With Italian media being largely compromised by political parties, cooperative companies, media and business magnates and financial strongholds, Italians have remained with only two real outlets for their frustration and disillusionment with contemporary politics and society, the Internet and satire. Blunders, scandals and a wide array of political issues that leak out into the public sphere instantly reach the web, where people vent their anger or have a (bitter) laugh at the guilty party by leaving comments on Twitter or circulating satirical cartoons on Facebook. And then there is satire, a particularly popular means of political criticism and contestation in Italy. Of course it is not new, and has been applied for a long time in the democratic world. Yet, with the various political scandals of the past year, as well as Monti’s harsh austerity policies and rigid attitude, seemingly unconcerned with the disastrous effects of these measures on the lives of many Italians, political satire in Italy is increasingly putting the finger on the sore spots, serving as a sort of mediatized vox populi.

And political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February, for example, Maurizio Crozza – best known for the satirical impersonations of politicians during his ten minute sketch on the weekly current affairs program, Ballarò, aired on the most left-centered of the three state-run RAI channels – was attacked by members of the audience at the yearly musical festival of San Remo. At the end of an unflattering imitation of a Silvio Berlusconi trying to buy the Italians’ votes, with which Crozza started his performance, people shouted that he should leave the stage, and that there should be no politics that night, making it apparently impossible for the comedian to continue. Although Crozza seemed affected and offended by the attack, and nearly walked off the stage, necessitating the intervention of host Fabio Fazio, it is likely that the entire scene was set up so as to boost audience ratings. Nevertheless, it shows how important satire has become in debates about politics, and in society as a whole.

Satire mostly surfs the web, though. One comedian in particular has drawn advantages from this, creating his own, grassroots political movement which communicates and organizes itself primarily on the web, completely knocking over traditional politics: Beppe Grillo. After a career in commercial television and (initially) without any apparent political conviction, in the early 2000s, Grillo began traveling across Italy, performing in theaters and out on the street where he unloaded his anger over ecological issues, warfare and Berlusconi. In 2005, he created, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, an Internet entrepreneur who eventually became the guru behind Grillo’s “5 star Movement”, the Beppegrillo.it blog. In 2007 and 2008 the duo organized the so-called V-day (where the ‘V’ stands for ‘vaffanculo’, the Italian F-word), an unofficial protest day against traditional politics – from left to right – that took place across Italy. Grillo indeed claims to promote neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies. (Hence, his recent opening up to the neo-fascist Casa Pound movement in the name of non-partisanship.)

It is mostly on the web that Grillo’s anti-politics take shape. Journalist Giuliano Santoro – author of an interesting study of the Grillo phenomenon (Un grillo qualunque. Il movimento 5 stelle e il populismo digitale nella crisi dei partiti italiani, 2012) – claims that Facebook in particular favors Grillo in that it creates “a bond between the Comedian and the People which makes possible keeping together […] both the propagandist strength of the “logo” that is so typical of the classical relation of consumerism, and the emotive and intimate power of ‘friendship,’ typical of social networks such as Facebook.” Put simply, Facebook allows Grillo to provide people with a sense of identity and belonging to community, a “product” which he can sell without having to gain the consumer’s confidence, considering his notoriety and Facebook’s capacity to create online – and subsequently also real – communities. And what Grillo has to sell, sells well, particularly since the political scandals of 2012. Recent opinion polls indicated that the “5 star Movement” is gaining support and may do well in the upcoming elections, due also to Grillo’s so-called “Tsunami tour” across the peninsula, these past few weeks. Grillo’s returning to old-fashioned street politics and online democracy seems to be paying off.

Yet, there is a big downside to the “5 star Movement,” and to Grillo’s character. His blog, for example, is not really a blog, as Grillo himself admitted: it is mostly a site of communication and propaganda, with no interaction between Grillo and his followers. Nor did the two highly successful V-days originate “from below.” Rather, they were programmed and effectively “sold” by the Casaleggio-Grillo duo. Similarly, Grillo’s political rallies – which are often filmed and put online –are more a one-man show, which, again, do not promote interaction but simply reproduce the stand-up comedian format of television. Accordingly, the people who attend these meetings are spectators rather than demonstrators. His activities, therefore, represent no more than a shift from television to new media. Things apparently change, but are essentially the same.

The obsession with new media reached a climax when it was decided that people could present themselves as candidates for the 5 star Movement primaries in 2012 by uploading videos of themselves to the Internet, where they would receive votes, a form of democracy from below. But this failed horribly as only a very small number of Italians voted, which was to be expected, with Italy still lagging behind in Internet usage.

