Green Italians are, apparently, not "true" Italians

I still remember how in the 1990 Cup Neapolitans whistled against Argentina when Italy played them in the stadium at Naples. In the words of one Neapolitan, ho fischiato il mio dilettissimo Maradona, e abbiamo perso lo stesso. I thought it was a neat phenomenon, but I was told later that it was in fact ugly, unsportsmanlike conduct by the Neapolitans. Still, it was less annoying than those awful vuvuzelas, if you ask me, but no one ever does.

Remember that, because the next time a northern Italian tries to tell you that southern Italians aren't real Italians, that they have no love for the country, and so forth (all of it nonsense: before the European Union made the borders porous so that Eastern Europeans could walk freely into Italy, Northern Italians would have had no one to exploit in their factories if not for southern Italians—but never mind that) ask them why Radio Padania cheered after Paraguay scored a goal to take the lead against Italy during Italy's opening game of the 2010 World Cup.

For all the Neapolitans' faults (and hey, I'm not averse to having some fun at their expense) I reckon you'd have been hard-pressed to find a cheering household in the Partenopolis right then. For some reason, I'm not at all surprised to hear that Radio Padania was exulting—not at all.

Update: Daniele De Rossi, midfielder for the Italian national team, has joked that when Padania's team plays, he will cheer their opponents.

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Is this what a "healthy Conservative party" looks like?

The healthy, modernized Conservative party of Britian… still can't muster enough votes to govern.

Over the last few months, I've read a lot of commentary about how a healthy, modernized conservative movement in the United States would look and sound like Cameron's Conservatives in the UK. I really, really hope that this election result puts an end to all that. The United States cannot now, and never could be, modeled after Great Britain. (I seem to recall a bit of a disagreement over that a couple of centuries ago.)

Contrast this to Berlusconi's party put up solid wins in Italy's recent regional elections, despite a poor economy, scandal, and all the rest.Should Republicans look to Italy's, uhm, "healthy" conservative party for inspiration on how to win elections? If so, God help us all.

Update: Some commentators now argue that the result in the UK validates their arguments, since the percentage of Conservative voters increased over the 2005 election, from 9 million to 11 million. Given the supposedly atrocious state of things in Britain (which many of them trumpeted, at least) I find the argument unconvincing.

I prefer a different comparison: that from 1974 to 1979. A healthy Conservative Party would be a Conservative Party that could grow from 10 million to 14 million voters.

Some have argued that there simply aren't that many voters who might vote Conservative. There's a point to this: just add up the number of Labour and Liberal Democrat votes. Fair enough, but I don't see how this helps the larger argument: if the Conservative "brand" is such that there's no way to win 14 million votes in Britain, then it isn't a healthy party. Period, full stop.

Neverthemore, the United States and the United Kingdom are two different entities. Should American conservatism modernize? Absolutely. But there are different ways to modernize it, and those who advocate Cameron-style Conservatism strike me as profoundly unconvincing.

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Secession? in Italy? Surely I understand wrong...

For all the talk by Lega Nord about increasing federalism in the Republic of Italy (they used to talk about secession if I'm not mistaken), there is apparently a serious move in southern Lazio to secede, thereby getting away from the influence Rome has over the region.

Italy is divided into Regions, which are subdivided into Provinces. Lazio is the region in central Italy that contains the soccer team I sometimes pay attention to (conveniently named Lazio) based in the city of Civitavecchia, where I have some relatives, and where my greataunt recently passed away. It also contains the cities of Roma (which has its own soccer team), Nettuno (the home of St. Maria Goretti), Latina (a city founded on the land of a drained swap, during the efforts of Mussolini to modernize the nation), Gaeta (my mother's hometown), San Felice Circeo (a beautiful city and park) and a number of other great places to visit.

The Provinces seeking to secede from Lazio are Frosinone, Latina, Rieti, and Viterbo—in other words, every Province of Lazio except the Province of Roma:(image from Wikipedia)

The article in Corriere della Sera notes that the discussions were taking place in the same place where St. Thomas Aquinas died.

Assuming I've understood all this correctly, I wonder whether it will come to pass.

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The dictator-pig and the smoking president

This isn't about Orwell's Animal Farm, honest. Rather, this story starts with a Nebraska (?) county official who couldn't (he claims) get an official photo of the president despite repeated requests (he claims), so he put up a photo he found of the president… smoking. Naturally,* this drew a complaint, so the photo came down.

For some reason this reminded me of a story my Italian Nonno used to tell of a relative's pig named Benito. The blackshirts got wind of it soon enough, and came around to inquire about it. Nonno used to tell the story in dialect, which made it much funnier, but the conversation boiled down to something like this:

Why did you name your pig Benito?

Why, is there something wrong with the name Benito?

The way Nonno told it, they didn't have an answer for that, and left him alone.

I'd joke that this illustrates how Fascist Italy had more freedom of speech than the contemporary USA, but making such comparisons, even in a hyperbolic sense, is inflammatory and ridiculous, don't you think?

Well, don't you?

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*By contrast, had it been a photoshopped image of the previous president snorting a line or two, no number of complaints would have taken it down without several lawsuits getting in the way: if, that is, it weren't funded by an NEA grant.

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If only we had these options

Italians are preparing to go to the polls for regional elections. Italy being Italy, the election season has featured high drama. This year is especially notable for drama, for two reasons.

First, the party in power (Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà) isn't running any candidates in Rome. Why not? You see, electoral officials in Rome are obsessed with trivial inanities such as, say, following the law, one detail of which is that a party must submit a list of candidates, which PdL did not do.

