UMARELL 20 – IL PENSIERO UNICO

I was going to buy bread, there on the corner of Via Brioschi, which is the closest place, and I see someone in front of me in line looking at the newspaper and says aloud, 'uei a in tucc d'acord han decidan che i cativ a in quei là e se ne parli pu' [they're all in agreement, they've decided that the bad guys are those there and don't talk about them anymore. (translated from Milanese)] So I told them, I know my wife says I can't keep quiet and that I should mind my own fucking business, but I had to say it, I told them that I had realised it too, it's only allowed to agree with the main stream (the intellectuals say) and woe betide anyone who goes out of there, to say "look at that, they won't let you finish your sentence and they'll bark at you and if they can they'll take you out of office, look at Moni Ovadia, a holy man if he doesn't take offence, a Jew of Bulgarian origin,

the family escaped from the Nazis and then from the Russians, remember that "pogrom" is a Russian word, he dared to mention that the Palestinians also have rights and they told him to go away as a theatre director from I don't know where, then at the Buch messe in Franckfurt they withdrew an award for a young writer because she is Palestinian, not because the novel sucks, someone prevented Gerghiev, a magnificent Russian conductor, from conducting at La Scala because he's Russian, three years ago if you said long live oil and nuclear power they spat at you, now if you talk about clean energy they look at you as if you were a poor idiot who hasn't understood that nuclear fusion is just around the corner, almost ready. And I thought that democracy fostered the free exercise of ideas, the circulation of opinions as cultural richness, the one that allowed homo sapiens to improve, just think if the first Neolithic hunter ringleader who saw one of them planting seeds on the ground, had stuck his axe in his skull and told him to skin the aurochs, we would still be wandering around the Ardèche or in the steppes of the Caucasus chasing deer and mammoths,

to run away from the bears that want to hibernate in our cave, to watch from afar the lionesses that attack the horses and the aurochs, to learn hunting techniques and that one must stay downwind of the prey.
Is this democracy so weak, so sick and corrupt that it cannot bear a different voice? once it was only dictatorships that were afraid of different voices, to impose the single thought, which was never a wonderful thought, now everyone has to think and do the same thing, you don't have to raise your head that they cut it off, like this government here that throws people off the television who pass themselves off as dangerous revolutionaries and who instead are like lukewarm water like Fazio, nice guy, but I had Trotsky in mind, whose most important piece of writing is perhaps 'The Revolution Betrayed' where he explained that Stalin had destroyed democracy in the Kolkoz by sawing off socialism at its roots,

it turns out that Trotzki is more democratic than Trump, I won't say of Meloni because I feel like laughing, the only thing to do is to go and see the building site in via Bonghi where they are digging and you can't understand why, on the other hand making molotov cocktails doesn't do it any more, if your hands are shaking from Parkinson's you can drop the bottle of petrol on your foot as soon as you've lit the rag and it's the last one you prepare. Come on John.


November 2023