In late August of 2023 I celebrated the fiftieth anniversary
of my emigration from the USA to Italy.
Most of my grandparents or great-grandparents had made the Atlantic
crossing in the opposite direction in the mid-19th Century, also seeking a
better life on the other side.
By now my views and conclusions may be viewed by younger
readers as the tedious laments of a grumpy old man but I have come to
appreciate my extraordinary good luck in being born in the USA just as its
unexpectedly brief golden age of middle class expansion was getting up to
speed. While the US suffered a significant
number of casualties in WWII, the war had little material consequences in the
country other than bringing more women into the workforce and lifting the
economy out of the Great Depression. For most of us growing up in the suburbs
it was a relatively carefree and unrestrained life. Having no awareness of the transient nature
of life, I may not have appreciated it at the time, but we had a serene and
healthy environment. We thought that was
normal, sometimes even lamenting in adolescence that it was boring,
Our good fortune extended to being able to attend good
colleges and graduate schools without having wealthy families or working
mothers and without incurring student debt.
The US may have been bland at that time but despite occasional heated
arguments between Republicans, who ran the banks and the car dealerships, and
the Democrats, who were often union members or other undesirables, there was a
shared pride in citizenship and belief in “the American Dream”, a concept
rooted in political freedoms and economic opportunity.
Some of us who gravitated to the Democratic side were
sarcastic about the Norman Rockwell imagery and the 4th of July parades but
while our tastes and preferences varied, a degree of faith in the fundamental
goodness of the country was widespread.
My own appreciation of the Homeland was always a bit
restrained and when I got to travel abroad, first to Mexico and later to
Europe, it was seriously compromised.
Traveling around Europe for a few months following graduation from
college and active duty in the Army, I realized that no matter what blessings
America had bestowed on me, the prospect of living the rest of my life there
was a bad dream. I was fascinated by all
the European countries I visited, each with its own language, food, art,
architecture and landscape. Italy was
not the most relaxing place in Europe, but I found the beauty of its cities,
its countryside and its people to be magnetic.
Upon returning to the US to study architecture, I was able
to audit classes in Italian. I hardly
excelled at it but it moved me along the path to becoming an Italophile. A
further push came from an Italian-American roommate who taught me most of what
little I knew about cooking. His mother
was born to a family from the Province of Parma. At that time, New York was full of
Italian movies which drew me in as no cinema had before or since.
I might have adapted to living in the US, and almost did
while living in San Francisco for a year, but once again my nearly supernatural
good fortune intervened. By pure chance
I met a young Italian while on vacation in Rome who had all the Italian traits
that I had been so intrigued by: beauty, personality, taste, intelligence, and
independence of mind. Also, lots of
character. In short order she came to
the US where we were married and fifty years ago we moved to Italy with our two
very young daughters. It was a big cultural adjustment, most of it enjoyable.
Where the US had a shared patriotism and belief in its form
of government, Italy had little of that.
Italy had remained largely a loose confederation of city states, each
with its own history and traditions. The country had only been unified around
the time of the US Civil War and unification did for much of the southern regions
what the potato famine had done for Ireland, i.e., it brought poverty and mass
emigration. While Rome was a wonderful
place to be in the 70’s, there was an uncomfortable amount of violence between
the youth of the far left and the far right.
Terrorism emerged then, long before it was felt in the US.
I grew up in a rather anti-Catholic atmosphere. It was never so in a violent way, just a veiled
prejudice which showed itself in a sense of disdain and distrust. Marrying a serious Catholic required some
adjustment on my part and brought significant attitude modification to my
family. Regardless of my upbringing, I
did come to recognize the Roman Catholic Church as the unifying element in
Italian life, much as the allegiance to the flag was in the US. Almost everybody in Italy was Catholic and
even those who were not were bathed in the culture and rituals of the
Church. There were devout Catholics,
ex-Catholics, priest-hating Catholics, going through the motions Catholics,
good, bad, rich and poor ones but at least on major holidays and weddings, they
showed up together in the same place and to some extent tried to conform to a
modicum of decorum imparted to them by their priests in childhood. For at least one hour they would put aside
their personal postures and interests and join in a communal act of devotion.
While 1973 saw the birth of our second child and our move to
Italy, in the public sphere the news was taken up by the hearings on the
criminal activities of President Nixon.