To be fair, PdL did, in fact, submit a list of candidates, just not before the deadline. This led to an uproar; Parliament passed a decree that would have allowed PdL to submit a list after the deadline, and the president of the Republic signed it (with a great show of distaste).

title: Italian theater: It's the way we like it!
subtitle: characters and actors
The characters laughing on the left are leaders of PdL, including Berlusconi, Alfano, and La Russa. One of the two lonely characters on the right is DiPietro, holding a sign with an ancient Roman proverb: The law is harsh, but it's the law.

Nevertheless, a quick suit sent the decree to court, where it was deemed unconstitutional, proving that you're never allowed to change the rules of the game… unless the left wing can profit.

This might, however, feed into a growing tendency in Italian politics, to make noise about not voting. The idea is this: if a certain minimum of the population doesn't vote, then no one wins. A taxi driver once explained to me with a straight face that this would mean there would be no government. (That was a long drive from Rome to Gaeta.) I have my doubts, but maybe he wasn't entirely wrong, since there have been quite a few campaign ads advocating precisely this option. I thought I'd share a few of my favorite ads.

• Far and away the best one is this:
  I can't even begin to explain it, except to say that in Italian, porco (pig) has all sorts of vulgar meanings, and porcu is often the local dialect for pig. I'm not sure that's the case in Lombardy, where this fellow is running for mayor, but there ain't no one in Italy who would fail to understand this. Porcu has doubtless suffered teasing for much of his life over such an unfortunate name, but he's making the best of it with an entire series of ads that play on the vulgar meanings of the word. This particular ad urges you to vote for an ugly figure. His Flickr website adds,

  Oggi è il giorno del fare, non la promessa del domani.
  Abbiamo bisogno di tornare a sorridere.
  Vota Porcu.
  
  (Today we ought to do things, not make promises about tomorrow. We need to start laughing again. Vote Porcu.)

  He'd win my vote, hands down.
  
  Well, maybe.
• There is the usual shamelessness of those who still think that six or seven decades spent shilling for the Soviet Union wasn't such a bad idea after all:
  
  Yes, that's the flag of the former Soviet Union. Yes, they've placed it above the flag of Italy. Yes, I realize that they mean it as the symbol of international communism, but its origins are, nevertheless, the symbols of the Soviet Union.
• This guy oughta lose if only for this ad.
• I know what Paolo Brutti's trying to get at in this ad, and I admire DiPietro in many ways, but when your last name means ugly men in Italian, I start to suspec that this is another party's ad, rather than his.
• Never mind what I said about Porcu above; I really like Diversamenti Occupati, which appears to be a comic strip that has somehow gone viral into campaign ads. (Actually, it looks like a bunch of photo shops, but they got onto Corriere della Sera anyway.)
  Vote for the candidate who has your future in mind.
  Ok, don't vote.
  
  Enough with workplace discrimination. Fewer rights for all.
  
  Have more faith in the future. After all, it isn't guaranteed to get here.
  
• And now the afore-mentioned option to vote for no one.
  Regionals 2010
  A special choice
  Vote no one!
  Send them to jail!
  
  Regionals? No thanks!
  + National + Regional + Provincial + Local + Etc.
  =
  + Corruption and + Cheating
  
  Enough with employing them with our money!
  Let's give them a lesson: don't go vote!
  
  No one defends the workers.
  Vote no one.
  

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La tiella gaetana

One of my favorite Italian foods is one that I've never found in the States. Essentially it consists of some kind of filling baked between two circles of pizza dough which have been pressed together along the edge. My family and friends said that the tiella was devised by fishermen's wives so that their husbands could take with them something that would last for the several days that they were out at sea.^*

Fillings vary quite a bit. My favorite consists of spinach and olives; I also like escarole filling and egg and ricotta.
Since Gaeta is a seaside town, there are several varieties filled with seafood, most of which I can't even stand the thought of: small octopus, for example. You can also fill it with eggplant and onion, but that's another one of those concoctions that Italians love and I don't.

I've never found tiella offered in any of the Italian restaurants in the states. You can find pizza, pasta, and all kinds of foods in Italian restaurants here, but you can't find the stuff I actually ate when I was in Gaeta. I reckon immigrants from Gaeta don't open restaurants, not around the places where I've lived at least. So I asked my mom once, and she gave me a recipe, the result of which you can see above. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. I'll describe how I make my variant after the break.

• Dough
  Be advised that I make my dough in a nonstandard way. For some reason the standard way doesn't work very well for me (a cone of flour with a hole in the middle, that looks something like volcano).
• 1.5 cups water
• 2-3 tsp of yeast
• 1-2 tsp salt
• 2-3 tsp sugar
• 2-3 tsp olive oil
• an undetermined amount of flour
• Mix dry ingredients (not flour) in bowl. Heat water: not too hot, not too cold. Pour over dry ingredients and mix. Let sit 5-15 minutes, depending on how busy you are with other things.
• Stir in olive oil.
• Add flour, a fistful at a time, say, mixing reasonably well, until your dough attains a nice consistency. If it starts to feel like a heavy slab, you did something wrong, probably mixing in too much flour. You should be okay anyway. (Yeah, I do this on occasion.) Once it's good and doughy, let it sit a while. Punch it down every hour or two.
• Filling for egg and ricotta (the spinach and olive filling shouldn't need explanation, honestly)
• In a separate bowl, beat 4 eggs thoroughly.
• Add one 15 oz. tub of quality ricotta, having allowed any excess water to drain. Whisk vigorously. The resulting consistency should be something akin to goo, or at least cake batter.
• Mix in some salt.
  Don't ask me how much; I don't think I have the yeast/salt/sugar amounts above correct, either. I just kind of eyeball it and hope I don't screw anything up. I think I use 2-3 tsp.
• Preheat oven to 450^o.
• Cut dough into two pieces, one a little larger then the other. Roll each into a circle, oval, rectangle, or whatever you feel like and/or are able to get the dough to agree to.
• Lay the larger circle out on an oiled pizza pan (or a seasoned baking stone).
• Spread a thin layer of oil over the top of the dough, leaving a dry ring at the edge. This will protect the dough from excess water in whatever filling you use.
  (This trick works for protecting pizza dough from tomato sauce, too. My dad taught it to me; I think he said that Nonna taught him.)
• With great care, spread filling over oiled dough. Don't let it get onto the dry parts.
• Carefully lay the second circle over the filling. Fold the lower circle over, pressing it down onto the upper circle. Use a fork to press down and seal the two.
• Bake in preheated oven for 10-20 minutes until the crust turns golden.
• If my directions aren't as bad as I think they are, you will enjoy a tasty, authentic, rustic Italian food. Doesn't look like I'll be writing any recipe books anytime soon, though.

