theme, one that cannot really be summed up in newspaper headlines except as a technical legislative matter. That is the broad necessity, recognized by every political stripe and color, of rewriting the laws governing the Italian electoral process so that voters cannot again bring an excessively weak administration into office. It is unfortunate that this must be faced by a Government that has seen the handwriting on the wall and is desperate to gerrymander its way out of the hole it is in. A Minister in the Prodi Government, Ms. Giovanna Melandri, speaks approvingly in this morning’s papers of a plan to lower the voting age to sixteen…