His Vice President Spiro Agnew had been investigated for corruption and
forced to resign in time for him not to accede to the presidency upon Nixon’s
resignation. The year also subsequently
appeared in many economists’ graphs marking the downturn of median incomes and
the start of the permanent growth of the wealth gap.
The US has often been called the most religious of the
western countries because it has more regular church goers. While most of the people who (voluntarily)
emigrated to the US before the mid-Twentieth Century came from Europe, once an
almost exclusively a Judeo-Christian territory, the Founding Fathers were often
deists, men of the Enlightenment whose speech often mentioned “the Will of God”
or “Divine Providence”, but who showed little adherence to any specific religious
denomination. The vast number of
religious sects tended to create social division and rivalry rather than
creating a shared set of religion-based values.
In recent decades, people, often described as liberals, have
made claims that religious teaching has had no place in American law or
American government. Yet for at least
the first two hundred years few citizens of the US would openly challenge The
Ten Commandments or the teachings of Jesus Christ. They might not conform to them, but they
would not deny their validity. Indeed, my
own public school days started with a short reading from the Book of Psalms and
the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States.
Perhaps the most definitive contribution to US culture from
a religious movement came from the now despised and ridiculed Puritans, whose
rather stern work ethic was a major factor in the nation’s development. However, that mindset was detached from any
particular religious denomination early on and often absorbed and internalized
by immigrants from all over the world.
Italy and the USA have changed a great deal over the past
half century. Both have had their difficulties
as well as moments of glory. In the
‘80’s Italy surpassed both France and the UK in terms of GNP to become Europe’s
second largest economy, but its success was short lived, undermined by
corruption which emerged in the Mani Pulite scandals of 1992. It had been governed by what was unofficially
known as the partitocracy, wherein a large collection of theoretically opposed
political parties would agree to maintain the status quo and divide the spoils,
doing little or nothing. In the
aftermath, most of the existing parties, including the Christian Democrats, who
ruled Italy for most of the post-war era, went out of existence, while the
Communist Party changed its name twice to carry on as today’s Democratic Party.
Over my fifty years mostly here, that seemed to be the low
point, at least until now. Many things
in Italy have improved, mostly through advances in technology rather than by better
government. However, the country seems
to have lost its soul, its direction, and mostly its independence. The Covid pandemic, followed by the proxy war
in Ukraine, have combined to form a new wave of authoritarianism, not seen in
Italy since Mussolini came to power a century ago. In response to corporate and
foreign domination, the most common response has been resignation
and obsequious passivity to the predations of the foreign neo-cons and the
domestic quislings. Italy was the most enthusiastic
participant in the foundation of the European Union but by now there is
widespread though mostly silent frustration that the EU has become one large
Vichy Government, faithfully towing the line of its North Atlantic master.
The US has experienced many ups and downs in the cyclical economy,
with each downturn shifting more resources from the poor to the rich. The epochal event of these past fifty years was
the end of the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It should have been a time for rejoicing and
a peace dividend to improve life across the globe. Instead, the old Cold Warriors could not face
change when they could see how profitable endless war could be. The US had plenty of war hawks throughout the
Cold War, probably more and worse than even those of today. However, at the beginning of the new century a group was formed by Bill
Chrystal and Robert Kagan, calling itself the Project for the New American Century, advocating what both Stalin and Hitler had tried and spectacularly
failed to do, namely conquer and control the entire world by exerting unmatched
military and economic power.
The PNAC has completely dominated US foreign policy for a
quarter century through two Republican and two Democratic administrations. Millions of people around the world have been
killed or displaced by their policies, although it must be admitted that those
millions are far fewer than the millions wiped out by the activities of Stalin,
Hitler or Mao. The new imperialists have
been terribly successful, as three quarters of the countries of the world are
now under US military occupation. Of
course, the US doesn’t use that language.
It is all about mutual defense agreements among allies and friends. If you’re a country with a small population
and a sizable territory, you may prefer to see it that way but just how much
autonomy do you have? And who are you
being protected from? When the US
decides to attack and destroy a country it has taken a disliking toward and it
uses its NATO bases to launch the attack, how much does the country hosting
those bases have to say about it? But
why would the US do anything like that, you ask. You will have to ask a member of PNAC. If I were to be asked, I could only suggest
that the State Department is run by psychopaths. You might better ask a Libyan, an Iraqi or
an Afghan.