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^*Variants of this exist in the regions around my mother's hometown. In Ponza they called it a ripiena; in Gaeta they called it a tiella. The ripiena isn't quite the same as the tiella; the one I bought was smaller actually.

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Speaking of the end of a... whatever...

Speaking of the end of a decade whatever, I'd just like to acknowledge that the past ten years of my life a huge improvement over the previous ten. Not necessarily financially—I earn more money, but between inflation and the family, I'm actually poorer per capita than ten years ago. But I'd much rather be the man I am now than the teenager I was twenty years ago, or the man I was ten years ago.

If you read the newspapers, you know that opinion writers have been writing off the terrible decade we just survived like some sort of business loss. Many people really did survive it at best, but opinion writers really ought to know better.

Sure, I could focus on the bad aspects of the past decade, and in some ways I guess I had a pretty miserable decade. But as Nonno Felice used to observe in his recollections of the Second World War, many experiences that would otherwise be awful can be made bearable, even pleasant, with a little optimism and a sense of humor. To place this in context, he was speaking of a time where much of Italy was destroyed, the Germans occupied his city and eventually expelled all its inhabitants, including the sick and infirm, sending them wandering for months until, after a brief stay in a concentration camp, they ended up in occupied Rome.

In that spirit, I'd like to reflect on some of the happier parts of a not-nearly-so-miserable decade as that one.

To start with, my life is much better, and much happier, now that I'm married, and have children. I'm not sure that they feel that their lives are better and happier, but I'm resolved to do my best to ameliorate that. That's one of the down-/up-sides of marriage: you discover defects you never knew you had, or (from a different point of view) opportunities to weed out your vices and grow in the virtues. If only I had more than half a life to do my best for my family!

I completed my education with the proverbial "terminal degree". The discovery of new knowledge has been among the greatest pleasures I've experienced, enhanced by sharing it with others, learning what they've discovered, and combining it. I can't for the life of me fathom why more people aren't fascinated by science and scientific research: it's wonderful!

I've been lucky to have traveled both in the States and abroad over the last ten years, for work, family, and spiritual reasons. As for places abroad, I'd recommend:

• in Italy, Gaeta, Pompeii, Lecce, Cuneo, Minturno, and Ponza;
• in France, Nice and of course Lourdes (in the offseason, which is when I went);
• in Austria, Linz;
• in Germany, Kaiserslautern (or if not, riding the ICE train is by itself worth the price of admission);
• in Russia, Sergiev Posad and Kazan.

Just don't expect them to speak English, wherever you go. The guidebooks lie, lie, lie about that, and people who visit places where lots of people speak English haven't (in my opinion) discovered the real place they're visiting. Then again, I'm not sure I have, either.

I've read, or reread, some great books. My favorites would have to be Il fu Mattia Pascal, Gli ultimi soldati del Ré, Lettera a un bambino mai nato, Безы, and Братья карамазовы. (The Late Mattia Pascal, The King's Last Army, Letter to a child who was never born, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov.) I've read some excellent English novels, too; I just can't call them to mind.

I'm proudest of the moments when I made my wife and children smile. The only pleasure that could outshine that, is the same one I have been privileged to share in since Easter, 1994. I described it to my three year-old last week in my atrocious Russian grammar: самый лучшее тортик—Евхарист. The sweetest treat of all, is the Eucharist.

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The best place to live in Italy

According to an Italian periodical, the best province in Italy to make a living (in all senses of the word, rather than merely financial) is Trieste. (Tree-ess-teh. The final e is not silent in Italian.)

The full list is here. The province where my mother's family originates, Latina, is #81 on the list. I (used to) have a pen pal who lives in the Cuneo province, #22 on the list (but down from #13 previously).

Everything I knew about Trieste before reading this article can be summarized by two things I read:

• In 2002 I read Italo Svevo's novel La Coscienza di Zeno (The Conscience of Zeno), which is set in Trieste in the years leading up to the First World War. It's quite a touching novel actually, although I didn't learn much about Trieste proper from it.
• During the 80s, at least one opinion article written by an Italian Communist expressed outrage that Trieste should even be part of Italy. Italy ought, he wrote, to "return" it to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Okay, I know a little history; maybe Trieste's incorporation to Italy is indeed a consequence of colonialism, imperialism, and/or Fascism. Later, I looked up a little about Trieste, and found that it had never been part of Yugoslavia (unless you count occupation after World War II as incorporation) and the vast majority of the city's population has always been, throughout all of post-Roman history… uhm… Italian.
  
  Hunh?!?
  
  Well, maybe not Italian proper (what is an "Italian" anyway?), but certainly not Slavic. Slavs certainly seeped slowly into the surrounding rural and suburban areas over the centuries, just as they did around many Italian-ish towns along the Adriatic coast. In most cases the Slavs seeped into the cities themselves, which is why Ragusa is now called Dubrovnik. But Trieste was not one of these, and in any case the real outrage was that Italy itself wasn't a Communist paradise like all the other countries in Eastern Europe. Had Italy been Communist, the author probably wouldn't have cared where Trieste lay. If not for those stupid, ignorant Catholics who in the first post-war parliamentary elections heeded to their malicious, black-robed clerics and voted Christian Democracy instead of Communist…

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Violence not an Italian value... unless "Values" in party name

You thought our partisanship had gotten bad? Someone punched Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi in the face today, while he was signing autographs for fans. The year had been pretty bad for Berlusconi; old and new scandals were rocking him, including suggestions of ties to the Mafia, but violence upon him is likely only to re-solidify his popularity among his supporters. (Of course, I've been wrong before.)

