Every now and then, you know, even Concita loses it. Let’s face it: who, in the circles of Repubblica and the collective whining of the Capalbio trend intelligentsia, doesn’t go crazy for class struggle? Could Repubblica, and especially Concita De Gregorio, not make the intellectuals deprived of money and a platform from Minister Giuli a category of spirit to defend like Silone defended the peasants of Abruzzo? Do you want them to be exiled to Rai Storia?
Except that here the peasants, protagonists of the lyrical-funereal sermon in defense of the “persecuted” by Concita published yesterday on Rep, are called Geppi Cucciari, Elio Germano, Stefano Massini, Tomaso Montanari. Not exactly underground voices. The first at the Quirinale, the second awarded at the David di Donatello, the others omnipresent in newspapers, theaters, events, and talk shows. A sub-proletariat with a microphone in hand and, surely, a subscription to Repubblica. Dictated by peasants: if this is censorship, then Pasolini was a minister and Montanari is Solzhenitsyn with the key to the foyer.
Class struggle against Minister Giuli
What happens is simple: Cucciari, with her Quirinale status and free access to Italy’s most institutional audience, mocked the minister’s vocabulary. Germano attacked him not once, but twice: on the stage of the Davids and then at the Teatro Parenti at an event organized by Domani, because the working class does not go to the cinema, the right cuts culture as if it were chicory, “a poor person must have the same dignity as a rich person […] a Palestinian the same dignity as an Israeli”, and “we must free ourselves from this terrorism that makes us censor ourselves.”
Obviously, no one was censored: simply, the minister responded. That’s enough for Concita to appeal to the dear old unbeaten concept of democracy in which free thought is sacred (but only if it doesn’t think like the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli), and the loss of privilege (of always being right, applauded, financed, and when the privilege creaks, cry censorship and call on the friendly press to arms) is automatically “new fascism”. “Even the new pope,” writes an irritated Concita, speaks of the “last”, “but with the pope Minister Giuli doesn’t have a problem, at least for now, with Germano and Cucciari yes.”
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Defense of the “martyr” intellectuals
The mutual defense, you know, calls for intellectuals who self-canonize as martyrs, comedians treated as exiles, playwrights as dissidents, columnists as political prisoners, as it is typical of the intellectual organically connected to the editorial bubble and the new resistance to still have a voice in all newspapers but declare themselves “silenced”. Until they resort to hyperbole. A minister criticizes an actor? Censorship. Calls him by name? Terrorism. Responds? “And then the Pope”?
The case has become national, but if La Stampa pulls Cacciari a (good-natured) criticism of the reply (“denotes inferiority complex”), Repubblica serves the big guns: “The right has an inferiority complex that believes it can solve, compensate by pointing to the left as a victim of a specular and opposite complex: superiority”.
The “superiority complex” of the left
Concita writes assuming the equally old dear posture of those who have dominated the cultural scene for thirty years and today compete to see who was less friendly. To then return hegemonic and a bit cabaret: “Could you, differently oriented colleagues of efforts, contribute to the common cause of democracy and knowledge? Because otherwise it will be up to the left alone again, and this new display of cultural supremacy would not be nice. Make yourselves supremacists, be hegemonic. If not Gramscianly, Tolkienly”.
We are back to the parody of Gramsci: if the left occupies everything and imposes whatever we are in democracy, if the right does it, there is fascism. But we are also at unintentional comedy: an entire paragraph is in fact dedicated to ridiculing the government where there are people “even cultured”, “rare”, “who have studied cryptic and refined authors”, “have frequented the Vatican libraries”, “who speak Arabic and do not disdain Sanskrit”, “even they have surely read The Lord of the Rings at thirteen but then, unlike their colleagues, have continued in the effort”.
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Every day has its complaint
It’s the upgrade of the Telemeloni paranoia phase, when every morning a left-wing journalist woke up knowing he had to run to TV to denounce that you couldn’t say anything on TV anymore. Every day, from the Sanremo festival to the Turin Book Fair, had its complaint. “Capocracy”, “regime”, “occupation”, “Eiar”, “It was better with Berlusconi”, “There is no freedom of speech”.
Repubblica published lists of proscription of the “colonels enrolled in Unirai” and then as now Concita De Gregorio took the side of all those who had been deprived of freedom of speech.