Grillo’s hierarchical and undemocratic nature, finally, was revealed when he expelled a regional and a communal councilor of the “5 star Movement” in the city of Bologna. One of them had participated in the abovementioned TV program Ballarò, a decision which clashed with Grillo’s number one rule of complete absence from the mainstream media, although he does not always apply that rule to himself. In October 2012, he pulled off a publicity stunt as he swam the Straits of Messina for the launch of his local election campaign in Sicily, where the “5 star Movement” would be very successful.

Clearly, Grillo is afraid of losing control. Or maybe he just doesn’t like it when someone draws attention away from him, as also became clear after a member of the “5 star Movement” was elected mayor of Parma during local elections in 2012, leading to polemics with Grillo who tried to dictate his next moves. The Movement does indeed come across very much as an army of little soldiers, who are dismissed as soon as they step out of line.

So how would they govern Italy, should they win the elections? Of course, they won’t, but if they would, Grillo-Casaleggio would probably dissolve the movement. It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution. At a local level, though, the Movement is doing well, which illustrates an increasing call for local activism and participant democracy, due not in the least to a discontent with European politics in these times of crisis and austerity.

Grillo’s success also shows how traditional politics are being affected ever more by the power of satire and democracy via the web. In a way, this is not very surprising, Italy having been run for nearly 20 years by a man many consider a clown, and who has indeed built much of his popularity on the Italians’ (bad) sense of humor.

Yet, to a certain degree, Grillo’s assault on the political caste is a good thing. In a country where traditional political parties have exploited ordinary citizens for far too long, distracting them with semi-nude ballerinas or simply brainwashing them through television, it is time people wake up and smell the coffee. But I’m afraid Grillo is not our man. Although many of the things he says are true, they do no more than feed grudges. Grillo does not offer any real alternative, so that voting for him is not a vote for something but against, and that is never really productive.

In a previous article I argued that Italy is witnessing a sort of end of ideology: Prime Minister Mario Monti’s technical government responds to the economic market alone, while Beppe Grillo’s a-political grassroots movement is winning over disappointed voters. But with the elections in sight, the old political guard is warming up, eager to regain control over the country. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has governed the country on and off since 1994, is first in line: after months of tactical holding off, the Cavaliere – as Berlusconi is also called – decided to get back into the game as it became clear that Monti might run for the elections. For some weeks now he has been appearing on every single political and current affairs show on Italian television, primarily on his own TV channels but also on the more critical, independent La7, where he engaged in a highly media hyped duel with a critical journalist Berlusconi managed to have removed from state television back in 2002. On another talk-show, old times again revived as Berlusconi took it out on magistrates who ordered the former PM to pay €36 million ($48 million) a year in a divorce settlement with this ex-wife Veronica Lario: they were accused of being Communists and now also feminists.

The sense of history repeating itself was reflected in a satirical cartoon, where we see Berlusconi’s face on TV as he yells “Happy 1994!” to a terror-stricken viewer. Unless Monti’s newly found political list, “Civic choice,” can put a stop to it. Positioned neither to the left nor to the right, Monti seems to want to do away with traditional polarities in politics for good and give continuity to his technical government, with no one to respond to but the European Union. In fact, when criticized for the rigorous measures taken in order to bring down the government bond spreads, i.e. the spread between Italian benchmark 10 year bonds and safer German Bunds, Monti inflexibly shifted responsibility to bad management by previous governments. In the name of rigor and economic reconstruction, he has thus been able to pull off tricks none of his predecessors could ever have dreamed of getting away with. “Europe wants it” and “I respond to the market,” were Monti’s stoical replies to criticism.

During an international conference on protest cultures in Italy, sociologist Donatella della Porta argued that Monti’s government disguises a “corrupting democracy” and what she coins as “clean corruption,” in that it presents itself as an a-political and neutral government while in reality it is very much immersed in economical politics in the Euro zone (unsurprisingly, Monti is connected to Goldman Sachs). Consequently it has pushed through anti-Constitutional measures that may work in Northern countries such as Germany, but not in Italy. Sponsored (at least until recently) by politics on the left and on the right as well as by mass media, Monti’s government thus follows a neo-liberal program with a highly non-democratic way of decision making, where trust is not sought among citizens but economic markets.

And Monti is not ready to give that up yet. Before his formal decision to participate in the upcoming elections, during the holiday season, he declared that he was “open” to lead the government if he was “asked” to do so. More recently, he invited the Italian center-left to “silence” the more radical, anti-reform elements in its ranks, including the left-wing union organization CGIL. Should the “civic choice” he is offering Italians perhaps be read in ironical sense then? It leads Della Porta to conclude that Monti is more Berlusconian than Berlusconi, whose many trials, gaffes, indecent behavior and political incapacities have made him the official laughing stock of Europe. Monti, on the other hand, is somewhat of a wolf in sheep’s clothing: with the European Union behind him, the serious and polyglot professor is far more respectable than his predecessor. He is indeed the absolute counterpart of “Mr Bunga Bunga,” and even those Italians who didn’t/don’t see through Berlusconi’s game seem to get that: opinion polls reveal that what people most appreciate about Monti is the fact that he has given back “credibility” to the country, a catchy formula which is often repeated in the press, but actually reflects a linguistic media habit where complex issues are reduced to slogans.