Berlusconi is of the Italian right wing party Popolo della libertà, and while "left" and "right" there convey somewhat different meanings than they do in the States, it's not too far off the mark to say that they are the Italian equivalent of the Republican party here. But only a rough equivalent; Italy has a lot of parties and they've changed a lot over the last fifteen years, after the Christian Democracy and Socialist parties were brought down in a series of corruption investigations.

I'm no fan of Berlusconi, and I like to poke fun at him. But I can't really understand how anyone could justify this behavior. Yet the leader of an Italian political party called Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values) has attempted precisely that:

Io non voglio che ci si mai violenza, ma Berlusconi con i suoi comportamenti e il suo menefreghismo istiga alla violenza. Io condivido le rimostranze dei cittadini che ogni giorno vedono un premier che tiene bloccato il Parlamento per fare leggi che servono a lui e soltanto a lui, mentre milioni di cittadini perdono il lavoro e faticano ad arrivare a fine mese.

(I never want violence, but with his behavior and his attitude of I-couldn't-care-less* Berlusconi instigates violence. I share in the protests of citizens who every day see a Prime Minister who ties up Parliament with bills tailor-made for his benefit and his alone, while millions of citizens lose their jobs and struggle to make it to the end of the month.)

*menefreghismo can be read as "irresponsibility" but from the contraction of me ne frego it also conveys an air of not caring.

This is on top of a remark he made a few days prior:

Se il governo continua ad essere sordo ai bisogni dei cittadini, si andrà allo scontro di piazza, e lì ci scapperà l'azione violenta se il governo non si assume la responsabilità di rispondere ai bisogni del Paese.

(If the government continues to play deaf to citizens' needs, the conflict will move to the public squares, and violent action will erupt there if the government does not take up its responsibility to answer the nation's needs.)

Di Pietro is a former prosecutor of government corruption, and helped destroy the old regimes twenty years ago. He is, moreover, a man with a remarkable life story. He has opposed not only Berlusconi, but Italian Socialists and Communists as well, although he's mellowed a little over the years in that regard. His party received a not insignificant percentage of the vote in the last parliamentary election, but his party recently suffered losses in membership, as notable members complained about a shift from "reformist" policy to "antagonist". Many of these members have moved to the Alliance for Italy, believing that violence is not one of the Values they signed up for.

Update: Earlier reports that the assailant struck Berlusconi in the face were mistaken; instead, he launched from extremely close range a metal figurine of the Dome of Milan's Cathedral. The assailant himself appears to be a mentally troubled man with no political affiliation, whose father says they rarely speak of politics, if ever.

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You thought I was exaggerating about Naples

Not a day after I wrote that 50% compliance with the law in Naples is something of an accomplishment, the city outdoes itself. The latest news is that someone stole the city's Christmas Tree. In fact, they stole it the very night after it was installed in the Galleria Umberto I. That's an enormous hall situated in the center of the city.

And you thought I was kidding about Neapolitan attitudes toward the law.

I said it's the latest news, but it isn't, not really: someone has cut the thing down every year since 2005. This is Naples, after all; la malavita can't have something like a Christmas tree giving ordinary folk a bit of joy in their hearts. Especially not a tree where people have, for 26 years, been hanging Christmas wish lists that include desires like, No alla Camorra ("No more Mafia").



For this reason, the tree took on the name, L'albero dei desideri, the Tree of Wishes. At least one wish, sadly, has gone unanswered for another year.

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If 50% compliance with the law is an accomplishment...

…you must be talking about Naples, where a police sting of restaurants, pastry shops, and cafes has found that 28 out of 36 restaurants failed to issue a receipt for purchases. That's not so bad, actually; 47 out of 50 pastry shops and cafes failed to issue a receipt. You read that right: a mere 6% compliance with the law. Welcome to Naples!

The question that comes to my mind is, how on earth do the other 3 stay in business? I don't understand the details, but printing a receipt from the register is part of the enforcement mechanism of Italy's tax laws, and stores are required to print and give them to each customer for each purchase. Sometimes the police hang around outside stores to check whether customers leaving the story have a receipt for their purchase. If I understand correctly, these are members of a special police force, one of whose duties is to enforce the tax laws. One of my boyhood friends made his career this outfit.

It is (in my experience) common for store owners to increase their profits through various schemes to avoid the VAT. Usually this involves conducting business on a pad of paper instead of the register. I was once sent out the back door by owners of a store, precisely so that I wouldn't be seen leaving the shop without a receipt. I didn't realize what was going on at the time; someone explained it to me later. I don't quite know if the customer also runs afoul of the law in this circumstance, but I know that these shop owners were making themselves unpopular by the practice. Across the (narrow) street was a supermarket whose prices were lower and whose clerks never asked you to go out a back door.

Anyway, the title refers to the good news that compliance was much higher in towns of the surrounding province, where 50% of the shops visited issued a receipt.

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Results of World Cup 2010: you read it here first

FIFA drew the groups for the World Cup 2010 tournament today by lots. Over the last few years I have developed a highly sophisticated formula^* that predicts quite accurately^** the final results. I don't have time^*** to consider all the teams, but here are the ones I care about most:

1. Four years ago I stunned a fan by referring to Team USA as "a bunch of pathetic, overrated losers". The characterization was well deserved: they scored all of two goals in that year's World Cup, and one of those was an own goal by the other team, which emphasizes just how pathetic the offense was; and American fans who study the sport and ought, therefore, to have known better, overrated the team and bandied about seriously the notion that Team USA would win the thing. So, yes, in case you're wondering: I'm poking both the team and its fans.
   
