An environmental blog

I am referring to an enviromental blog called the Environmental that I discovered by reading the very interesting blog of my class mate called Bul Media Blog.

There is a post that discusses whether we should underestimate global warming or not. I don't have a certain answer. The only thing I am sure about is that because our society discourse is controlled by people who make money out of polluting activities, the view we have is an underestimation of the whole matter.

Then the blog discusses the issue of cows meat, which is one of the primary sources of pollution. Nobody knows about it because big money come out of meat production. And probably nobody would pay attention to this information while listening because the rule of listening is that we listen only to information that seems to be advantageous for ourselves. This one is not very good. We would have to feel responsible for polluting the earth while eating beef if we paid attention to this information. I am afraid we should do it.

The fact that liteners listen only when information seem adavatageous for themselves make of them pray of speakers who use nice metaphors to make their own interests. And they do it by making their interests look like something that sounds good for the listeners, just as if they were making the listeners' interests. This is the key of advertisement.
We should stop doing it and listen only to things that look real, that sound moral and right.

AND THEN GO AND CHECK IT!

Democracy now

Is the world real?

Our minds are so biased after all that hearing business men's talk that we ended up having ideas that fit their purposes very well.
Like, for example, after studying at school I ended up believing that reality does not exist. What? John Searle in his book "Language, mind and society" discusses this issue. These business men have managed to make us believe something so foolish as that reality does not exist and everything is realative...Oh my. I understand what is the purpose of this belief. It serves their interests very well: reality does not exist...then there is a soldier dying in Iraq, but there is not a soldier dying in Iraq...it is relative. What?
What is relative here is their discourse...their discourse is relative and biased and serves their own purposes...reality exists...They even managed to fuck up philosophy.
The same is true for moral relativity: it is unfair to kill but it is fair to kill sometimes. It depends. Hey! It does not depend at all!

Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Press Dinner (17 mins)



I knew all these things before growing up, they were obvious. Every child knows that reality exists and it is not fair to kill and that the king makes his own interests. And they knew them at Dante's time. But then all our culture was financed by business men and we ended up like that. Trapped in Matrix. Believing foolish things that go against our interests. My brother was killed...but it was not. It was unfair...but it depends.

The only thing that is not real is language.
I was in the newspaper today. I did not know before that I was a Spanish major and I don't remeber saying those things...but probably reality at that time was being relative and what is written on the newspaker is right. I should change my memory and conform it to what it is written there. I am a Spanish major and I said that the voices of Spanish people in the USA can be heard only if we are able to know about the facts. No...not even like that...I quote " It is important that our voices should be heard because there are things we need to know about"
You can imagine what I really said instead. I do not blame who wrote the article. What I said acquired a new meaning...or maybe no meaning at all when she tried to make my words fit her mental schemes.

This is a song I will give to my students. It is about real morality. The French singer Brassen's song Dom Juan criticizes our false sense of morality talking about a soldier that spares his enemy's life when he has been defeated. In this song De Andrè, an Italian singer, talks about the story of a soldier that decided to die not to shoot the enemy when he saw him, because he did not want to see the eyes of a man dying.




Songs like that cannot be found everywhere.
Expecially in Italy, where after Dante the whole litterature was sponsored by the rich and wealthy of the nation...and fosters this kind of distorted morality. And then we had Mafia. The climax.
In Naples now they ended up buying the toxic waste from the factories in the north or abroad and put them in the garden of common people who would accept to have them for a little money and then die of cancer. A big business..I can tell you. And I did not know anything about it before I saw the movie Gomorra, candidate to the Oscars this year. And the biggest dump of the region is just a few kilometers from my house.
I can tell you that that dump is real...

American Democracy is not the Italian democracy

I am linking to an op-ed from the New York Times called Iraq Voted. Did Democracy Win?

Imagine I live in Iraq. I don't speak English. You come and tell me: "I want to give you Democracy". I see that you have good intentions and I learn the word giving to it a positive meaning. I don't really check its meaning on the dictionary to see what you want to give to me exactly. And I don't ask you to give me the exact definition. Words are there for this reason. Communicative economy. Saving the time and effort that would be needed to explain all the times something by giving its exact definition. And I am fucked!

