The slime that I left about 30 years ago (in the form of human slime, the one that inhabits the provincial villages of the lower Ferrara area) came back to touch me in one of its worst manifestations, and this (no, I won't talk about the slime in if ', I am not a biographer of idiots) made me want to write about the need for reputation that seems to haunt provincial politicians.
If you want to recognize the provincial politician you should perhaps count the geographical origin of the journalists to whom they give interviews. You may always notice that the interviews granted to fellow countrymen are few: the reason is simple. To those who know the facts of the time, telling a political biography is very difficult.
What do I mean?
I mean that the provincial man experiences a toxic situation:
- He has an extreme need for reputation, because the anonymity that is possible in the city is not possible in the villages.
- Since the company is immobile, the phenomenon of social overriding occurs not by climbing but by defamation .
It means that if, for example, an American cousin comes to visit mine for a few days and takes advantage of it to do tourism, whoever sees her together with my father goes around telling that she has a foreign caregiver. (Implied, implied). It means that if my mother, due to a surgical scar, has automatic timed shutters installed, and someone sees the two-room shutters getting up together in the morning, the village says that my mother and father are separated in the house, because they sleep in two different rooms. (as they have the ability to synchronize the alarm clock per second and raise the blinds together with precision by tricolor arrows, the legend does not say it).
Consequently, the need for reputation quickly turns into a paranoia , because in addition to having to sip the things that are told about themselves, it is necessary to prevent what others might say . The arrival of the American cousin must, that is, announced to almost the whole country, in order to sterilize in advance the rumors about improbable carers. In the same way, the installation of automatic shutters must be made known to the public, starting from the hairdresser, or the external divorce starts.
This paranoia becomes even more terrible if you go from reputation to biography. I just stopped arguing with a guy that I have had the sorrow to meet often in the past, who comes from a wealthy family, who has built a political proletarian biography.
Except that I happened to say something that is true: that his parents were not proletarians at all. Unless we define anyone who has a job as a proletarian, a rather imprecise category that covers an interval that starts from the employee up to Lapo Elkann. However, I said, they were not "proletarians" on the social scale of the place and the period.
Since I'm not a biographer of mediocre people, I'm not explaining why and how. But one thing must be done. Understanding the problem: political biographies are always consistent. In his political biography, the politic doors or has always been interested in certain battles. Always.
So the communist politician, it turns out, had already organized proletarian diaper committees in kindergarten and was making a revolution against the fascist teachers, in elementary school he had founded workers' committees for snacks, in middle school he was in the partisan resistance against the principal , and so on.
Because the politician MUST always have been on the right side, indeed: he was born on the right side. The communist politician is not only a communist and proletarian from birth: he comes from a family of proletarians, indeed he has a noble lineage made up of proletarians for generations . Just as the great electors of the Holy Roman Empire all descend from Charlemagne, (including, it seems, the emperor of Japan: sarcazzo where Charles was going to sluts) the internet communists seem to descend directly from Carlus Marxius, a famous materialist philosopher from Trastevere , if not by Bakunos Anarkos of Miletus, a well-known Greek philosopher.
It is not a new phenomenon. Even the life of Christ, for one thing, has been bleached in this way. He was the son of a carpenter carpenter, who in that area was certainly what we would call today "upper middle class", and there are many things in the Gospel that make one think of what for the period was a comfortable life. The history of the cave heated by donkey and ox was an invention of an apocryphal gospel, called PseudoMatteo (one of the), but nevertheless entered the tradition without saying a word. Because the "official" story clearly spoke of the bourgeoisie, and it was difficult to speak of "the last of the last" in a world where to take a donkey, charge our pregnant wife only for the habit of giving birth to the son in another place, and stopping at the hotel at night by hiring midwives on the spot was not a lifestyle accessible to … just that 70% of the population in slavery or close servitude (they could not move from the land they cultivated, in short).
