Elly Schlein vs Benedetta Rossi. The plating DeathMatch.
Since Elly Schlein is doing NOTHING to change her party, but it must be said at all costs that it is something new and something different from the past (the same process took place with all the "new" leaders of the PD), it must end up in the newspapers, and in Italy this is achieved through useless polemics. The last useless controversy, made to believe that Elly Schlein really exists, is that of the Armocromista.
Before getting to Color Analysis, I want to insert an element of comparison into the discussion: providentially, at the same time, Benedetta Rossi who has a cooking Vlog feels accused of "not being a chef" and of "using low quality ingredients" , in this specific case the ingredients used by 99% of Italians.
This comparison serves us to understand something more in the personality of "the people". In other words, we will have to ask ourselves why, on the one hand, Schlein is lynched because she spends 400 euros an hour on an “Armocromista” – while the Italians are starving, and then Benedetta Rossi is lynched because “she is not a chef ” and because it uses poor ingredients that practically everyone uses.
If we leave the problem as it appears, we should admit that:
- The agent only eats food cooked by a chef.
- Laggente eats only fresh tuna fillets bought in Sicily.
- The agent can't afford the Color Match
you immediately understand that the agent is a little schizophrenic. You don't see anything in common between Benedetta Rossi who cooks the real, effective Italian cuisine that is on everyone's tables, and Elly Schlein who pays €400/h for an Armocromista.
Are you sure? No.
The common message exists, and it is exactly the same in both cases.
To understand it, you must first repeat the stages of mourning, and then understand what mourning is.
1. Denial (or Refusal) Phase
2. Rage Phase
3. Bargaining (or Plea Bargaining) Stage
4. Phase of Depression
5. Acceptance phase
The problem that Italy is going through, i.e. the impoverishment of the population, is precisely the mourning we are talking about. The Italian is poorer, knows he is economically fragile, and is committed to overcoming mourning.
You will say: but how long does it take? Isn't this phase of denial a little too long?
The answer is yes, it's too long. It's artificially long. And it is held artificially long by a political class that fears the second phase: that of anger.
How does the political class extend the Negation phase? There are several strategies for keeping people in a perpetual phase of Denial. I list a few:
- Artificial hope, or populism. Here comes the Cricket, he takes anger and converts it into a visionary, absurd, incoherent and inconsistent party. Always better, as Grillo himself admitted, than the civil war.
- Low Cost. Low cost alternatives are imported in order to allow the Italian to continue a lifestyle apparently identical to the one before. Thus, through social media, the Italian can go/eat/sunbathe/dress/drive in an economical way, paying the little he can afford, but still claiming to lead the affluent lifestyle of before .
- Unrealistic plating. Reduce the portions, but serve them beautifully. So the ration has now been reduced from 110 grams of pasta to 30 grams, but we serve it well: we put the useless basil on top of a small forkful of carbonara, rolled up in the center of a huge plate, and the Italian suddenly he's a gourmet. (or rather, what he learned to be a gourmet by watching Masterchef).
- Falling birth rate: some think that violent revolutions are made by young people. Fewer young people, fewer risks. The impossible birth conditions are wanted by a ruling class that fears the young people in the streets.
- Gentrification. The removal of benches for homeless people and their expulsion from historic centers allows Italians to forget their own economic fragility, or rather to live continuously on the edge of the economic abyss.
- Many more…
Here we get to the point: the Italian must remain in the phase of denial, because the phase of anger is feared by all politicians. And both Schlein and Benedetta Rossi make denial much more difficult.
Deluding Italians that they are as rich as they once were (and it's been 30 years now!) has been the main concern of the Italian political class, ever since the two billionaires (Berlusconi and De Benedetti) transformed Italian politics into a battlefield of their comfortable pigs, monopolizing it and reducing it to a dispute over the purchase of a publishing house.
Do you remember when Berlusconi denied the crisis by saying "I only see full restaurants"? Remember when d'Alema defended himself against the accusation of owning a boat by saying “but today do workers also have boats?”.