Mirriam Webster's definition of democracy:


1 a: government by the people ; especially : rule of the majority
b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2: a political unit that has a democratic government
3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States
4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

Interesting is entry n. 3. And this is exactly the meaning of the word that is being exported. But the dictionary is not honest enough to tell you the truth.
What is being exported by the USA is a two-party system controlled by the richest people of the country, where people can only choose between two factions of the same party that makes the interests of the rich people.
The word 'democracy' is really misleading....as John Searle would put it.
Reading "Mind, Language and Society" by Searle I have noticed how many words have different meanings in American English and Italian. Demoracy, communism...and many others. When in Italy we will all speak English we will end up accepting the meaning these words have in American English. And what we will have in July will be Democracy in the American sense. Now I would define it as 'una dittatura', a 'dicatorship'. Because the Italian system is far more democratic, allowing different parties to be elected...even those who are closer to the interests of the people...
Then when we will learn Chinese the word communism will be used to decribe 'capitalismo', because what they have there is not very different from what they have in the USA. My Chinese flatmate is a shopaholic.

What was also intersting in Searle's book was the analysis of the word money.
Money at the beginning meant 'piece of paper that stands for a fixed amount of gold". Unfortunately we will still consider our money to have the same meaning. The truth is that the name has remained, but the thing has changed. Nowadays money is subjected to inflation and deflation, those processes used by the governments to abuse the private property of the people. Here in the States, where private property is so important, nobody complains that at the moment the state is printing money causing its value to decrease and taking away the private property of the people? No, because nobody questions the meaning of the word money.

Things change, words stay the same. This is how people are fooled.

Madame Bovary

How come that it took me one year in the USA, plus attending classes in politics and reading books in linguistics to understand what Madame Bovary was all about? This society we are living in has made me be very very dumb.
When I studied it at high school it was presented to me like a book written by an emmbittered man, who was living alone in a house and had nothing to do but writing a novel about a woman who cheats on her husband. So when I had to choose a topic for my final dissertation for my second BA in French Litterature I went for it. And I decided to deal with the central chapter, where Emma is seduced by a kind of Don Juan during a political rally.
I would have never immagined that Flaubert was describing exactly what is happening in our society...just like George Orwell in '1984'.

The whole story is that in France the industrial middle class, just like in the USA the Northern countries with the Civil war, was trying to get the power. In 1848 they organised riots involving the whole population to send away the king. Then they did not know what to do with the rest of the population, that expected changes. So they decided to fool them by introducing democracy. What they did was allowing everyone to go and vote for their representatives, but these representatives had to be rich middle class people who had to make the interests of rich middle class people anyway. And they sent people to speak to the peasants in the countryside. The speeches they gave are reported by Flaubert in his book.
They convinced the peasants that 'security' was their interest. To keep thier private property safe. This made sense to the people but they did not realise that security was the richest classes interest, not theirs. Because if they accepted this idea they would be sure to keep their donkey and their small house, whereas the rich would be sure to keep all the money that they had, continuing to exploit the peasants who would work to produce food for them for little money. The peasants interest should have been to ask the rich to make the system fairer and to get more money for their hard work. They should have questioned the concept of 'security'.

The concept is the same here in the USA: the poorest people vote Conservative because they are easily manipulated and are made to believe that it is right if there are no taxes. In this was they keep their few money but they don't get any access to education or health care and their children stay poor anyway. They don't understand that if they paid a small amount of taxes the rich would pay a lot of taxes and they could not but benefit from it. In Europe this concept is pretty clear to everyone. But here the wealthy of the nation have managed to create a system where they make believe the people anything they want by using the mass media.

What happened in France was that the first elections with universal suffrage ended up with the whole population voting to restore the empire. And this is what will happen in Italy in July: the whole population will vote to get a two-party system, like in the USA and UK, because Berlusconi is manipulating them with his TVs. This means that they would not have the communist party anymore, which is the only one that, by getting the 3 or 4 per cent, represents more or less the interests of the majority of the population (it is pretty logical!). Only having this small party makes it possible to journalists who are in favour of the people and against Berlusconi to speak in the public TV. Once it will be no longer possible people will stop having any information which goes against the interests of rich people.
To make Italy like the USA is dangerous because there are not enough money and I am not sure if the rich American people who are behind Obama (USA controls Italy after the II WW ) will allow Berlusconi to do it. Despite the constant moaning and begging Berlusconi is doing...I bet he calls them everyday...
Any system of this kind, where the rich have all the power and resources, has had to resort to get money from external sources to keep a kind of balance: see Hitler's expansionism, or Stalin's (what a rip-off was that!) or the USA, or Napoleon III in France at Falubert's times. They had to invade other coutries to get more money so that the rich could get richer without making the poor starve.

