Another day, another thought

Today’s thought comes from The Waste Books, by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

A dark, fast-paced story…

Amazon has just posted the cover of my next novel, published by Picador in May 2010, which makes it feel oddly official. Here it is. You can pre-order from the big boys here and from Book Depository, at a lower price and with free delivery, here. No pressure, obviously.

Button up

The France Soir correspondent in Rome, Ariel Dumont, has just been sacked for being anti-Berlusconian. This isn’t what the paper says, of course. The editor talks about the need to rationalise its overseas representation for reasons of budget and denies any pressure from the newspaper’s owner. France Soir is controlled by 23-year-old Alexander Pugachev, the son of the Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev, the 605th richest man in the world, ex-Chekhist and close friend of Putin. Berlusconi, by sheer coincidence, is also a close friend of Putin, in what passes for friendship among people of this sort.

By further coincidence, the newspaper has also sacked Natalie Ouvaroff, its Moscow correspondent, who has been less than gentle recently with the feisty bare-chested salmon wrestler from St. Petersburg, the man whose reputation may not be besmirched, or else. The dinky badge to the right, by the way, belongs to the KGB ans may once have adorned young Vlad’s lapel, or wherever they used to wear these things.

Still, things could be worse. Getting the sack isn’t much fun, but it’s better than being shot in the head.

Not very well known people in important places

A lovely piece of self-fulfilling reporting yesterday on RAI One’s evening news. They were talking about the appointments made by the EU for president and foreign minister. After telling us that neither Tony Blair nor the Italian candidate for foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema, had been selected (for which relief, much thanks), they showed a brief clip of Cathy Ashton going about her business in a smiling and competent manner, followed by a photograph of the new EU president, Herman Van Rompuy. Not much is known about him, they said. You’d have thought this was the cue to tell us a little more about him, other than that he’s Belgian, but you’d have been wrong. They had other, more important fish to fry than sole à l’Ostendaise (a Belgian speciality, if you were wondering).

To slightly redress the balance, here’s a photograph of them both. Van Rompuy is the one in the coordinated blue shirt and tie (a Top Man deal) in the front row, staring ahead and obviously concentrating on raising his European profile, while the great and good of the continent think about their own affairs all round him. Berlusconi doesn’t appear to be present, although judging from the ‘Not now, Silvio’ look on Ashton’s face and Sarkozy’s widely spread hands I suspect he’s behaving badly just off-camera.

Bingo bongo

People in Britain are right to be worried about the BNP, but even Griffin and his mean-spirited cronies might think twice before imitating the Northern League council of Colacchio*, a small town near Brescia. As part of their Yuletide festivities they’ve decided to conduct a door-to-door search for immigrants whose permit to stay has run out and expel any they find forthwith, and certainly by 25 December. This might not sound very Christmassy to you, accustomed to the notion that the festival is a time of good cheer in which a general welcome is extended to all. That’s not what Claudio Abiendi, responsible for ‘security’ in the town, thinks. For Abiendi, one of the original founders of the League, Christmas isn’t a time of welcome, but an affirmation of ‘the Christian tradition, and of our identity.’ It’s not clear which Christian tradition they’re referring to here, although they could be referring to such high points in the church’s past as the Inquisition, Vatican support for Nazism, forced baptisms, witch hunts, and the organisation of pogroms in much of medieval Europe. And to show how deeply rooted the local administration is in the millennial heritage of Catholic Italy, or should I say the decade-long identity of ‘Padania’, the very sound of which brings a smile to my scoffing lips, they’ve decided to call the operation ‘White Christmas’. That’s right, in English.

*Actually Coccaglio. See comments for correction, apology, and so on.

