Lies, lies and more lies

And talking of Sarah Palin…

You can see the interview this comes from here. What’s hilarious is that McCain implies that it was fine for him to use the lipstick on a pig metaphor, but not fine for Obama to use it, because Obama ‘chooses his words very carefully’. Am I hearing this right? McCain says he can say it because he chooses his words as sloppily as he chooses his running mates?

Thanks to Joe My God for the captioned photo.

Very important people

Silvio Berlusconi will be making a state visit to George Bush mid-October to discuss world affairs. I don’t know who’s most likely to benefit from this, given that one is totally discredited at home and abroad, while the other has reduced his country to a sort of laughing stock and only keeps his head above the domestic waters by making sure that nobody ever, I repeat ever, interviews him in the way that is normal practice in the States. The only good thing that might come from the visit is that Berlusconi is bound to endorse McCain. As though Sarah Palin weren’t horror enough.

Evidence

A couple of nights ago, while reporting in its usual brown-nosing way on Ratzinger’s visit to France, Italy’s TG2, the state-run evening news programme, talked about the ‘appearance’ of the Madonna at Lourdes. Except that, the way it was said, there weren’t any inverted commas around appearance. And I didn’t hear any of those qualifying words like ‘claimed’, or ‘presumed’ or, well, ‘possibly never happened’. Apparently, for Italian state television, she really did appear. The physical presence of a woman who’s been dead for damn near two thousand years in a small French town one and a half centuries ago is a fact. Like Russia invading Georgia, or Berlusconi representing Italy at G8. (Hmm.)   

This was followed by an account of a recent ‘miracle’. There was an interview with the head of some preposterous religious organization set up to ensure the validity of religious miracles who said that, yes, this was a miracle. Apparently we’re supposed to believe the man because many so-called religious miracles are shown to be false, which makes this one true. Next thing, we’ll be asking Russell Davies if being on the cusp really makes a difference to the way we relate to Sagittarians. Publish Post

Contempt

Italian actress, comedian and satirist Sabina Guzzanti‘s in trouble. The last time old broom (read: Berlusconi) swept clean (read: ensure that all critical voices on state television had their contracts pulled from under them) she must have been on sabbatical somewhere. Since then, though, she’s made her film about the state of Italy under the rule of B., entitled Viva Zapatero and has generally mouthed off against the corrupt old charlatan, so it was fairly obvious she’d be next in line for the censor. 

This time, though, Baldy didn’t swing his own axe, but persuaded someone in Rome’s public prosecutor’s office to do it for him (OK, I may be simplifying things here. He might not have fingered collars himself. Hey, it might be a zeitgeist thing. As in, we’re all neo-fascists now…). And the person whose dignity is being defended isn’t Berlusconi, but Joseph ‘Prada’ Ratzinger.

After a speech at a public meeting earlier this summer, in which she predicted that within twenty years the Vatican CEO would be getting buggered in hell by some very active faggot-devils, Guzzanti’s been accused of something called vilipendio verso il papa. This translates as “contempt towards the pope”, and actually appears to be a crime. Guzzanti could be fined or, given the mood of the country at the moment, go to jail. 

Jail for having made the sort of crack satitìrists in Rome and elsewhere have been making against the rich and powerful for millennia. And who’s defending her? Apart from Dario Fo? Certainly not the Partito Democratico, one of whose leading mealy-mouthed lick-spittle toe-rags, Dario Franceschini, announced that there was no need to punish Guzzanti in legal terms because she had already been condemned by civil society. Says who?

What Guzzanti said (and, believe me, it works one hell of a lot better in Italian) is no more vulgar than Aristophanes. Or Shakespeare. Or Dante. Good god, it’s not as though the man’s more worthy of our moral respect than any other un-elected pedagogue with a degree in astrology (sorry, wrong -ology) and a cracker of a private secretary. 

Relax, girl. It’ll hurt less.