In reality, he is not as innocent as he would like us to believe, and I’m not so sure Monti is really doing Italy any good. Recent figures show that youth unemployment has reached 30%, while more and more companies and factories (and not just small and medium enterprises) are closing or being relocated to East-Europe, Asia and Latin-America. Even Fiat, the country’s biggest private-sector employer, is no longer made in Italy. Italians’ purchasing power is staggering, as they are continually faced with tax increases and new taxes such as the much debated council tax, whereas wages – for those who can claim any – fail to grow accordingly. All these problems are arrogantly sidetracked by pulling out the “Europe wants it” story, or by placing Italy on the same level as other European countries, forgetting that Italy seriously lags behind wages – again, for those who (still) have a (paid) job – and civil rights, in comparison with Northern European countries. And what about Monti’s raising of the retirement age? Surely, he could have made exceptions for old age pensions? Contrary to more advanced European countries, in Italy many workers from older and poorer generations have been working since their early teens, and therefore no longer see the end of it. On top of all of this, Monti’s ministers have attempted to defend the measures indulging in offensive, selfish and downright stupid comments, for example about Italian youngsters being “choosy” and pretentious when it comes down to getting a job, completely ignoring the privileged positions of their own children who have clearly been favored by their parents’ connections.

Perhaps Monti’s “Civic Choice” list is an attempt to make amends, and make up for some of the harsh measures he was “forced” to carry out by the European Union? He has in fact announced that he wants to modify the law on council tax and suspend a future tax-increase. But is he to be trusted? Or does Italy risk ending up with something worse than Berlusconi?

Forty three years ago, on 12 December, 1969, a bomb exploded in a crowded bank in Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing seventeen and wounding eighty eight. This bomb was the first in a series of terrorist massacres performed as part of the so-called “strategy of tension,” a political climate of terror orchestrated by a variety of right-wing organizations which aimed at promoting “a turn to an authoritarian type of government.” (see Anna Cento Bull’s study on Italian Neofascism) Other major bomb massacres followed: in 1974, during an anti-fascist demonstration in the Northern city of Brescia and on a train traveling from Florence to Bologna. Bologna was also the stage of another dramatic massacre, when a bomb exploded in the waiting room of the central railway station, on 2 August 1980: eighty-five people died (including a three-year old girl), two hundred were wounded.

Needless to say, the 1970s have a bad reputation, in Italy. Notwithstanding the fact that two neo-fascist terrorists were sentenced for the Bologna massacre, there are still too many unresolved issues and (state) secrets for Italians to make amends with this difficult past. In fact, the so-called “years of lead” are known mostly for the large number of terrorist attacks carried out by both left-wing and right-wing terrorists, as well as other forms of “subversive” violence. These have given shape to a “collective trauma” which the country has failed to come to terms with, in spite of official monuments and annual commemorative rituals that really only contribute to the silencing of memories.

The lack of a commonly shared, official memory of these events might explain why there are so many cultural products that take on the issue of 1970s political violence. A number of movies produced since 2000, for example, have tried to narrate the story of the 1970s, in different ways and with different purposes.

Recently, acclaimed filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana has attempted to visualize the traumatic memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre in Romanzo di una strage (“Piazza Fontana. The Italian Conspiracy,” 2012). The movie focuses not so much on the massacre itself but on the mysterious death of an anarchist who was arrested after the massacre and interrogated for three days, before he was thrown out of the window of the police headquarters. No legal truth has ever been reached on this incident, which was put off as a tragic accident. Giordana too fails to bring light on it, though he probably didn’t even intend to do so. Using the genres of the detective story and the Italian cop film, he presents a tale of mystery and secrets where the responsibility for the massacre is split between neo-fascists and anarchists, perhaps in an attempt to forge a symbolical reconciliation, which, instead in my judgment, only reopens the wound.

And so the phantom of the 1970s continues to haunt the country, as happened in May 2012, when the chief executive of a leading Italian manufacturer of thermoelectric power plants in Genoa was kneecapped by two men. Mainstream media instantly and dramatically called back memories of (left-wing) terrorism. In fact, the term “years of lead” primarily refers to left-wing terrorists, who used fire arms (“lead” being a metaphor for bullets) rather than bombs, and thus ignores right-wing terrorism which mostly had recourse to bombs, as in Piazza Fontana or Bologna. Of course it is not impossible, in times of crisis and social malaise, for some wannabe Che Guevara to decide to have a go at revolution again. But to talk about the return of the “subversive violence” of the 1970s is senseless. We are in a completely different social and historical context. More importantly, there has been a change of mentality which excludes any possibility of a new terrorist generation: Communism is no longer in, and most young people are more worried about how much money they have in their cell phones than about bringing down capitalism.