   After today's draw, the same completely unreasonable speculation started. YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: Team USA will not make it out of the group rounds. After a dispiriting spanking by England in the opening game (this ain't 1950, folks) we will be shocked by Slovenia, who recently shocked Russia (no one to sneer at). At that point we'll struggle even to tie Algeria and save face. In other words, expect a repeat of the 2006 Cup.
   
   Doubt me? Here are some scores from the past few months:
   1. lost to Denmark 1-3;
   2. lost to Slovakia 0-1 (Slovakia, Slovenia, hmmm…);
   3. tied Costa Rica after falling behind 0-2;
   4. lost to Mexico in a World Cup Qualifier match 0-5.
   You read that right: 0-5, a baseball score. In a game that counted. Now Mexico isn't someone to sneer at, but they ain't exactly Cup favorites, either. No, I'm afraid we're a long ways from a win yet.
2. Speaking of England, it's England FTW. If not, they should be banned from the sport for ever. Come on, boys, even France has a title now. Win this won for God, Queen, and Country. Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the pitch! Britons never will be… uhm… kitsch?
3. Italy, whom I must root for lest my blood relatives disown me, will underperform. They won the 2006 World Cup, and there's some law of fate that Italy can't appear in consecutive cups (only Mussolini found a way to make that happen, much as only Mussolini found a way to make the Italian trains run on time, or so they say). So it's out of the question. Besides, the team hain't been the same since i notti magiche di Totò Schillaci, or (for that matter) the incomparable Gaetano Scirea.
4. Brazil fans without any connection to Brazil: that's not sporting. Fate will punish you with a performance that will teach you to pick an underdog for once and learn what real fandom is. Honestly, you're no better than fans of the Yankees, Cowboys, and the Northern Italian Triumvirate of Serie A.
5. Speaking of underdogs who will surprise and delight: my usual favorites are out (Romania, Poland, Russia) so I'll pick
   1. Slovenia (see above)
   2. South Africa (since at least 2002 the refs have made a habit of cheating for the home team; so France, you've just been warned)
   3. Nigeria (Diego "Hand of God" Maradona is coaching Argentina, so I'm praying for this one);
   4. Mexico (Team USA fans, your consolation is that Mexico will shine, shine, shine—if not, France may yet win).

You may be wondering whether I'm making all this up. Read the footnotes below.

Two more notes:

1. FIFA has once again designed a new ball that, they say, will increase goal scoring. Considering how well that worked last time around (the 2006 Cup featured fewer goals than the previous Cup—147 v. 161—which featured fewer than the 1998 Cup), don't expect a lot of excitement.
2. I forgot the second. Must not have been important.

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^*This formula is designed with meticulous precision. Its primary criterion is to annoy as many soccer fans as possible. What? at least I'm honest.

^**The metric of accuracy here is my imagination.

^***(or interest)

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Nationalism

I would like very much to emphasize one of the tags below: this is a

Largely uninformed rant.

With that out of the way, I want to think aloud about this post by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy.

After reading Somin's post, I have to say that I agree with all of it except two things.

(1) The assertion,

[N]ationalism is second only to communism as the greatest evil of modern politics.

In my opinion, tribalism is the greatest evil of modern politics, greater even than nationalism. I think it explains a lot of the problems we have: hyperpartisanship (if that's a word), interest groups that hate each other so much that they work even against their own interests, so as to destroy the other, etc. Of course, that's only an opinion.

(2) The definition of nationalism,

loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity.

This requires a much longer explanation.

I have never thought much about what nationalism is, except that in general I have thought that nationalist movements in lands where nations did not have states of their own were generally Good Things (Poland, East Timor, Greece, Armenia, etc.) even if tainted with bad aspects (are there any human phenomena untainted by bad aspects?), whereas nationalist movements in nation-states tend to be bad things. So I'll think aloud about it for a moment, and invite people to tell me what a moron I'm being. Or, if you prefer, what an insightful genius I'm being. But that never happens. :-)

Contrast Somin's definition of nationalism with the definition of patriotism,

loyalty to one’s government and/or its ideals regardless of ethnic or racial identity.

This is helpful because my definition of nationalism would remove one word from the one given:

loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity.

That is to say, one can be nationalist without being very loyal at all to one's nation-state. Indeed, I think Somin's distinction in the definitions is a distinction without a difference; for me any nation-state is more or less identifiable with the government. This may be wrong, but it explains why, to me, one can be quite disloyal to the nation-state precisely because one is loyal to one's nation. Nationalism can favor the nation-state, for example, when none exists; on the other hand it can oppose the nation-state, for example, when it feels that the "state" part of the nation has turned against the nation or been co-opted by another nation. I have in mind things like Operation Valkyrie in Germany. As one leader of the latter put it,

It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?

To me, this is a far closer expression of nationalism than those who worked to maintain Hitler in the name of the nation-state, or to subjugate other nations in service of one's own.

Somin was replying to a weblog entry of Jonah Goldberg at National Review's Corner. To be honest, I didn't entirely understande Goldberg's argument that Thanksgiving is a nationalist holiday as opposed to a patriotic holiday—I kind of get it, but I kind of don't—but it does look to me as if Goldberg is working from the definition I give here of nationalism, rather than Somin's. He writes,

The Fourth of July, President’s Day, and even Veterans’ and Memorial Day are celebrations of the nation-state created by the American founding. In short, our other holidays are about patriotism, not nationalism. …[O]ne reason for [this country's] greatness, too often forgotten, is that it is ours. [emphasis added]

Goldberg explicitly identifies patriotism with the nation-state, and implies that nationalism refers to the people and culture who make up that nation-state, regardless of whether they actually had a state.

