Notes

The Lion and the Lizard

My friend, H., who is traveling about the world, is not yet writing for the Iranian. This is a pity, since the Iranian is one of the most interesting sites on the web, and if H. ever comes across these words, we'd like to know why he hasn't contacted them yet. Why, H.?

There's a sad essay by Abbas Milani, a Persian (he insists on Persian) intellectual, who dilates on the varied glories of Persian culture -- glories which are reflected in a mirror we know, the mirror of Western writers. After tracing fragments of the Persian interlocutor in this history -- a figure that I must imagine from footprints and echoes, since I am ignorant of the very rudiments of Persian history -- he ends with this coda:

"Furthermore, as the West began to take its leap into modernity, we fell into a dread abyss of tyranny, religious fanaticism and irrationalism. We have yet to altogether free ourselves from these benighted conditions. Khayam could have been referring to our time, when he wrote, "They say the lion and the lizard Keep/the court where Jamshid gloried and drank deep."

Maybe on nights like these we are allowed to dwell on the glories of our past; we are, after all, gathered here to help support the education of a new generation of Persians, whose critical understanding of the accomplishments of our much abused nation will make them wise and gallant torch-bearers in the long, complicated, sometimes terrible, often glorious march of our history and heritage."

The lion and the lizard are at least respectably iconic beasts. What can we say of the ruinous Bush administration, except that the armadillo and the diamond back rattler seem to keep their swampy watch/where Lincoln once made his melancholy round.

And getting back to Italy...
When LI first started this site, we served up several juicy meditations about the intricacies of Italian politics. We were brought up short by Alan, who now runs the Gadflybuzz site. Alan advised us that Italian politics was probably repulsing more readers than it was drawing.

Alas, this was good advice. So we lowered ourselves to comment on, well, American current events. Not as exciting, not as exciting. Italian politics is so exciting that it eventually wears down the participant. This might be the reason that more isn't being made out of the latest scandal to exhibit the unhealthy roots of Berlusconi's fortune, and its prolongation in his government's evident plan to nurture corruption. Here's the latest, from the World Press:


"On Jan. 7, 2003, Antonino Giuffre�once a key aide to the fugitive Mafia kingpin Bernardo Provenzano, now an informer�confirmed that Mafia figures had been in contact with members of Berlusconi's Fininvest company to negotiate the terms of their political support for Berlusconi�s election campaign. He also clearly stated that several Mafiosi, including a Palermo boss named Stefano Bontade, had met the Italian premier at his villa outside Milan many years before Berlusconi entered politics in 1993. According to Giuffre�s testimony, Bontade used to go to Berlusconi�s villa to visit his friend (and Mafioso) Vittorio Mangano, who was employed as the stable manager at Berlusconi�s country estate, Villa D�Arcore.

Giuffre is testifying in the ongoing trial of Senator Marcello Dell�Utri, who stands accused of laundering mob money through Publitalia, the publishing company he formerly managed. Publitalia, which is Italy�s largest publishing house, is owned by Berlusconi�s company Fininvest. Prosecutors allege that the Sicilian-born Dell�Utri was very close to top mobsters and allowed the Mafia to use Fininvest accounts to launder dirty money."

Anybody who has followed Berlusconi's fine effort to instantiate Marx's dictum in the 18th Brumaire (Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce) will know that the man's fortune has been entangled with suspect mysteries and peripheral frauds from the beginning. That, in fact, the impetus to his political career might well have been simply to avoid trial. But the latest is truly fascinating. Here's another graf from the story:

On Nov. 27, Berlusconi himself was questioned during Dell�Utri�s trial. He exercised his �right to silence,� refusing to reveal the source of 99 billion lira (US$55.3 million) used to build his empire between 1978 and 1983. Prosecutors suspect that the money came from Mafia boss Bontade. According to Rome�s center-left La Repubblica (Nov. 28) �the Italian premier had the right to refuse to answer, but he also had the moral duty to clarify the issue since he is the prime minister of a democratic nation.�

On Dec. 3, La Repubblica revealed what Giuffre had told the police a month earlier: �The Mafia have chosen to support (and vote for) Forza Italia because the Mafia always choose the best horse. Boss Bernardo Provenzano managed to find three direct channels to the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi.�

Italy, though, is strangely quiet. As Berlusconi throws his unconditional support (although no Italian soldiers) behind Bush, as he refuses to divest himself of his media empire, as he pushes throught he worst kind of anti-labor legislation, Italy takes it. This is the politics of numbness, the anaesthetic that follows the revelation of systemic corruption. It is never counted on by the reformer, whose sense of shock is enlivened, rather than deadened, by the intensity of the injury. Freud's paper on War Trauma, written in 1915, certainly applies to the infamous system of corruption that has formed Belusconi as its clown-herald, and that is now debauching the rights of labor in Rome. Substitute, in the following quote, politics for war, and you will have the attitude towards corruption that emancipates it from the indignation it deserves:

"War carries off the levels of silt deposited by civilization and leaves in us only the primitive man. It puts us in the attitude of the hero who doesn't believe in the possibility of his own death; it shows us, in the stranger, the enemy, who will will either have to eliminate or at least wish to eliminate. It counsels us to guard our cold bloodedness in the face of the death of beloved persons. But war doesn't let itself be suppressed. There will be as many wars and there will be differences well enough dug between the conditions of existence of peoples and in as much as they feel towards one another a deep enough antipathy. The question posed in these conditions is the following: given that war is inevitable, wouldn't we do better to accept it, and even to adapt ourselves to it?"