Going back to Madame Bovary: Flaubert wanted to show how the rich people were seducing the poor people to make them make the interests of rich people. And he compared the politician speaking to the people to a man who is seducing a woman just to sleep with her by convincing her that happiness is to cheat on one's husband and being immoral is a matter of freedom.

This is another key point. The politicians were saying to the peasants: Progress is the key for happiness! Go and get rich! (sounds like Stalin..sic) To educate people to immorality and to stimulate in them constant desire for improvement is another key to make the system work.
For example let's say that Napoleon III wanted to make a lot of money by invading foreign countries or that Berlusconi wants to make a lot of money by doing things which should be considered immoral and unaccpetable like lying or bribing people. A good way of making people accept this it to make them believe that it is in their interest that the system is like that, because in that way they are allowed too to do immoral things. And they foolishly believe it, without realising that in this way they are allowed to make 30 euros by cheating, and Berlusconi is allowed to make 4 billions by taking them away from the rest of the population. What people do not understand is that if they were living in a communist country like Cuba they would be just as poor as they are now, but rich people would be poorer, they would not pollute the environment and the world would be better.
Instead they are made believe, like Madame Bovary, that happiness lies in constant desire for improvement and they struggle to get more and more money, that they end up spending in things they don't need but that they are made to believe they need by advertisment. Like a big house. They indebt themselves like Madame Bovary and then they are not able to repay the debts (this is what happened here with subprimes). They do not realise that the system is made so that they cannot get as rich as rich people, because education is private and the access to important positions is limited to people who are already rich.
So people are constantly unhappy, trying always to make more and more money. And they want to keep the system like that, hoping that one day they'll dream will make true.
According to Orwell this also leads to being unable to feel any kind of pleasure, including sexual one. Because pleasure is not possible while being in constant desire.

Now I believe that this capitalist system is very wrong because it keeps poor people as poor as they would be in Cuba, but allows rich people to to things that are highly dangerous for the future of humanity. But people don't understand it and go on leading their unhappy lives, constantly striving for improvement.
This is probably because people are naturally cooperative when they listen and they naturally try to fool the others when they speak. So there will always be speakers who will make listeners go against thier own interests...What a foolish species are we!

On our mental schemes

I have never really understood what Derrida meant when he said that our minds are full of schemes that give us a completely distorted view of the world and that we should try to deconstruct for our own good. Until yesterday. When I could see deconstruction put into action. And I laughed and laughed...you cannot even imagine how much I laughed.

I went to see a conference on Cuba (held by the famous professor from Stanford University, James Cockcroft) at Ramapo and then we watched a movie.
Fresa y chocolate.
This movie shows the way Cuban people consider American and European people. There is a young man who is 'normal', a 'revolucionario', while the other one is a Cuban too but because he is homosexual he has ended up conforming to the stereotypes they have in Cuba about people in capitalist countries. Because he is homosexual, he identifies himself with the stereotypes they have in Cuba about people living in capitalist countries:

- he is homosexual like capitalists, who have no moral values and are all homosexuals
- he drinks tea like English people and not coffee like Cubans
- he has American newspapers all over his flat
- he likes litterature and art, all things that Cubans avoid because they are all capitalist propaganda
- he drinks and amokes
- he does not do voluntary work
- and....the funniest thing ever...HE IS RELIGIOUS...he has statues of Jesus everywhere.

During the movie they get to know each other better and the 'real Cuban' learns to accept the other one. They get rid of the stereotypes and become best friends. Both love their country very much, but they simply have different sexual orientations.
And now in Cuba they are trying to get rid of the stereotypes about western people and they are more open towards homosexuals and religious people because they found out that it has nothing to do with betraying the revolution...

But the same opening is not always true on the other side...as the movie Good night and Good luck shows: some American people still consider being communist an accusation, something negative.



What really made me laugh was crosses and statues of Jesus everywhere in the flat of the homosexual guy as a symbol of capitalism...while singers such as Woody Guthrie (that I got to know on Friday during the show at the Berrie Center at Ramapo) would identify Jesus with ideas which are just the opposite.



And all this shows that also my stereotypes about American people were not quite right.

I killed Berlusconi

Why Hamlet is the greatest play ever?
Because it talks about when we find out that the king is a killer, illegittimate and a liar, and feel really like behaving like him...in a very immoral way...and kill him straight away.