In fact, I think that we have been witnessing a sort of end of ideology in Italy: Mario Monti’s “technical” government responds primarily to the economic market, and the highly successful “5 star Movement,” led by comedian Beppe Grillo, explicitly has presented itself as an a-political party which promotes neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies, but ideas. The traditional left, finally, has had its own demons to fight with: Florence’s mayor Matteo Renzi, a young and highly overestimated politician whose political views seem closer to the neoliberal right than to his own party. In a move not dissimilar to the one with which Silvio Berlusconi managed to win over the Italians in 1994, 37-year old Renzi had a go at the presidential primaries for the Democratic Party last month, promoting vague ideas about generational change and modernization. In doing so, he built strongly on the American model, with his Obama-like blouse with blue tie, tour bus and catchy slogans. Although such attempts to break with the hierarchical and rigid schemes of Italian politics is necessary, Renzi’s incapacity (or reluctance) to take discussions beyond the idea of generational change and engage in more serious political debates make him a highly inappropriate candidate. His success both among disappointed left-wing voters and right-wing voters in search of a new leader is another sign of Italy’s current struggle to define a political identity and outline a future direction, a struggle exemplified also by Berlusconi’s neoliberal right.

Over the past few months, Forza Italia has been desperately seeking a new political leader, up to the point that the party announced its own presidential primaries with some twenty candidates, an unthinkable situation when Berlusconi was still in charge, the party being constructed entirely around his figure. This has further fragmented the party, pushing right-wing voters in the direction of Renzi. However, this may also have been Berlusconi’s strategy – to create the impression that his party, and the country as a whole, cannot do without his leadership.

Berlusconi purports to be needed, motivating his umpteenth change of mind about going back into politics for the good of the country. Not very convincing, though: the day after Mario Monti’s announcement of resignation, the bond spreads rose instantly. The country risks losing the confidence of economic markets which Monti so painfully obtained. He brought the spreads down from nearly 600 in 2011, when Berlusconi resigned, to some 300 before Berlusconi announced his return, earlier this week.  Now, Berlusconi seems to be building his election campaign on a new enemy: the ‘scam’ of the bond spreads.

The world no longer seems to be run by politics or warfare, but predominantly by economic markets. People too are tired of politics and ideology, and ready for a new start. This increases the tendency to talk about difficult memories of political violence in terms of stereotypes and clichés. Interpreting acts of violence like the attack in Genoa in May 2012 as the reproduction or continuation of something that happened 40 years ago reveals a lack of critical analysis, an unwillingness to take responsibility for what’s happening today, and a turning away from problems which have their roots in the present. It’s the “easy way out,” and yet another sign of how the past continues to haunt the country and obstruct the way forward.

In the early 1990s, the political scandal “Bribesville” led to the emergence of a new political class in Italy, headed by Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party Forza Italia (“Go Italy”). Bettino Craxi’s political protégée promised the Italians a “clean, reasonable and modern country.” Instead, the media magnate turned Italy into the “sick man of Europe”: “a country still struggling between modernity and backwardness, between the need/will to change and the fear of losing some local or specific privileges.” Twenty years on, a new corruption scandal has emerged, and the country seems to have returned to its point of departure, in spite of Berlusconi’s dismissal as Prime Minister.

This is not just Berlusconi’s fault, as I discussed in an earlier post . After all, he was voted in by many Italians, even if his control over the media (the Berlusconi family owns several TV channels, a publishing house and national daily) suggest a certain degree of political manipulation. The problem is that there is a mindset where getting away with (bad) things is a kind of national sport. It relates to the diffidence of Italian citizens towards the state, as historian John Foot explains in Italy’s Divided Memory:

“T]he Italian state has been in the throes of a semipermanent legitimation crisis ever since its inception. The basic ‘rules of the game’ have never been accepted by many Italians in terms of a ‘rational’ management of the state and the political system. They have, instead, been partly replaced by other, unwritten ‘rules’ that have institutionalized patronage, clientelism, and informal modes of behaviour and exchange.”

