Fiddling while Rome Burns
Cause for concern
This is not a happy moment in Italy.
The Neapolitan garbage crisis – actually, the fifth such crisis in three years – shows with remarkable clarity that the State here is progressively less able to maintain even basic services. We are assuming you’ve seen something about this in the papers since it has been unusually well-reported abroad. In essence, for many and very vague reasons, trash is not being collected in the city and, as we write, an estimated seven to nine thousand tons of it are simply lying in the streets, where from time to time local inhabitants set fire to it to keep rats and the stink at bay.
The breakdown in service is being attributed to many causes; a local “Not In My Back Yard” movement undercutting the Left in the matter of opening new garbage dumps, the extreme ineptitude of the Neapolitan city government, complex plotting by the Camorra, the traditional Neapolitan mafia (here), which is said to profit somehow from independently exporting local trash to Germany, and, finally, to stupidity on the part of the national government, unable to get its act together in any significant way about much at all.
The last “national” solution imposed by a government-nominated trash czar was a deal to export garbage from Naples to Romania. This broke down when Romanian public opinion, such as it is, attempted to understand who exactly was getting the $110 a ton subsidy the Italians were paying somebody or other to accept this stuff. At a certain point the Romanian Government claimed – roughly – that it knew nothing much about the whole thing and incoming shipments were more or less marked “return to sender.” That was back at garbage crisis four.
There is probably at least some truth in all of the explanations offered for why it is impossible to collect trash in Naples. None of them really matter, in the sense that, whatever the cause, effective government would usually be presumed to be able to deal with it. The reaction to the latest round of trash troubles on the part of the national government shows, once again, that no one at all is now minding the store in Rome. Still another “garbage czar” – the seventh – has been appointed and administrative arms have been twisted to persuade other Italian regions to accept shipments of Neapolitan trash.
(Some sources consider that Italy is on its ninth garbage czar, but this figure appears to count multiple appointments of the same person. It is not a stable position.)
As might be expected – as ought to have been expected by any politician with half a brain – the attempt to export the crisis to other and better run parts of the country has led to unhappiness and street demonstrations on the part of those who fail to understand why virtue in disposing in a rational way of their own junk should cause them to have to pick up the pieces of the mess in Naples. Most other Italians were already unhappily inclined to view the Neapolitans as a bunch of unreliable layabouts in any case. Now they have been given proof to sustain the popular prejudice.
But it is not just about trash collecting or the lack thereof. There are “higher” themes at boil. A planned lecture by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Rome has been cancelled after students there – by way of nothing more than a few banners, really – made it clear they did not appreciate a showy papal visit from a man who, a few years before his election to the Holy See, proclaimed that Galileo had deserved everything he’d got when tried for his heretical views on the rotation of the Earth a few centuries back.
The students felt these comments indicated only limited support for science and free academic inquiry. They also thought it would be fun to stick a finger in the eye of the leftist parties supporting the unpopular Prodi government who have been sucking up to the Church in a desperate attempt to hang onto power. In other words, the Pope got caught in a battle between the moderate and less moderate Left.
One reason this could happen is that almost the entire spectrum of Italian public thinking quietly considers that Benedict has been a disastrous Pope who has completely misread the willingness of the country to get back to the kind of Catholic “old time religion” he espouses. He has in every way attempted to turn back the clock on the Vatican II reforms; with a return to the “Latin” mass (here), the pronouncement that no other Christian church can be considered a “real” church at all (here), his weakness for 14th Century head gear (here) and so on. Last week he got press – probably only in Italy – when he served Mass with his back to the faithful and then pronounced a sermon seated on his throne, perfect throwbacks to the monarchical style of worship whose lack had not, to say the least, been deeply felt.
Sometime back “Upper Italy” jokingly suggested (here) that this Pope might revive the use of the “sedan chair,” where God’s Viceroy on Earth is carried about on the shoulders of the faithful when he leaves the Vatican so that his sanctified feet do not have to actually touch the ground. The practice was abolished only in the early 1970’s and its return would be perfectly coherent with the rest of Benedict’s thinking.