To follow through, I don't think a nation can be healthy without a healthy nationalism, as opposed to the unhealthy nationalisms described by Somin. By contrast, there is a very unhealthy anti-nationalism that poisons a nation's institutions, so that its history, culture, and genuine achievements of a nation are forgotten, ignored, or discounted so much that the institutions inculcate disdain of the nation and its traditions rather than love for it. And I think both of these can, and probably must, exist at the same time, but that healthy nationalism must be nurtured in order to stave off unhealthy nationalism.

This though comes from my observations and interactions of the inhabitants of several nations: Italy, Russia, and the United States:

1. Fascism so poisoned the Italian notion of nationalism that (in my experience) Italians usually display flags only when the national soccer team wins a game. In Italy, the flag is a national symbol more than a patriotic symbol: the combination of green-white-red has existed in some form as an Italian flag since the Risorgimento, and the tricolor was the de facto symbol of the Italian nation since shortly after Napoleon. Admittedly, Italians never had a very strong sense of an Italian nation, with reason (Cavour's famous remark comes to mind), but I think this would only strengthen my argument.
   
   Italians do value many aspects of their culture (religion, cuisine, fashion), so by my reckoning Italians maintain a half-hearted nationalism. But even "Italian" cuisine varies greatly by region, and my experience with Italians is that they value their nation too lightly, especially when thinking of how they can solve their problems. Italians tend to have a can't-do attitude, that their problems will always plague them and their nation will not be great.
2. Russians, on the other hand, take the assertions of anti-Russian bigots far too seriously, even while rejecting them far too thoroughly. Serious achievements in the sciences and the exploration of space are so thoroughly forgotten that Russian films portray older Russians asking younger ones, Do you know the name Gagarin? Of course not, why would you? That is a serious lack of nationalism that leads to the unhealthy militarism and bigotry that people wrongly confuse with nationalism.
   
   Thus Russia allows me to try and distinguish what Somin has, I think, confused: nationalism and militarism are not the same thing. Nationalism in general relates to a nation, which can be independent of a state. The Polish nation, for example, existed even when the Polish state had been dismembered in the Partitions of Poland. The militaristic bigotry that manifests itself in many ways, such as the nostalgia for Stalin, is not nationalism if for no other reasons than (a) Stalin was not Russian, and (b) a major animus of the Soviet Union (indeed, of Communist ideology) was to subsume and eliminate nationalistic divisions. I would characterize this as nostalgia for the old patriotism, not as nationalism.
3. In the United States, it is far too common to hear and read remarks along the lines of,

   There is no greater cause of evil in the world than the United States.

   Never mind the blatant untruth of the statement, the attitude expressed by these words completely and utterly discounts, even disdains, the genuine good accomplished by the United States in the world—not so much in military matters (that's an argument I simply do not wish to take up) but in science, culture, the promotion of freedom merely by example, and so forth.

I'm having a hard time expressing my thoughts in those examples, but I hope I'm getting the idea across. Anyway, at this point I'd be very interested in readers' opinions: are my definitions correct, or are Somin's closer to the matter?

Update: Goldberg replies to Somin here. He touches on some of my points, even mentioning tribalism, but seems to contradict my understanding of his notion of nationalism. This is why definitions are, in any discussion, essential.

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Another useful Ukrainian proverb

The other day I gave my elder daughter something to eat. She dropped it, and without pause reached down, picked it up, and popped it into her mouth. My wife rolled her eyes and sighed, Русский не поваляет, не поесть.

I understood everything except the third word. My wife translated, "A Russian can't eat, unless he wipes the floor with his food. It's a Ukrainian proverb. My father's mother used to say it all the time." She had to remind me that her father's side of the family is Ukrainian.

I once came across a web page dedicated to Ukrainian proverbs about Russians. I only remember one, which I thought funny and related to a Russian officemate. He wasn't quite so amused; for some reason, Ukrainian proverbs about Russians tend not to be flattering.

I suppose that when a neighboring nation's armies take up long-term residence on your territory, it grabs one's cultural attention. Perhaps in a similar vein, Italian pop songs from the 70s and 80s refer frequently to America or to Americans: for example,

• in Mamma Maria, the group Ricchi e Poveri sing, così la bionda americana, o s'innamora, o la trasformo in rana ("so that the blonde American either falls in love [with me], or I will turn her into a frog");
• and again in Piccolo Amore, they sing, strano e colorato, come un film americano ("strange and full of color, like an American film");
• while in L'italiano, Toto Cutugno sings, Buongiorno Italia con i tuoi artisti / con troppa America sui manifesti ("Good day, Italy, with your artists, with too much of America on your posters");

and one could go on a while.

Now I need to figure out whom I can blame for my daughter's genes. Not me, surely.

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European Union manages to offend Italy (again)

The European Union's Court of Human Rights recently ruled that the Italian government must pay damages to a family whose daughter had to endure the sight of a crucifix in every classroom. The National Catholic Registrar's daily blog offers disdainful commentary here; the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera editorializes here. Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy, has said that crucifixes will not be removed from the classrooms, adding with some interesting insight:

Non è rispettosa della realtà: l’Europa tutta e in particolare l’Italia non può non dirsi cristiana. …Se c’è una cosa su cui anche un ateo può convenire è che questa è la nostra storia. Ci sono 8 paesi d’Europa che hanno la croce nella loro bandiera… Cosa dovrebbero fare cambiare la loro bandiera?

([The decision] does not respect reality: no part of Europe, let alone Italy, can declare itself non-Christian. …Even an atheist can agree that this is our history. There are eight European nations that have the cross in their flag… What should they do, change their flags?