In the fifty years since I came to Italy as an American
ex-patriot married into an Italian family, I’ve had an unusual vantage point to
observe the changes in both countries. Italy is the most wonderful place to
live that I know of, if you can make a living here, but the latter part is
difficult, which explains how I came to live in Saudi Arabia for a year or two and
later return to the US for a few years. For all my love of Italy, I’ve continued to
read, speak and work in English most of the time and despite living in a small Umbrian
village, I socialize mostly with the foreign community whose shared language is
English, regardless of their country of origin.
Eighty or ninety percent of our foreign community are
conventionally secular in outlook, with most quietly so, but a vociferous
minority aggressively hostile to the Church, past or present, while
being remarkably tolerant of other failed institutions. They may visit the many glorious churches in
every Italian town or city as they would visit a museum or Disney World. If there is a new faith to replace those that
have faded, it would seem to be a belief in and dedication to good food. Italy is a fine place to adhere to such a
faith since it is so widely shared here.
The secularization of Italy was spearheaded by an unusually
charismatic politician, Marco Pannella, the Secretary of the Partito
Radicale. He was an intense promoter of
direct democracy, i.e., the making of major decisions by public referendums. In this way, both divorce and abortion were
legalized despite the protestations of the Church. He may have even been behind making Roman
Catholicism no longer the official state religion. The effects of these three changes have been
dramatic and not especially positive. While
many unhappy marriages were ended, a relief to most of the people involved,
statistics have shown that widespread divorce increases the number of children
raised in poverty, and that many of the divorced are devastated
economically. For a long time, the birthrate in Italy has
been far below that needed to replace the existing population. Only Spain has a lower birthrate in Europe at present. In the period after the legalization of
abortion, the population crisis has worsened.
As for the detachment of the Church from the State, most
democratically inclined people would agree that this was a step forward. Nonetheless, the most visible result of the
change was the removal of nuns from the hospitals, which they ran rather well. Their administration could be severe, but the
hospitals were orderly and clean. My
recent experiences in Bologna and Umbria have found modern hospitals well run,
especially in Bologna, but the same is not true in some of the other major
cities. One hears grim stories of chaos,
neglect, and violence in the major hospitals of Rome. Even in Bologna, doctors and nurses will tell
you that they are seriously understaffed, and they fear for the future of the
health system.
The Church has changed much more from other causes. Church attendance is sharply down although
there are still many devout Catholics and others continue to go out of habit. There are many churches, but the lack of priests
to run them is much more severe than the lack of parishioners. Standards of comportment imposed by the
priests have been relaxed out of fear that today’s people will no longer accept
limitations on their conduct. Italians
have always been a bit anarchic and the discipline of the Church has been
something of a corrective. The cycle of
sin, confession, and forgiveness has suited the Italian temperament very well
for centuries. That cycle has been
broken and we now see brides arriving at the church as though they just stepped
out of a sleazy discothèque, and pudgy little Lolitas parade around the churches
as if dressed for sale to sex tourists in Bangkok. The men are often little
better. Some show up as if they just climbed
off their tractor, even those who work in offices, with their drooping baggy
pants exhibiting their ass cleavage with
the same lack of inhibition as the women showing off their more attractive
assets.
Marco Pannella was a charming and energetic man, who got
things done. It’s a shame that he wasn’t
born in the US rather than Italy. His
extreme devotion to a government responsive to the will of the people and to
the Constitution could have done a lot more good there.
I mentioned the decline in the US starting in 1973 but Ronald
Reagan’s devastation of the labor movement helped it along. Bill Clinton kept the economy going but his
incarceration of a high percentage of young black men on minor offenses did
vast harm to the social fabric. With the new century came the unrelenting
horror of the Enron Generation and its devotion to making big money with no
regard for neighbors, the country or the environment*. We’ve had a string of four presidents* vying
for the title of the worse US president ever.
It appears that next year we’ll see a presidential election between, in
the red corner, a bloated narcissistic degenerate who believes in nothing other
than the art of the deal, his deal, and maybe a good deal for others rich and
powerful enough to be of use to him, up against, in the blue corner, from the
PNAC wing of the party, an old mafia machine style pol, more or less out of the
Spiro Agnew mould. Unfortunately, he
wasn’t removed when leading the remarkably corrupt Clarence Thomas though his
Senate hearings, nor when he served as chief Democratic cheerleader for the
barbaric and truly unprovoked war on Iraq.