However that may be, this Pope has shown himself to be utterly tone-deaf in respect to what the Italian public is prepared to accept of “its” Church. It is perhaps a question of timing. The Church here has behaved abominably over the centuries and for many Italians those “bad old days” have not yet become fond sentimental memories.
Finally, and just to wind up a quick whirl of institutional troubles, the Minister of Justice in the Prodi government, Mr. Clemente Mastella – someone we have already had occasion to be snippy about (here) and (here) – has resigned following the arrest of his wife for political corruption and the news that he himself is under investigation for related crimes. Aside from the evident entertainment value, this is important because Mr. Mastella’s micro-party, the UDEUR (don’t ask what this stands for), provides precisely the margin in parliamentary seats that keeps the present very wobbly government in power. The party has now said that it will supply “external” support for the government, a way of saying that its votes from this point must be purchased on a case by case basis rather than wholesale.
Since the question is almost entirely political, very little information is available on the nature of the case against Mastella and his wife. It might be fairly said in fact that their actual guilt or innocence in relation to the charges is not a question of much interest. To the degree that anything is known, they appear to have indulged in an excess of classic machine politics, leaning in an overly heavy way on local administrators who were not prepared to “play ball” in the time honored fashion regarding matters relating to political appointments at a state hospital and whatnot.
Mr. Mastella – who likes to point our that he is the only important Catholic politician in the country who has not been divorced or is not living in sin – has said that he is a victim of judicial interference in the political process, and that is probably true, though it hardly changes the nature of the kind of sailing close to the wind that has characterized his career and his friendships. In other words, whether he is a crook or not barely comes into it.
It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. The present extreme weakness of the standing government has left openings that an aggressive Church on the one hand and that ambitious – and highly politicized – magistrates on the other have been rushing to fill. Yesterday a Sicilian court sentenced the island’s regional Governor, Mr. Salvatore Cuffaro – yes, we’ve dealt with him too, (here) – to five years in prison on charges of having informed a Mafia suspect that his telephone was bugged. The case against the politician was decidedly dodgy and there is no special reason to believe that it was actually decided on merit one way or the other.
Mr. Cuffaro, Sicily’s most powerful political figure, has consistently delivered huge electoral majorities supporting Silvio Berlusconi’s Center-Right formation. The Sicilian magistrature is instead very largely in the hands of crusading “red” magistrates who have a long history of wishing to correct the errors the population makes when it goes into the voting booths. The fifteen year trial of the former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti for “presumed external collusion” with the Mafia – which eventually concluded with a verdict of “not guilty” – was brought to you by the same folks. Please do not get us wrong. Cuffaro may or may not be guilty as hell. The problem is that this was not the issue that led to his incrimination and trial.
A somewhat similar case is that of a different set of magistrates who are very publicly attempting to incriminate former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for having asked – in a bugged telephone call – a senior executive of the RAI State television network to find jobs for a couple of large-breasted starlets. There is no chance on earth of this actually coming to trial, nor even any reason to believe it is in fact illegal. What it is is sleazy – as is Mr. Berlusconi – and pushing the issue is simply a way of keeping it in the papers as it becomes more and more evident that national elections are now probably inevitable.
What is interesting about these questions – including the Neapolitan garbage matter, though we are not going to explain why here – is that they all stem fundamentally from instances of that part of the Left not in government attempting to force their representatives who are instead in office back onto the path of ideological purity. It is not the present government that is after Clemente Mastella; they desperately need his handful of votes. Nor are they after Silvio Berlusconi, a political competitor certainly, but one whose support the government now urgently requires if it is to attempt to do anything that looks like governing.
Italy, in other words, is currently at a high point on the cyclical curve of fiddling while Rome burns – a national sport, but one ill adapted to the moment.