A Tale of Two Nations

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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