The majority of American citizens want neither of these
candidates, but the two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, or the
Bloods and the Crips, as I choose to call them, want no interference by the
public in selecting their candidates.
There is a long tradition in America of voting for the lesser of two evils. It’s a hard call this time. Both the Bloods and the Crips are trying to
take out the opposing candidate through criminal indictments, a cynical
approach, but reasonable in both cases under the circumstances. Can anyone envisage a way out of this dilemma?
We can only suggest a mutual plea bargain where all criminal charges would be
dropped against both candidates in return for their disqualification to seek
public office.
The multifaceted oligarchy runs the United States and the Congress is a fully owned subsidiary of
the oligarchy. The spoils are divided
among the financial sector, the health and pharmaceutical sector, and the
Military Industrial Complex with its unlimited, unaccountable and unchallenged
budget. The voting public has no real voice in anything of consequence and can
effect no significant change. American military and cultural imperialism is
changing the face of the earth, usually for the worse. Its health care system
is both the most expensive and the least effective in the developed countries
of the world. People have grown
frustrated and angry about these shortcomings, but they appear unable to
articulate their complaints or find a way to fix them. Belief in democracy has
become as rare as belief in God has in Italy.
In 1882 Friedrich
Nietzsche proclaimed that God is Dead. That was sad, since God was the most
noble concept that mankind has come up with.
There have been other noble concepts: truth, beauty, justice, and in
that list was democracy. Now democracy is dead!
Some of those others are on life support. What’s left to be believed in? Well, we have pride, right off the top of
Dante’s list of Seven Deadly Sins, and currently the most trendy of them. There’s even a National Pride Month. Next on his list was either lust or greed, so
will we be having a Lust Month or a Greed Month? Given the dropping birth rates, sperm counts
and growing gender confusion, maybe a Lust Month could be useful, but since we
are promoting our most rampant sins, why not follow up with a Greed Month?
Italy has long been addicted to style, “la moda”. Unfortunately, in its insatiable quest to be
at the forefront of what’s “In”, it has imitated every bad idea exported by the
United States, among them drug addiction, slob culture, single motherhood, chemical
castration, gratuitous profanity, obesity, self-mutilation, and a forced
obsession with diversity, as well as privatization and dismemberment of public resources.
It even emulates American efforts to suppress free speech, usually through groups formed to protect us from disinformation, and spy on its people with the help and guidance of large corporations. This entails total submission to the theories and tactics of US Neo-cons
and Neo-libs. Will the country find a spine?
There’s not much to put one’s hopes on, although Italy does still have a
number of good independent minded journalists, but they are seldom seen or
heard in the mainstream media, just like in the USA.
I started this essay by stating how fortunate I have been. I
have a wonderful wife and family and live in what I consider the most beautiful
place in the world, and while I have enjoyed good health for most of my life,
my doctors tell me that that is no longer true.
Again, my good luck puts me in the country with the best health care
system I know of. We all must face our
mortality at some time. Just in case I haven’t, I am frequently asked the year
of my birth. Following my answer I often
hear a cheerful “complimenti”, as if they
are surprised that I’m still alive and walking on my own. I take it as a compliment but it does lead to
thinking about the end getting closer. That
facing of reality is eased by the sense of continuity that comes with starting
as a child and moving through the stages of marriage, parenthood and then seeing
grandchildren start the same cycle. Well
into the fourth quarter on my game clock, I can’t help thinking of all the
people whose lives were interrupted by the wars and political crimes of the
earlier attempts at world domination. They died without knowing if, how, or when the
calamity would end. By now, whether I
die of natural causes or am taken away with everyone else in a nuclear holocaust, it won’t change the story of my life very much.
I thank God for what I’ve had. I
also thank my parents for giving me life and I thank all those who built the
world in which I’ve lived. They are all
dead too. If my allotment of good fortune hasn't been exhausted by now, I hope to live long enough to see signs that the planet will survive
and that the two countries that I’ve spent my life in will somehow rise from
the depths of nihilism they’ve fallen into.
***
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