Moi Soleil

I haven’t got a lot of time for Jeff Koons. After all, he ruined the reputation of Cicciolina, a perfectly respectable hard-working pornostar-cum-politician in the pre-Berlusconi days when politics in Italy was a serious matter. But I can’t see what’s so shocking about the idea that Versailles should hold a show of his work. It’s exactly the sort of high-level overpriced trash that places like Versailles, and indeed the whole concept of ‘royalty’, feed on. At least it’s honest OTT vulgarity with no artistic worth or intrinsic value. Not like the dreadful would-be classical pseudo-rusticated tosh our own royal family seems to prefer when it’s forced to think about art rather than horses. The Sun King wouldn’t have minded, if he’d had an ounce of sense. I like to think he’d have recognised a kindred spirit. So why should anyone else? 

You can find out more about it here. I’m planning to visit Versailles myself in a few weeks’ time, so I’ll be able to let you know what it’s actually like to see Michael Jackson and Bubbles in the great one’s bedroom.

No, you can’t

Read this hilarious post from Jesus’ General, which would be even funnier if it were satire rather than the simple truth. Here’s a taste to get you in the mood:

No, you queers can’t have equality at work or in marriages. Being gay is a lifestyle choice, like illegal immigration, and not an immutable characteristic like being saved by Jesus Christ, so it would be wrong to protect it from discrimination. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, then between a man and a younger woman, then maybe the man and the younger woman’s prettier friend depending on how the implants work out. Two men in a decades-long, committed relationship and raising healthy, well-adjusted children simply can’t qualify as a real marriage or family like that enjoyed by those icons of family values John McCain, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, or Larry Craig.

Giuseppe Mallia

If you’d like to see more of Giuseppe’s work, and you’d have to be mad not to, click here.

Hang on! The worst is yet to come…

This is just one small frame from an entire comic devoted to the horrors of homosexuality. It was produced in the 1980s by someone called Dick Hafer, who clearly had issues. You can read the whole exhilarating opus here. And don’t miss the comments at the end. 

Creeps

This photograph gives me the creeps. I wanted to share them with you.

Football

You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of football from this blog. One of the funniest, and most shocking, moments at the start of each new academic year is the one in which I’m outed by students as someone who honestly couldn’t give a shit about the sport. Not one shit. Well over 60% of Italians, regardless of age and sex, are overwhelmingly interested, on the other hand, and generally find it far easier to accept me as an atheist (which is actually no worse than being protestant) than as someone whose indifference to calcio is infinite. 

Having said that, I’m very interested indeed in football as a phenomenon (and, I admit, I’m often fairly interested in footballers as, well, fit young men in shorts). And so I’ve been fascinated by the political hoop-jumping occasioned by last weekend’s episodes of violence as Naples fans trashed trains on their way to Rome to ‘support’ their team. It came as no surprise to discover that among the ‘fans’ to be arrested for vandalism and worse, far worse, were more than 800 convicted criminals, which, in Naples, means the Camorra. Add to these the numerous apologists of fascism, the most common gesture in the stadium being a raised arm, and it’s a wonder Italy hasn’t invented its own word for hooligan, instead of using ours.

It’s a truism that politics and football are intertwined in Italy. It can’t be any other way when the prime minister is also the owner of the country’s biggest teams, routinely wheeled out at election times as though the entire team were not only his employees but testimonials to his political wisdom. It would be easier for a politican in Italy to express indifference to football than it would for an American candidate for president to announce that s/he was agnostic, or didn’t believe in free trade except when it took American jobs. In fact, the line between religion and football is pretty permeable. Maradona, before becoming a pro-Castro, coke-snorting porkie, was up there with Padre Pio on the wall of every pizzeria between Formia and Salerno.

Why am I writing about this now? In response to the news that ex-Lazio player Paolo Di Canio wants to manage West Ham. Di Canio made a name for himself on the pitch not only as a footballer but as one of the most rabid supporters of Mussolini in a world where fascism is the norm. That’s him in the picture, displaying his armpit. Just what West Ham needs.

And yes, I do remember where I was when England won the World Cup in whenever it was.1964?  Bored stupid in the back of the car as we drove home from a family holiday in Ventnor.