But I said the life of Christ was bleached to the point of being "last among the last, humble among the humble, and blablabla", and therefore if we slide forward in time we should not be so surprised if nobody mentions the fact that Marx was the son of a rather wealthy Jewish lawyer, as well as owner of several vineyards on the Moselle. (today we would say he did do prosecco). Instead, the London police reports that describe his poverty are enhanced, given that immediately after being runaway emigrated there he lived on loans from Engels, who was … son of a wealthy industrialist and therefore had a lot of money. Um. Difficult to build a noble lineage of proletarians.
But this had never been a problem neither for Christ nor for Marx nor for Engels, who evidently did not have the provincial mania for personal reputation. Neither the paranoia that a ghost of the past came.
But especially, they did not have an audience devoted to purity .
Because when you have an audience devoted to purity you must at all costs prevent ghosts from emerging.
For example. There was, in my adolescence, the ritual of San Firmino (the feast of every primino! WOW). It was repeated every year, and in that year groups of bullies went to high school looking for "primini" and "signing" their markers with markers (or with some spit, depending on). In my case this ritual was "embellished" by a series of homophobic insults painted on the jacket, and by the fact that being my family in layoffs, losing a jacket was a problem and I also received a slap of slap on the way back.
Now, having happened 35 years ago, even if someone reminded you of it (and besides the guy was not present, it was his clique ), the most sensible thing to do is to say "fuck, what nonsense we did as kids. We were dickheads, weren't we? " Come on, we all made shit, provided we are alive. To say, I was a glamster / lipstick in the period when the Slayer split. Do I need to add anything else?
But those who need a reputation for purity cannot do it. And since, according to the Bolognese saying, "the shit the more you mix it the more it stinks", you get the "I don't remember any San Firmino". But San Firmino was a tradition consolidated long before we arrived, and it continued for many years afterwards. Saying "I don't remember any San Firmino" is like saying, like, I went to university in Bologna but I never heard of the freshman party and add that "I don't remember well if there were towers". Credible?
But why do you touch the pathetic up to this point?
The pathetic is touched when living a pathetic existence made of pathetic devices to keep up an otherwise mediocre reputation.
Same thing goes for life as an off-campus university student. I mean, everyone does some nonsense: you're 18/19 years old, you're out of the house, you're in a city all in all tolerant. If you then go into politics, or touch politics, even if you just go to the Piccolo Bar, sooner or later you will do something embarrassing. But even without politics: I was Dark (today it is said to be Gothic) and a goliard (Balla dell'Oca, was the good Nusco Consul). But I'm not saying "yes, I dressed like that for a little while, but then I only knew a dark, ciccio". What the fuck does that mean?
But if someone came out today saying "hey, you were part of an embarrassing youth subgroup and you wrote embarrassing things on a wall", I would probably breathe a sigh and say "eh, youth." What memories. And how many bullshit. " And yes, I also stuck awkward flyers on some wall. So what? I even made the soccer referee to bring home the expense reimbursement, you see. And I hate football.
But the pure person who has a political biography cannot say "so what?". It would be like saying that Christ went to bourgeois wedding parties with Roman imported wine, the maximum of the decadence of the Jewish bourgeoisie. You can not do this.
The true communist does not do these things: he was born whole from intact parents. So poor that misery had also ended on the 22nd of the month. For definition.
Shock the youthful reputation, that is the political biography, of a politicizing wannabe (moreover mediocre, boring, scholastic and funded appreciated only by sycophants more like him) it becomes a problem because of the need for a political biography .
Political biography looks a little bit like those curriculums I see in IT: people who used agile methodologies before they were invented, people who have seniority on Kubernetes who are previous to Kubernetes himself, etc.
In the case of the provincial politician, the problem is precisely this: that in the best of bad luck, someone who has known you in the past may appear. A countryman of the same age.
The nightmare of any professional political wannabe with a splendid biography.
So beautiful that you tremble at the thought of someone remembering something different .
It would have been ridiculous if it weren't pathetic too. The idiosyncratic reaction brought me back for a moment to the plain of the cringe , to the realm of the most apocalyptic Fremdschämen, and especially to the greatest display of pathetic justifications I have ever heard.
But the pathetic is one of the most popular styles in the province. You know.