This legitimation crisis is evident, for example, in tax evasion but also – on the part of the state – in the use of excessive violence against citizens during social conflicts. The most exemplary case was the G8 summit in Genoa, in 2001, when police killed a student activist, savagely beat up activists and journalists during a police raid in the former Diaz school, and indulged in forms of torture at the Bolzaneto prison, where the nightmare continued for some 100 victims of the Diaz raid. Although the movie Diaz – Don’t clean up this blood (Daniele Vicari, 2012) gives an accurate account of what was defined as a “Mexican-style massacre,” it fails to take a real stance on the matter as responsibilities are split between the police (one of the police officers inside the Diaz school symbolically apologizes to one of the wounded activists, the view of a girl bleeding from her head clearly generating a sense of guilt) and the provocative and violent “black bloc” youth, the pretext for police to raid the Diaz school in the first place. In the movie, a couple of them find a hideout in a bar across the former school, on the night of the massacre: when – the following morning – they explore the abandoned building, traces of blood and debris unveil the horror that had taken place there. One of them penitently cries out that it was their fault.

The Genoa incidents are among a long list of traumatic memories, which remain controversial also because of a corrupt judicial system in Italy: earlier in 2012, ten Genoa activists accused of damaging property risked prison sentences of 10 to 15 years each, whereas the excessive physical violence used by the police in the Diaz school, on the other hand, was left unpunished. The trials for a series of dramatic bomb massacres that occurred between 1969 and 1980 had similar outcomes: 35 years after the 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan, for example, the main suspects were identified as the culprits but received no prison sentences, for bureaucratic and legal reasons. On top of this, the families of the 17 victims were summoned to pay the trial expenses.

So Italians have some reason to not trust the state and its legal system. To be “bad,” in Italy, is a virtue, and this might explain the country’s infinite troubles with corruption. Throughout 2012, a series of scandals involving political parties from various ideological backgrounds followed each other up like a tragicomic sitcom. It started with the centre party La Margherita (“Daisy Party”), whose treasurer Luigi Lusi has been arrested for embezzling party funds. Next, it was the turn of the xenophobe Lega Nord (“Northern League”), which for years boasted of being corruption-free, and even built its very identity on the idea that Rome was full of thieves, as opposed to the clean North. Now it turns out that the Lega used party funds to buy leader Umberto Bossi’s son his university degrees, in Albania.

The most recent scandal, finally, involves the heir to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the People of Freedom party (PDL). Italians were plunged back into the ancient Rome of the Satyricon as news came out of PDL members from the Lazio regional council spending taxpayers’ money on luxury holidays, expensive cars and extravagant dress-up parties. Regional chief Franco Fiorito has been arrested for embezzlement of party funds of over $1,500,000, whereas a councilor spent nearly $40,000 on a toga party attended by 2,000 people – including Fiorito, nicknamed Batman – dressed up as Roman centurions or wearing pigs masks, while fondling women and feeding on oysters and champagne.

Ironically, Fiorito has tried to defend himself by claiming to have been among the angry crowd that had symbolically thrown pennies at Craxi, during the “Bribesville” investigations in 1993, one night when the Socialist leader left his residence in Rome. This historical moment came to represent the political demise of Craxi. Today, Fiorito has become the new face of political corruption in Italy.

This is the social context of the satirical TV show Blob, which I analyzed in an earlier post.  Blob brilliantly hit right on the spot when it opened its episode of 26 September 2012 with the “Mr Creosote” sketch from Monty Python’s satirical movie The Meaning of Life (1983 ). Mr Creosote is a surrealistically obese man who literally stuffs himself with food in a fancy restaurant. As he eats and – at the same time – coughs up his food, the man reaches his limit when the waiter (John Cleese) convinces him to have his final “wafer thin mint chocolate.” Mr Creosote accepts and literally explodes, but we don’t get to see that in Blob: just before the explosion, the scene switches to a shot of the equally obese Fiorito, and we cannot but imagine him on the various nights out, stuffing himself with oysters and champagne.

But it’s not just the fact that – in times of austerity – these people feed both on oysters and other people’s misery (in 2010 the Lazio region introduced prescription charges for disabled people). The real problem is that they don’t seem to be bothered with their lack of ethics and sense of propriety. Lazio governor Renata Polverini is exemplary here: according to Fiorito, Polverini was well aware of the misuse of funds within her council, and pictures showing her at the parties have been circulating in the media. Yet she denies that she knew anything of the embezzlements. Indeed, Polverini has been on a kind of media tour to exonerate herself from the accusations, pointing her finger at other parties and their scandals, as if to say that, in the end, everyone has been “bad.” She has also had posters put up all over Rome, where she looks straight into the camera, with pride and determination, as she firmly states that she will “send these people home.” This is, I think, the most outrageous outcome of the scandals: the lack of decency and responsibility among those who are in charge. For, even if Polverini really didn’t know anything, what is her ($15,000 monthly) job about then? For had this happened in Germany, Denmark or the Netherlands, Polverini would have stepped down instantly, quietly and ashamed for not having been more vigilant. Instead, she arrogantly claims to be a victim in the whole affair.