He speaks and speaks and convinces you that everything is true as well as its contrary. And he is building weapons and he tells the people that an enemy, who has been dispossesed by his land, is ready to get revenge and attack...but then it seems that it is not completely true.
And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern...even Tom Stoppard caught them speaking and speaking many years later...

Bla bla bla
Ble ble ble

How can you say that this is not true? It sounds so logical! How can you deny it!

But that poor Hamlet. Because of the ghost words he was caught in the spiral of rethorics and logics too and forgot about the most important thing: never do to someone else what you would not like them to do to you. Like Jesus and Confucius said. And like Chomsky said: do not forget to apply the same moral standards you apply to other people to yourself first.

So I have decided not to kill Berlusconi...wait I remember they did a movie called 'I've killed Berlusconi'...but I think it has been censored.

A dog named Bob and the cost of a referendum

Local news

On My 9 news tonight the local news were presented in the following order of importance:
- 10 min on a dog, a specific one named Bob
- 5 min on a local school that organized a cooking competition (the price was a trip to Italy)
- 5 min on the next Hannah Montana movie
- 5 min on how ‘going green’ means to make school children feel guilty about the paper they use
- 15 min on the weather, including an in depth analysis on the fact that a season called spring is coming.

I believe that the order of importance was quite good. I have recently been told that I am talking too much about politics and I should focus more on the weather, which is considered to be a far more normal and important topic of conversation. As a consequence I believe that to talk about it for 15 min is quite fair...I am joking, of course.

In Italy the same thing is going on. In July there will be a referendum on a very crucial issue, to make of Italy a two-party country like the USA and concentrating all the resources in the hand of the few rich people, and what politicians and TVs talk about is the cost of it and not its content.

This is called ‘game frame’: everything is a game, all what is said on TV is stupid and futile in order to avoid discussing real issues that could make people think, becoming aware of what is really going on and thus cause problems to the ruling class.

I have heard there is a movie called ‘State of play’ which has been released recently. I don’t know why but I suspect it is about the present situation. Another poor director who is trying to make people wake up from the Matrix.

Some politics-fiction

Yesterday a friend of mine went to see a play called 'Out of order' by Ray Cooney. It was about something that was obvioulsy out of order and it had to do with a politician of the British parliament sleeping with the secretary of a member of the opposition. That is obvious, you would say. Nothing wrong about it. Nothing wrong with the fact that in England there is a business party and the opposition is a party that defends the interests of a class that does not exist anymore, aristocracy. And that they obviously sleep together.
If you think that this is normal...well you happen to be another victim of what George Orwell called Newspeak: they make you forget the real meaning of words such as democracy so you don't fight for it.
He also talked about Doublethink: to believe that something and its contrary are both true. For example you are not a business man, so you vote for the party of aristocracy, but you work in a hospital. So you are a nurse and at the same time a duke.

Ok, after destroying England it is France's turn. There this doublethink concept is still developing. So the rich people had to come up with different ideas. Were the rich people of France that took inspiration from the rich people of the USA in finding out how to make a party lose, or vice versa? I think this time the Frech had the best idea first. The formula of having a dumb woman running agaist the man you've chosen seems to work very well. And when she is running for office together with an old man...then it is smashing. It cannot but work.
I bet they came up with this idea during one of their 'dinner des cons', like in the famous movie, when they invite common people to have dinner with them, in their houses by the Tour Eiffel, in order to make fun of them.

But USA, UK, France are all rich countries, they've had colonies, they can afford to have a big gap between rich and poor without the poor noticing too much. Italy tried to have colonies but we clearly chose the wrong countries...no oil, no diamonds...But still there is hope for rich people to become richer. Hoping that by the time poor people will realize the gap they have become so dumb by watching TV not to notice it.

I have an idea for when Berlusconi manages to convince Italian people to vote in favour of a two-party system in July.
And if he goes on moaning all the time that a small party that is part of his coalition and has neo-nazi views does not want this law I think he can make it...
Hey see...Orwell's doublethink again: if you are against neo-nazis you vote in favour of a law that will destroy their party together with all the other small parties and you make of your country a totalitarian country. So you are an anti neo-nazi and a nazi at the same time.

