To tell the story of Italy today, not only that of the beloved and yet still important schemes of creativity and excellence, without frills and without discounts.
Telling the anthropology of a modern country to those overseas who are or still feel Italian, that was the mission of the founding editorial I wrote last summer for a world newspaper, The Newyorker, which carries in its belly, in addition to the synchronicity of various media, entire narrative projects such as Good Morning Italy and the soccer format Soccer Made in Italy.
As well as being the prototype, and the compass, of other city children, in Detroit, in Boston, in Washington, in Miami, in Los Angeles.
A long introduction to say that today we are talking to you about violence, a double violence, involving crime news and politics.
In Afragola, in the province of Naples, a 19-year-old young man, Alessio Tucci, stoned to death a 14-year-old girl, Martina Carbonaro, who wanted nothing more to do with him. For a rejected embrace she got a stone blow to the head and was buried, possibly still alive, under a pile of trash. Left there like an old thing, alone in likely terrible agony, guilty only of saying NO. And we will come back to that.
Then, as if the horror were not enough, a 65-year-old German teacher in a Campania high school wrote in a hate-filled post that the premier’s daughter Giorgia Meloni (Ginevra, 8) must end up like the Afragola girl.
Strong bipartisan outrage and condemnation, we would miss it, but beyond the usual sleazy network debate, there is more. That the political battle is something else is rhetorical. Here there is disdain and indifference for women (one murdered, the other mistreated in her innermost affections), the social folly of wanting to replicate a slaughter instead of taking the field to stop it, the end of culture, education and schooling (the author teaches in a high school), the entry into politics of language that authorizes death, legitimizes it.
The battle of ideas gives way to the battle over people, over the Person. The annihilation of the other takes the place of democratic challenge and opens the door to terrorism.
A new barbarism is within our society, a barbarism that sacrifices human life (now worth less and less) because it exercises its right to freedom, in this case love, and is mirrored in ideological resentment.
A double violence, a double democratic, political and moral defeat. On guard!
The article Too much violence comes from TheNewyorker.