Indeed, the attitude of Italian politicians reflects a symptomatic problem in Italy: that of trying to get away with anything. As a number of Italian journalists have observed, the likes of Fiorito simply and sadly reflect Italian society at large.

Ever since former PM Silvio Berlusconi was forced to make way for Mario Monti’s politics of rigor and sacrifice, Italy has been confronted with major cuts, radical changes in legislation, and a complete reversal of mind-set with regards to life-styles and consumption habits. Whether “Rigor Montis” (from the Latin expression “rigor mortis,” i.e. stiffening caused by death) – as Monti is mockingly called on occasions – will manage to turn Italy into a real European country is still a big question. What I fear will not change easily is the disgraceful condition of women in Italian society. My anxiety was confirmed on a daily basis throughout the summer of 2012, as I followed a contest to elect two new showgirls for a popular show on Channel 5, one of Berlusconi’s TV channels. But what is the big deal with women, boobs and bums in Italy anyway?

Since classical antiquity, female beauty occupies a central place in Italian culture. Not by chance, the nation has often been represented through allegorical female figures. The connection of the “fatherland” with female mother figures or erotic ideals was to encourage men to a “passionate attachment to the nation,”  as Stephen Gundle puts it in his Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. In other words, beauty was used as a form of (political) persuasion. This is also because Italians have never really had a commonly held, national sense of identity. Therefore, special importance was given to factors relating to the informal culture that Italians did share, i.e. the sexual fixation of men on women, the physical element apparently being more important for Latin males.

Berlusconi’s application of the stereotypical image of women as erotic objects of desire for men is part of both his success at home and his negative image abroad. His sexist and degrading jokes – most notably his vulgar remark about Angela Merkel’s bottom – are sadly famous across the world. Homosexuals weren’t spared either, like when he publicly justified his erotic escapades with a young belly dancer by stating that it was better to like girls than to be gay. But if it was only Berlusconi going through a second hormonal phase, it wouldn’t even matter that much. The thing is that many Italians accept and nurture the gender discrimination that has erupted during the Berlusconi governments, and the former PM’s popularity and public support very much relies on his self-proclaimed virility. As if you are not a “real man,” if you do not chase after young, beautiful women. On the contrary, this is presented as natural and normal behavior, as opposed to those that prefer their own sex. Clearly, the impact of the Catholic Church plays a crucial role here, and the documentary Suddenly Last Winter (2007), offers a good picture of the sad situation homosexuals in Italy often find themselves in. On the other hand, Berlusconi’s adultery and preference for under aged girls is not looked upon with a good eye by the Church. Yet, many Italian men do not judge Berlusconi for his immoral (and illegal) dealings with the women around him, but actually admire and probably envy him for his sexual adventures.

A second problem is the way women position themselves in this highly sexist society. Sadly, the majority tries to live up to the image Berlusconi and the media have created of women: young, slim and stupid. But it’s a tough battle as there are strong expectations of women, not only with regards to their physical appearance but also to their place in society (i.e. subdued to men), and it is hard to step out of this rigid scheme and develop an identity of one’s own without being criticized by both sexes.

Of course, there are successful career women, nowadays, but they often end up “imitating” men in order to gain that respect from their male colleagues, which they would otherwise not gain. I’m thinking of Emma Marcegaglia, the former President of the Italian Industrial Association Confindustria, with her male vocabulary and iron lady-like expressivity.

Alternatively, they just play the role of the beautiful but dumb woman who gets what she wants through sexual favors, as in the case of Nicole Minetti, the showgirl-turned-politician who got herself a job as regional councilor in the Lombardy region for Berlusconi’s Freedom Party. During Berlusconi’s most recent sex-scandal, Minetti – an alleged accomplice in the scandal – tried to turn attention away from her trial by appearing in public with a T-shirt that read: “I’m even better without a T-shirt.” More recently, she has made the news by refusing to step down from her position unless she was offered a movie career in Hollywood.

Women often play into the stereotypical and sexist gender division. This was confirmed for me over the summer as I watched the program Veline. The term “veline” was originally a journalese reference to the paper handouts from which journalists read news reports on TV, before it become the common denomination for female television showgirls. This happened after the satirical program Striscia la notizia – a parody of the daily news – started using glamorous showgirls to hand the “veline” over to the TV presenter. A few years ago, an additional program was created where the two Striscia la notizia showgirls – one blond, one dark-haired – would be selected from a wide range of candidates, during the summer break. Every episode contains six candidates who have a few minutes to talk about themselves and show off any talents (mostly singing or dancing), before they do a final, brief dance. The winner is selected by a group of five jury members, mostly fashion journalists or magazine editors, and then goes on to the semi-finals, and so on.