Yes...when he manages to have a two-party system I'd suggest that the rich people of Italy that are his friends push to put at the head of the opposition party, that they also give money to, a dumb woman. Well...there are so many good candidates in the Italian parliament...But to make it funnier they could pretend that the ex-show girl, Mara Carfagna, whom Berlusconi seduced on TV, saying in front of the whole country that if he had not been married he would have married her, and that after a few months became minister in his government, decided to go to the opposition because of an unspecified reason. Jelousy...so that the Italian housewives could support her.
They could make her become the head of the oppostion so that the very dumb people could vote for her, and the not so dumb could vote for Berlusconi. Berlusconi would win and they could go on sleeping together. Happy couple.
Then he could privatize schools, and hospitals...and make the dream come true.

I should write him a letter to suggest this brilliant idea I have come up with...and only after a couple of months that I have been studying politics...imagine with what ideas I could come up with if I could make money out of politics!

On taxes

On the blog called Huffington Post I read a post called "Sharing tea bags with Right-wing exptremists" by Bob Cesca. It was about people protesting because of the introduction of some form of taxation in the USA. The author clearly opposed this form of protest, being in favour of Democrats.

Everyone in the world knows that taxes are needed to avoid wealth concentration and preventing that 80 per cent of the resources are in the hands of 67 people.
Why then the less wealthy Americans are, the more they are against it?
Simply because they are manipulated by TV and made go against their own interests. They don't realize that if they pay a little money in taxes the rich will have to pay a huge amount of money and with that money put together universities will be free, hospitals will be free, and so on...In Europe everybidy knows it...here it sounds like an heresy!

But I must acknowlwdge that here in the USA it is not as easy as that, because nobody in the goverment defends the interests of the people. When you see that the only difference between the two major parties is that one uses the money of taxpayers to bail out big business and the other to build weapons, so they can sell them to other nations, or to send people to war so that they can control the world and make money out of it, this becomes clearer and clearer.
But what can they do? Obama had his campain founded by rich people. They even paid money to send him to Europe before he was elected (as if he was already the president) so he could see the Tour Eiffel, the Big Ben, the Parthenon...How can you betray the people who have given you so much money and even paid for your holidays and do things in favour of all the rest of the American people, who don't care, who are not your friends, who just want things from you and are not giving you anything...A president's dilemma. That is very easily solved.

America is not a democracy

Help! In Italy they will soon ask people to vote in a referendum to create a two-parties system like in the USA. This means that nobody will defend the interests of the people in Parliament and even on the public TV there won't be journalists allowed to speak for the people because there will be nobody representing the people in the Parliament that will control the public TV. Just like in the USA. This is a vicious circle with no return that will be very difficult to break and that will up in a dictatorship. And in Italy we are poor and we cannot afford it like in the USA...so far. Because if it goes on like this people of the USA will become poorer and poorer while the rich people will become fewer and fewer.

It is a law of nature that everybody speaks for their own interest while pretending to make the interests of the listener in order to be listened to. And with TV this bad feature of the human being has been amplified so much!
Only the voice of the rich speaking for their purposes and pretending to speak for the people's purpose can be heard nowadays. And people are free to speak to defend their interests...but nobody can listen to them. Or they have just become so dumb not to understand their interests anymore.
You watch too much Tv and you think you are Napoleon and vote for the restauration of the empire. This is what happened in France when they had a referendum with universal suffrage for the first time. No joking...And they managed to do it without TV, only by sending people to talk to the peasants....

On communism and capitalism

This afternoon I have been to a panel were American students discussed Communism. With my Chinese flatmate.

What I realised it that the word communism had a different meaning for all of us.

For American people it means having public schools and healthcare and a system where wealth is distributed by paying taxes each one proportionally to their wealth.
For me this is what is normal in Italy and we are not considered a communist country at all. However this things are ideal anyway because rich people don't pay taxes because they find tricks to fool the system.
Now if the guy who called himself a revolutionary and advocated revolution during the panel came to Italy and expressed these same ideas people would laugh at him.

I think it could be a good idea for the USA to become a normal country.
So people living in Italy would not be fooled by Berlusconi who managed to make us believe that there is a logic connection between being rich as the USA and having its system. The biggest deceit ever. Italy with the USA system is nothing but a dictatorship. We should have the same resources and sell more weapons and control other countries and taking their resources, or we should have had slavery or an empire like the British in the past: this is the key of being a rich country.
To put 80 per cent of the wealth in the hands of the rich people like it happens here without having too much wealth is just a dictatorship like any other. It is not the American dream. But if the world goes on without being aware of this deceit there will be very bad consequences. People getting poorer and poorer everywhere with just a handful of rich people around.