I think Berlusconi is undercounting here: European countries with the cross in their flag include Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Portugal (implied in design), Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Maybe he's excluding countries that are not (yet) part of the European Union, but at this point we're picking nits. His overall point is appropriate.

To get an idea of the strong reaction throughout Italy, consider these observations that open the Italian editorial:

Il giovane Sami Albertin — la cui madre ha chiesto la rimozione del crocifisso dalle scuole statali approvata dalla Corte europea dei diritti dell’uomo, ricevendo per questo su forum e blog volgari insulti da chi, per il solo fatto di proferirli, non ha diritto di dirsi cristiano — dev’essere molto sensibile e delicato come una mimosa, se, com’egli dice, «si sentiva osservato» dagli occhi dei crocifissi appesi nella sua classe.

The mother of Sami Albertin requested the removal of the crucifix from state schools. The European Court of Human Rights has agreed. For this, they have received vulgar insults on forums and weblogs. Now, the mere fact of proffering such insults strips one of the right to call oneself Christian; nevertheless, this must be a very sensitive child, as delicate as a mimosa, if, as he says, he felt himself "watched" by the eyes on the crucifixes hung on his classroom wall.

This is not, let me point out, an opinion that happens to disagree with the long-term goal of a secular Europe; to the contrary, the author argues,

La difesa della laicità esige ben altre e più urgenti misure: ad esempio — uno fra i tanti — il rifiuto di finanziare le scuole private, cattoliche o no, e di parificarle a quella pubblica, come esortava il cattolicissimo e laicissimo Arturo Carlo Jemolo.

The defense of the secular state requires other, more urgent measures: as one example among many, the refusal to finance private schools, Catholic or otherwise, and to bring them up to par with public schools, as exhorted by the very Catholic and very secular Arturo Carlo Jemolo.

Nevertheless, he disagrees with the notion that the crucifix must be removed.

I myself believe strongly in the symbol of the Crucifix, and I pay money so that my son will attend a school where crucifixes are free to hang from the walls. I don't see it as the symbol of any institution, but as a dual acknowledgment of God's universal and infinite love for fallen creation, and of the wretched depths of that fall, that we would crucify our own God. Yet hanging it in the state schools symbolically runs the risk of making God an instrument of the (fallen) state, rather than the other way around. And I think the arguments made prove my point; since they are along the lines of, "This is our culture and our past and we will keep it."

A better argument, I say, is the following: "We want to direct our youths' minds to the necessity of self-giving, a human value that even state schools should foster. Even if you do not believe in the story behind the Crucifix, there is no symbol of self-giving, universal love that is more effective or pedagogical than this one. Indeed, it transcends our culture."

Update: Grahnlaw corrects a bit of confusion on my part (the EU and the Council of Europe are not the same) and on his website offers some thoughtful analysis. In particular,

The Catholic Church would hardly have reacted as clearly, if the crucifix was only a state symbol (in Italy). …Generally, I prefer the state and the public sector more broadly to be secular and non-discriminatory, but I think that tolerance is sometimes more valuable than a stubborn application of principle. [and in the comments, he adds:] Protection for a 'right' not to be offended cannot go very far (cf. blasphemy).

I'm also reminded some time ago of the EU Parliament's debate (I'm pretty sure it was EU here) on eradicating Nazi symbols from public places. This went on fine until some Eastern Europeans proposed banning Communist symbols from public places. Since Communists Parties so-named are still abundant in Western Europe, this created difficulties. I don't remember how it turned out.

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A bad week for Berlusconi

It's been an awful week for Prime Minister Berlusconi. The Italian version of the Supreme Court rejected a law that immunized the top leaders of the Italian government from prosecution, which means that several prosecutions into Berlusconi's past will resume. In his subsequent remarks to reporters, Berlusconi was genuinely angry:

We will move forward. We have governed five years without [the immunity]. I didn't have faith because with a constitutional court with eleven left-wing judges, it was impossible that they would approve this. In the end, I'd like to say that the synthesis is this: thank goodness that Silvio is here. Because if Silvio wasn't here with his government and with the support of 70% of Italians, Italy would be in the hands of a left wing that would make of our country something which you all know. And so, it's fine that way. We have, number one, a well-organized minority of red magistrates who use the legal system towards political ends; we have 72% of the press that consists of left-wing journalists; we have all the news shows on public television, paid with everyone's money, dominated by the left wing; they make fun of us even with comic shows; you all know whose side the head of state is on; we have eleven judges on the constitutional court chosen by the heads of the left wing who make of the constitutional court not an organ to guarantee justice, but a political organ. We will move forward. The investigations that they will hurl against me in Milan are of a nature that is authentically false; I will lose an hour from public service to go there and put the lie to all of them. These things here they make my responsibility; they make them the Italians' burden; hurray for Italy; hurray for Berlusconi.

Wow. An entire minute without any jokes, without any funny decsriptions of his political opponents? Has anyone ever seen Berlusconi lose his composure that way?

Yet the news gets worse! Just today we learn that the campaign to win Berlusconi a Nobel Peace Prize for, among other accomplishments, his work settling the war between Russia and Georiga was considered less admirable than the accomplishments of the president of the United States, which include…

uhm…

…someone help me out here…



Update: I don't know what's funnier, some of the mockery being directed at the Nobel committee, or the way die-hard Obama worshipers are characterizing Richard Cohen as a "neocon" and a "rightie".

My favorite joke so far comes from a comment to Cohen's piece:

Maybe this is why Chicago didn't get the Olympics -- the IOC didn't want the spectacle of seeing gold medals handed out before the events are even started.

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Berlusconi for the Nobel Peace Prize

There is a campaign to award Berlusconi the Nobel Peace Prize. The first sentence explaining why is,

The Nobel Peace Prize has never been given to an Italian from 1907 up today.

As God is my witness, I am not making this up.