The girls that participate in these shows very strongly fulfill the image of the Berlusconian woman: tall, thin and not too bright, or so it seems. In fact, many of these girls are students, either at school or at university, play classical instruments, and occasionally even have a good working position. Of course, not everyone with a degree is a cultured person. But maybe some of them are also just playing the role of the dumb showgirl? More shockingly, the girl’s parents are often in the audience, and seemingly proud. One father even signed up his daughter for the contest! Becoming (or trying to become) a showgirl is apparently seen as something normal and worthy of praise, and it is a common dream for many young girls to become a velina, and marry a football player. This takes us back to the issue of expectations and social conventions. The girls – called not by their names but by the numbers pinned onto their chest– simply do not realize that they are being treated as livestock. Or do they? For many it is probably their once-in-a-lifetime go at instant fame. Who knows, maybe some TV producer is watching and might just make them a star overnight…

A novelty this year is the many Eastern European girls who are participating in the competition. Some of them are adamant to demonstrate their “Italianness,” their rootedness in their new homeland and their desire to respond to the social and sexual conventions in Italy. Optimistically speaking, they are integrating into society, but I doubt they will be better off here than in at home.

Whether Silvio Berlusconi will make his comeback on the political scene or not therefore doesn’t matter much, for the problem isn’t Berlusconi alone. It’s the mentality of the people that – with the help of the Church – upholds the old-fashioned idea about virile (or just rich) men chasing after slim and stupid women. Women’s emancipation in Italy has yet a long way to go.

New media are increasingly changing the way history is being written and memories are being forged. Perhaps it’s not an appropriate comparison, with the Olympics ongoing, but think of the London bombings in 2005. Mobile camera phones enabled a new and more instant form of witnessing and communication, as Anna Reading explains in her article on “Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time” (Memory Studies 4.3, 2011). Another revolutionary moment in the history of media was the advent and diffusion of television, in the 1950s and 1960s, which enhanced the globalization of information and knowledge. It thus contributed to the creation of collectively shared, public memories as it allowed for news to reach – for the first time – large masses of people in various geographical areas.

The impact of television on the collective memory of the 1960s is illustrated by the blockbuster Forrest Gump (1994): here the protagonist is given a place – occasionally through recourse to original footage – in a range of major historical events which most Americans will have “experienced” through television. It thus feeds upon a national and visual memory of those years in the USA. In Italy too visual media have had an essential role in the creation and circulation of memories of the country’s national history of the past five decades or so. This is also because Italy has never had a real newspaper ‘culture’, and for most Italians TV news reports have been the main means of information. Italian cinema, in addition, has something of the status of a national heritage product, as Alan O’Leary suggests in his analysis of Italian movies on terrorism (Tragedia all’italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms 1970-2010, 2011), which has created a number of memorable ‘screen memories’. A news report about, say, a heat wave in Rome, for example, may start with the famous fountain scene from Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita.

But visual memories of Italy’s past can also be viewed daily on the 15-minute long program Blob, which goes on air just after the evening news at 8pm. Created by a former TV director and a number of movie critics and actors, Blob consists of a variety of deconstructed and reassembled fragments taken from (national and international) television program, TV adverts and movies. More precisely, Blob selects images from an audiovisual archive and re-organizes them in such a way so as to stimulate a critical reflection on current affairs and a rejection of institutional, mediatized and official discourses. Hence, it reveals the impossibility of a “meta-history” as suggested by the “global TV screen,” and instead gives space to other images and other histories, at times promoting a counter-memory.

What makes Blob so special is its unconventional form: rather than using texts or a presenter who unveils dark secrets or injustices of Italy’s recent past, Blob makes viewers think for themselves. This is achieved through an elaborate form of cutting and editing, which helps us make links and draw conclusions. Only a brief caption at the top left of the screen may give us some indications of the point being made. The announced political comeback – on 12 July – of former PM Silvio Berlusconi, for example, was used to bring back memories of Berlusconi’s political ascent in the 1990s. With the knowledge of Berlusconi’s various sex and corruption trials in the back of our minds, Berlusconi’s 1994 promises of a united and healthy Italy freed from corruption, today, sound ridiculous and surreal.

Clearly, this juxtaposition of the contradicting present and past images of Berlusconi, in addition to the knowledge we have gained of his problems with the law since the 1990s, works to reactivate forgotten or silenced memories, and to create moral awareness in the viewer. And if that doesn’t work, following on Berlusconi’s “outing” on July 12^th, the Blob team broadcast images of the major anti-corruption investigations Mani pulite (“clean hands”) of the early 1990s, which brought to the light the political bribery scandal Tangentopoli (“Bribesville”). The latter involved most leading political parties at the time, and the subsequent ‘clean-up’ therefore led to the emergence of a new political class in Italy, with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (“Go Italy”) at the lead. In fact, in his 1994 speech, Berlusconi strongly fed on the Italians’ distrust in politicians, which had of course increased with the corruption scandal. But Tangentopoli not only opened the door for Berlusconi’s populist “ordinary man-politics.” It also provoked a “major rift between the judiciary and certain politicians and parties,”as John Foot has noted (Modern Italy, 2003). The rift would mark Berlusconi’s political career, as his infinite anxiety about the “Communist judges” who are always on his case illustrate.