The message was: "I deny that poverty is rampant in the country." They did it in two ways, one by saying that the middle class was left untouched, the other by saying that the purchasing power of the workers was enormous.
This still continues today, with young Italians who don't want to work and don't go to slavers with their hands up, so they're rich, and things like this:
which in practice say "Italian customers threaten companies at gunpoint, in order to pay for things at a higher price". But everyone, everyone, everyone is still busy sustaining the denial phase. Poverty does not exist, impoverishment does not exist, and the inhuman effort made to force the average Italian to identify with the royals of England is only the pathetic side of the same strategy.
The mass media have created a hallucinatory bubble around the mind of every Italian, a bubble inhabited only by rich briatori and by Camilla the Queen of England. The bubble serves Italians to remain in the Negation phase, to deny the fact that they are poor.
Until something opens a connection to reality.
And this is the problem we have in both Benedetta Rossi and Elly Schlein.
If Elly Schlein hadn't said she had a 400€/h color schemer, and had limited herself to saying that she had resorted to using an color schemer, everything would have ended up in the usual "even workers can afford a boat". Who can't afford an armochromist?
Indeed, being a "profession" that does not require any qualification other than that of not being colorblind, armochromists would have sprung up like mushrooms, every clothing store would have offered advice from the armochromist, and the thing would have died there. (then the color matchmaker would have been a girl paid ten euros a day and bring the rest).
But when it is clearly stated that the color specialist costs Schlein 400€/h, then the problem takes on a precise volume. Because 400€/h maps VERY WELL into the average salary, and FORCE the Italian to get out of the bubble of denial that he built for the purpose of thinking himself rich.
In the same way, programs such as Masterchef have convinced the Italian that haute cuisine is a pop thing, which can be obtained simply by learning from TV, ("carbonara is made with guanciale but not with bacon" has now replaced the first five commandments of Moses), and especially, that taste and satiety do not count: TV can transmit sound and image, but not smell and taste. With the result that Italians now think that a dish is good when it is beautiful to look at , but they have no idea what the taste should be like, or what aroma the food should have.
This makes it easy to remedy poverty by plating things up: can't they afford meat anymore? “We are saving the planet”. Can't afford fish anymore? “The Mediterranean is exhausted”. Can't afford three meals a day anymore? Here comes “intermittent fasting”. They are all different plating techniques. If in the world of Big Brother in 1984, they acted by disguising a decrease in the chocolate ration as an increase , here they don't even need to do this: you put two basil leaves on it, and away you go.
After all, billions of people have believed that “less is more”.
When Benedetta Rossi arrives and reminds them of what they ate the day before, often cooked by a poor woman who is not a chef (although Benedetta Rossi is not), they are forcing the Italians to get out of their bubble of plated hallucinations, telling them "this is what you ate last night, give yourself less air".
And what happens after the Denial phase? There comes the stage of anger. And then everyone becomes angry and attacks Schlein and Rossi.
Years and years ago, around 2001, I wrote a short story in which a devastating terrorist attack was carried out against a shopping mall. Hundreds of ambulances arrived, people in shock had to be treated, and the police began looking for the bombers. The effects of the attack were described in an apocalyptic manner, similar to 9/11.
The bombing of the story consisted of taking a can and writing the following on a wall in the mall:
And this is what Schlein's 400€/h have in common, or Benedetta Rossi's cloning of yesterday's dinner: they undermine the process of Denial put in place by the Italians.
You may be wondering if you too are really in this bubble of hallucinations.
I offer you a test. Read the following:
If excuses such as "but no, come on, after all I get along", or "there are those who are worse off, come on", "but being poor is not a bad thing, it's degrowth/crisis/whatever" then you are engaged in a process of denial.
If, on the other hand, it occurs to you that it is really true, there are two cases: either you are very angry, or you are rich.
The only two categories that are seen as poor.