Craziness
Dod Miller, “Birdman”
Italy has been having one of those weeks…
As is known, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been defeated – barely – in the elections which took place on the 9th and 10th of April. He now says though that the result “must be changed” because of his conviction that the vote was somehow rigged and, for the moment at least, has made it clear that he does not expect to leave his post until he, personally, is convinced that he has been fairly beaten – and that, in his view, he cannot be “fairly” beaten at all.
In a letter published in Saturday’s Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading newspaper, Mr. Berlusconi wrote: “Nothing has changed, regardless of how the official recount ends and whoever gains the majority in the lower house of parliament. We are faced with a stalemate in which, at least on the basis of the popular vote, there are no winners or losers.”
Presumably, if there are “no winners or losers,” he has not lost and could expect to stay where he is for the time being.
In Italy, as in many countries, it is not the outcome of the direct popular vote that determines the winner, but that is the only thing Berlusconi may have won. To make the matter even more embarrassing, the electoral law under which he has now lost the elections was heavily and controversially rewritten by his own government – over the dead bodies of the now victorious opposition – in an effort to shape the outcome.
All of this raises the unlikely, but still conceivable prospect that at some point the Carabinieri, the national police, may have to be called to evict Mr. Berlusconi from the Prime Minister’s offices at Palazzo Chigi.
It should be said that there is no reason to believe that these elections were especially crooked – nor has Berlusconi actually given any. They were merely close, as in the case of recent electoral contests in the United States (Bush-Gore) and in Germany (Schroeder-Merkel). Most Italians though expect some fiddling with voting results and on the whole simply assume that both sides are going to cheat to about the same degree. In this, political life here has a kind of kinship with horse racing. “Handicapping” racing bets in Italy is not so much based on looking at the past form of the horse on the track as it is on trying to guess exactly how a race has been fixed and then profiting from the outcome established by others.
At any rate, the upshot is that, left alone, Mr. Berlusconi would for the most part come off as nothing more than an especially bad loser and would eventually be driven out the door by laughter rather than anything more dramatic. Unfortunately, his opponent, Mr. Romano Prodi, is as poor a politician as he is humorless and is in a way keeping Berlusconi alive with his shrillness and the stamping of his tiny feet about how his electoral “triumph” should be immediately and unconditionally recognized.
Nothing much should come of all this except that it will serve to reinforce the general conviction in the country that the Italians are being governed by no-talent jerks on every political side.
By an interesting coincidence, on the same day Mr. Berlusconi’s defeat became evident, April 11th, the capo di tutti i capi, the “boss of bosses” of the Mafia, Mr. Bernardo Provenzano, also fell from power and was arrested after 43 (forty-three) years (years) on the run.
Mr. Provenzano, whom some suspect may have received political and other protection during the course of his professional life, cleverly extended his flight from justice over many decades by not going much of anywhere at all. He was seized in a country house a little more than a mile from the center of Corleone, Sicily, his home town. It is claimed he was arrested on the basis of “old-fashioned police work” after investigators followed a package of fresh underwear sent to him by his wife. She did his laundry in town.
A debate is now underway over Mr. Provenzano’s lifestyle, described by a senior prosecutor as being in line with a “Mafia ethic.” He lived simply, enjoying very few luxuries and 
consuming frugal meals mostly based on green vegetables and fresh homemade cheeses. Provenzano is now said to have run the huge crime empire under his supposed control by way of little notes he typed himself on an old electric typewriter. Most of these ended with a benediction, calling God’s grace and protection onto whoever received them.
The debate is superficially about whether speaking well about Provenzano’s clean living weakens the “struggle” against organized crime. Underlying this concern though is the simple fact that everything about the way he both lived and acted – at least over recent years – smacks of the lifestyle of a retiree on a not very good pension. Really cynical persons might be forgiven for wondering whether he was in fact the, ah, CEO of the whole Mafia shebang or just a poor bastard who finally got pulled in at a convenient political moment. Mr. Provenzano is 73.
Then, just to show that the entire country and all of its manifestations are “in mano alle creature” to use a Neapolitan expression – “in the hands of the children,” the image is that of a nursery taken over by its young charges – the Vatican has foolishly allowed itself to be drawn into an interesting promotion being run by an American publisher, the National Geographic Society, about the “Gospel of Judas.” The document, a Coptic papyrus from the 3rd or 4th Century AD, casts the fallen disciple as a benevolent figure, helping Jesus to save mankind.
This is a very old heresy and the Vatican, which also has very old mechanisms for dealing with these things, would not normally have bit. The Pope instead found occasion in a high profile ceremony – the Mass for “Holy (or ‘Maundy’) Thursday”, the Easter kickoff – to remind listeners that Judas is nothing more than a “traitor who values Jesus according to the categories of power and success.” A little rich coming from an institutional role, the Papacy, which historically has hardly been immune from considerations of either success or power – whose leader, a “Prince” in international law, wears a crown, sits on a throne and until only a couple of decades ago was carried in a sedan chair whenever he left the Vatican so that he would not have to walk.
The Church has also been extremely unhappy about the success of Dan Brown’s book, the “Da Vinci Code” – probably far more dangerous to orthodoxy than an impenetrable gnostic gospel anyway – but has handled that matter in the customary way by keeping the issue at the operational levels, letting the senior clergy and the usual “outspoken” bishops deal with it.
The shift in policy suggests that Benedict has begun changing his advisors, or at least is not much listening to the ones he inherited from the previous pope. John Paul II, as it happens, was rather open to other interpretations of Judas, writing in 1994 that, “even when Jesus says of Judas, the traitor, that it ‘would be better for him to have never been born,’ the declaration cannot be understood with certainty in the sense of his being damned for eternity.”
None of the three questions discussed above are really important in any overwhelming cosmic sense. It is rather that they all put into relief the cracks showing in three of the principal institutions governing Italian life. They also all say something about the way these institutions interact, in particular about how the political vacuum that has grown up over the last years in the country has left openings that both the Church and the Mafia attempt to fill. The mafiosi find it an appropriate moment to finally “retire” the old figurehead boss and the Church moves more aggressively to influence overall public opinion. Both are theoretically international organizations, but both inevitably view the world through an Italian lens.
What is worrying is that they do not seem to know what they are doing either.