Imagine giving the Nobel Prize to a man who

• claimed before losing an election that Italians would not have the, uhm, "testicles" to vote for the opposition;
• claims that he loves Finns, as long as they're at least 18;
• claimed to have obtained concessions by working his "lover's magic" on the German Chancellor (presumably Merkel, not Schroeder);
• nominated a former showgirl from one of his TV networks to be Minister of Equal Opportunity;
• remarked during the throes of a trumped-up story against him that Italy has many beautiful women, and he isn't a saint.

To Berlusconi's credit, last year a minister of the Spanish government accused Berlusconi's regime of being racist and xenophobic, so he can't be all bad. (Call me insensitive, but leftists throw those words around wayyyyyy too much, and the Spanish government is not what you could call a model of welcoming immigrants.) He also succeeded in getting the mountains of trash bags off the streets of Naples after spending a while in 4000€/night hotels there. Amazingly, this did not involve relocating Neapolitans to other cities so they could trash them. (Neapolitans have a bad, bad reputation in Gaeta.)

Jokes aside, the group campaigning for him states that he helped resolve the war between Russia and Georgia two summers past. If a similar effort was reason to award Teddy Roosevelt the prize, I guess it's reason to award it to Berlusconi.

But, still…

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A European language unknown to Europe

Enzo Rivellini, an Italian minister of the European parliament, rose to address the assembly first in Italian, then in Neapolitian, the language of the Kingdom of Naples that, as he asserted, is not merely a dialect, but a language with its own vocabulary, and its own literature. The language, he sought to remind them, was spoken in European courts not so long ago.^*

According to Corriere della Sera, his discourse in Neapolitan left the translators puzzled. How to translate 'o pata pata 'e l'acqua?

I wonder if the Basques address the European Parliament in their language.

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^*A century and a half ago, actually, but who's counting?

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The formal versus informal second person singular

In many languages, a speaker addresses another person in different ways depending on intimacy and formality. For example,

• In Spanish, one uses tu with an informal relation, and usted with a formal relation.
• Likewise, Italian uses tu with an informal relation, and lei with a formal relation. I have read that this offended the Fascist Party, since lei is also the third person singular pronoun for a woman ("she" or "her") and they thought this was feminizing Italy, so they pushed to replace lei with voi (the second person plural, "y'all" in Southern and "youse" in Northern).
• In Russian, ты (ti) is used for the informal, and вы (vi) for the formal.

Apparently, this practice is falling into disuse in Italy and Spain, as Corriere della Sera reports in an article titled, The sunset of "lei" towards superiors and professors. The paper reports that an Italian company has reminded its employees that lei is required when addressing superiors; likewise, a Spanish official has stated that addressing professors with tu shows a lack of respect.

The article suggests that popular television shows are prompting the change, since everyone on the shows addresses everyone else by the informal rather than the formal. Wikipedia reports that part of this is also because advertisements and correspondence use tu to imply a close relationship between the client and the company. This suggests to me that in the past, people may have wanted respect from the people who did business with them; today they want intimacy.

Strange, but does it correspond to patterns of business and worship in this country as well? There's a memorable line in the film Falling Down (a dark comedy) where Michael Douglas' character asks a fast food worker and manager,

Why am I calling you by your first names? I don't even know you. I still call my boss "Mister", and I've been working for him for seven years, but all of a sudden I walk in here and I'm calling you Rick and Sheila like we're in some kind of AA meeting... I don't want to be your buddy, Rick. I just want some breakfast.

I've also heard that teachers used to address their students as "Mr." or "Miss" so-and-so; is that so? Now students often want to address their teachers by their first names, and many teachers prefer that as well!

Whatever the case, I have also heard that the Fascists' obsession with void was merely an attempt to resurrect a more ancient practice that had fallen into disuse. The article and Wikipedia seem to confirm this by referring to ancient southern Italian practices of addressing people formally as Vossia or Vossignoria ("your Lordship"). I have heard some southern Italians use voi when addressing each other; whether from ancient usage—as the article suggests—or from having learned it in Fascist times, I don't know, but Wikipedia implies the former.

My Nonno's neighbors used to refer to him respectfully as Don Felice or Dottor Leboffe (he had a doctorate in economics from the University of Naples). Even old acquaintances would refer to him this way (or perhaps by Don Felì)) then subsequently pass into tu. In the States, we associate Don with the Mafia (Don Gotti, Don Corleone) but it remains a term of respect in southern Italy. For example, in Gaeta, people address the parish priest not as Padre Giacomo or Padre Paolo but as Don Giacomo or Don Paolo. I reckon Don comes from the Latin Domine for Lord,and I'd wager that they also had such ways of showing respect in formal situations.

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Those Puritans in Italy

News items you aren't likely to hear from those who sing the praises of an enlightened, loose-moraled Europe:

• Roberto Donadoni, the Italian soccer legend who is now coach of the soccer team of Naples (perpetual underdogs of Serie A, assuming they're even in Serie A, which you can't always assume) has banned women with immodest shirts, short skirts, or even short shorts from sitting in the stands during practice. He wants to keep his players focused on the game, rather than distracted by female anatomy. Neapolitans have taken to calling him 'o Talebano, "the Taliban."
  
  A sample of short shorts is on the man in this photo:
  
  The shorts were originally on the woman until they tried to view the practice. The two decided to swap their shorts so that security would admit them to the practice.
  
  Spectators are also forbidden to use cell phones. Goes to show that the only person in the world who can get Neapolitans to adopt a modicum of decency, let alone rules like this, would be the soccer coach. (Or at least people who want to watch Naples practice, since if I read it correctly they are not actually in Naples when they practice.)
  
  
• In Milan, youth below 16 years of age are no longer allowed to drink alcohol, either on the street or in restaurants.
  
  An online survey by Corriere della Sera, a Milanese newspaper, shows that nearly 80% of readers support the action.

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