Special attention in the Blob episodes is given to Berlusconi’s political “mentor” and prime suspect in the Mani pulite investigations: Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who eventually fled to Tunis in order to avoid imprisonment. All in all, Blob recalls the fact that Berlusconi – in spite of his promise to give Italy a future again – actually continued the corruption, which was at the basis of Tangentopoli. The caption “fine pena mai,” which means something like life sentence, then ironically refers to the country’s condemnation to corruption by its politicians, from Craxi in the 1980s to Berlusconi in the 1990s and 2000s, and possibly Berlusconi again?

For a dozen years I have taught a freshman seminar at Northwestern University, entitled “Scandal and Reputations.” When I first selected the topic “Bill and Monica” it was the topic du jour, filled with phallic cigars, hypocrisies and conspiracies. I had planned the course to capture that sour, if momentarily historic, time.

Over the years I have never been without subject matter. I could pick and choose among the birthers, the deniers, the earthers and the truthers. Would we discuss churchly pedophiles or Abu Ghraib? DUI or DNA? Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, Britney, Paris or OJ Redux? Always some claim of conspiracy or scandal emerged that would capture the attention of students.

This week demonstrates that whether we run out of oil, we won’t run out of oily elites. The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and prominent French socialist politician, is instructive. (Yes, yes, innocent until proven…). Mr. Strauss-Kahn is currently holed up in a snug government-supplied suite on Riker’s Island (a neo-socialist dream of free housing for all). Mr. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested and accused of having attempted to rape a hotel maid in his self-paid suite at New York’s Sofitel. No doubt several of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s new compatriots will be happy to turn the tables on their new friend. DSK, don’t drop your soap in the shower.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was apparently naked in the bathroom when the maid arrived. As a prominent economist, he surely figured that since he was already naked, intercourse was simply a matter of structural efficiency. Perhaps he saw her as “my cute little Portugal.” Never having interned at the IMF, she had not been adequately educated in recognizing how the powerful organize the lifeworlds of the powerless. Metaphors gone wild.

But the tawdry events at a slick hotel reveal something more. First, they remind us that often what makes bad behavior scandalous is when it emerges outside the local domain in which “everyone knew” of its likelihood. As more evidence appears, it seems that Strauss-Kahn’s colleagues were aware that he was a sexual predator. Possibly they were surprised that he would be as rough and rushed as reports of his hotel encounter suggested, but he leaves a trail of accusations, discretely excused by friends and colleagues. Perhaps he was embarrassing, but this is what (some) rich men do. Most shameful is Anne Mansouret, a Socialist party official and the mother of a young French journalist, Tristane Banon, who Strausss-Kahn apparently attempted to rape nine years ago. Knowing this, Ms. Mansouret suggested that her daughter not press charges, presumably satisfied to have a politically correct rapist as the president of France. There are just some things that we provincial Americans will never understand. Strauss-Kahn had been previously criticized for his inappropriate sexual behavior by the IMF for a coercive affair with a subordinate in 2008. Ho-hum. He’s our colleague and by winking we can make the embarrassment disappear.

A scandal is not just bad or criminal behavior. A scandal is different than a crime (of which this rape is both), but scandal results from a form of behavior that “everyone” knows about, but which had been defined as normal or innocuous, leading the perpetrator to be conclude that he is protected. How many people knew about Tiger Woods’ behavior or that of former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger? More than zero. The inner group considered the behavior acceptable, if undesirable, until it broke outside its charmed circle.

Finally, the Strauss-Kahn imbroglio reminds us that the capacity for conspiracy never dies. Some French socialists, once they learned of the arrest, concluded that the event was a frame-up by the supporters of Nicolas Sarkosy, Strauss-Kahn’s likely opponent in the next French election. Just another vast right-wing conspiracy. Mr. Sarkosy, of course, has his own problems, political and ethical, although surely less than his neighbor, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. A Euro-conspiracy to discredit Strauss-Kahn seems laughable today, but one is well-advised “never to say never.” Still, the claims speak to the belief that some enemy will always stand behind the breach in reputation of those one admires.

Today Strauss-Kahn’s future is dim, but mine is bright. As I prepare to teach Scandals and Reputation this fall, I prepare confidently, knowing that my students and I will analyze lustily – as we have each year.