Sticks, stones, words, lawyers

That Berlusconi and his associates don’t trust certain magistrates hardly needs repeating. But it’s odd how much faith they put in the due process of law when they’re trying to shut up someone inconvenient. SB’s already brought cases against newspapers in Italy and abroad, so far without success, but that isn’t as important as establishing that acts of criticism will lead to substantial, even crippling lawyers’ fees to prove their legitimacy. Now one of his right-hand men, Renato Schifani, a Sicilian lawyer and the owner of one of the senate’s most splendid comb-overs until the Forza Italia image police got their hands on him, has decided to take Antonio Tabucchi, the author of, among other books, Sostiene Pereira, to court for an article he wrote for L’Unità, the ex-PCI that’s already being sued by his long-time boss, SB. Tabucchi, whose name often pops among Nobel candidates, has been accused of besmirching Schifani’s character, something the man does perfectly well for himself whenever he opens his mouth. Presumably Tabucchi mentioned some of Schifani’s former associates, usurers, Mafiosi and the like, and didn’t stress firmly enough that a man should never be judged by the company he keeps. If that weren’t the case, of course, we’d hardly need to dig into Schifani’s no doubt crystalline past for proof of unwise associations. I’d have thought the hands of a man who lends his professional skills to keeping the half-pint Buffoon out of jail were already quite muddied enough.

PS The word Berlusconi wasn’t recognised by the spell-check of the computer I’m using to write this. It proposed, as an alternative, Lusciousness and an adjective referring to conifers. His old chum, the self-exiled ‘socialist’ crook Bettino Craxi, produced similarly improbable results, including Praxis, Cranium and Craving. There’s a thesis here…

Shame

This cleverly designed bag with the handy noose-shaped handle might be the closest we’ll ever get to seeing justice done in Italy. It’s the old story. You’ve read it here on this blog a tedious number of times and pretty much anywhere else that’s talked about Italy in the past twenty years. It’s the one that begins: ‘In any normal western democracy…’ and then goes on to describe the latest exploits of a governing class that has never quite grasped the concepts of shame or accountability (in other words, the guardian angels of any democracy worth its name). It was bad enough under the Christian Democrats, who regarded the electorate as ignorant and tendentially obedient subjects, cowed by the authority of their masters. These days, under Berlusconi, we’re simply tele-customers and it would, indeed, be more than fitting if the tin-pot Duce were to meet his end on the side of a shopping bag. What continues to astonish, though, is the extent to which shame has been excised from the body politic. You probably remember that Berlusconi’s most recent attempt to wriggle out of the various court cases in which he’s the accused was blocked by the supreme court a couple of weeks ago. But a couple ofweeks is all it takes to come up with a new solution. This time a bill has been proposed which exempts all ex-cruiseship crooners with hair transplants from prosecution, as long as their surnames begin with B. I’m joking, of course, but only just. It might have been better if such a law had been proposed. It’s obvious that Berlusconi will never serve a day in jail, so legislation which really is ad personam might be the simplest option, howwever hard it is to swallow. Because the worrying consequences of this new proposal are that the putative prison doors will be flung open not only for our wily hero, but for all other kinds of equally serious evildoers, who will simply walk away scot-free and ready to re-offend, secure in the knowledge that they’ll almost certainly walk free again, however many people they rip off. These are white-collar criminals, which means they’re up there with Bernard Madoff, destroying lives while feathering already gilded nests. In my wilder days, I’d have called them filthy capitalist scum, and, guess what, those words still work for me. These people will be practically guaranteed immunity under the new law, which imposes time limits on trials. The more complicated the trial – and financial crimes are necessarily complicated – the less likely it is to be concluded within the time allotted. Oh yes, illegal immigrants, while fulfilling all the conditions of the measure, whose presence in this country is not a crime but an infraction, will nonetheless not be able to benefit from the law. The banker who squirrels away the savings of a thousand pensioners, in other words, will emerge unscathed. The Filipino woman who wipes their arses will find herself doing time. This, you won’t be surprised to hear, is a sop to the Northern League, which tolerates, indeed encourages, large-scale business malpractice but doesn’t like black faces cluttering up its super-sized shopping malls.

We are not alone

Had enough of the octopus? Try this.

That’s what Christmas is about

http://www.youtube.com/v/P8Aq00yJSxo&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0

Thank you for this, Adult Christianity.

Wil the real Maggie Gallagher fuck off?

My Facebook friends will already have seen this video, but why keep all the good stuff for them? It’s funny, and sad, and harrowing and you don’t need to have seen the sanctimonious bitch’s original video to appreciate it – indeed, it’s better if you don’t. The real Maggie Gallagher already has more attention than she deserves. It was made by a writer/actor called Jeff Whitty. His excellent website can be found here.