And another big deceit linked to the so called American dream is the idea of free market as a way to become a rich country. No way. At the beginning the USA adopted a very protectionistic system, as this article written by a Cambridge scholar says. Even the Civil war was fought not for abolition of slavery (????) but because the North wanted protectionism. And after years of protectionism (and the new slavery called immigration), when the economy was strong enough, it could become free. But imposing free market to poor countries now means just making their economy fall pray of the more powerful economies. A big deceit.

Talking about deceits. China. Well they are called communists but this means in reality that they have a totalitarian society where the rich people in power have ended up adopting a system which is even more capitalistic than anywhere else...almost as much capitalistic as slavery.

Communism should ideally mean that the interests that are put before anything else are the interests of the majority of the people. And this sound quite a lot like real democracy should be (did you know that democracy has never existed in the world because the rich people have always had the power and done their own interests preteding to be elected by the people?)
However I don't completely agree with the idea of Communism. It is still very selfish. Each one doing their own interests. This sounds quite similar to capitalism on a large scale. If we all the people in the world had the standard of living of rich Americans that would mean the end for everyone. Extintion.
The only interests human beings should be really pursuing are the interests of the children. Expecially those who are not born and cannot speak for themselves. This includes a fairer society were wealth is not so concentrated, but also a sustainable society, where happiness does not mean having money to buy useless things but living responsibly, trying not to do too much harm to other people and the planet.

There is still hope in Italy

There is still hope in Italy. Recently the Prime Minister got very very angry because in a satirical show called Anno Zero, that is still being broadcast on the public television, they discussed the fact that 200 people died during the earthquake because the building constructors wanted to make money and save on the material. It is very important that they talk about it. Even hospitals fell down, killing people. Maybe people will understand and things will improve.

And it is great luck that our political situation is very transparent. We don't have a puppet president that look very good and delude people about the real situation of the country. In Italy the richest man is prime minister. Everyone knows and nobody is deceived. And maybe one day we'll understand that he cannot represent the people's interests. And this program on TV will help us. And it will also help us understand how the idea that making money comes before anything else, even people's lives, is very bad and does not make people's interests because we can just end up dying during an earthquake because of that.

Don't speak, act now

Do you believe this is not cool at all? Do you find very cool, instead, the idea that we live in the best world ever thanks to progress. Or that freedom of doing whatever you want without worrying about the consequences is the best thing ever? Well, you are not alone. All of us do. And the reason why is just because the people in suit you saw in the video also own the televisions and they tell us and show us what is convenient for them.
For them it is convenient to pollute the environment because they make money out of it. Is it convenient for us? For our children?
If we listen to them night and day we end up believing in what they say. We believe that we share the same interests with them. Is it true? I personally don't earn anything from them putting toxic waste in my garden because they are so mean that they don't want to pay to dispose it properly or to avoid producing it at all. They don't give a damn about my health, of me getting a cancer and I don't give a damn about them not being able to earn even more than what they already earn. Which is a lot, believe me.

Or should I be compassionate...yes... feel sorry for them... "Yes, you can put toxic waste in my garden...How much you need to pay to dispose it? Ah, it's a lot. You need more money to buy that nice island in the middle of the ocean, with palms, and clear water...? Ok. What about my children... what can it do to them? Nothing you say...right...if you say so than it must be true. Go ahead."

Anytime I have an idea in my mind that I find very appealing I always ask myself: where did this come from? Does it serve the interests of someone else (expecially the rich people who own tv)? Could its consequences be bad for me or the human race in general and the future of the children?

If they don't talk about it on TV or even tell us that there is nothing to be worried about nobody worries about it and people don't protest, don't ask for new solutions. And not just for words...for real facts. And if things go on like this we might end up noticing that the temperature of the planet has risen before we hear about it in the news.

Butterfly effect

If a butterfly moving her wings
Somewhere in Cambodia
Causes the worst storm ever in another continent
The choice of someone in a western bureau
Affects millions of destinies
Especially if the bureau is oval

The polar bear is the only one who is worried
About the fact that the ice is melting
That does not astonishe anyone in our side of the world

When the business man catches a cold
It is the workers who are coughing

The ozone hole is far from here
But it is from here that we can feel its effects

This is the butterfly effect
A Small thing with big consequences
A quite beautiful expression
A small thing with big consequences

Lipsticks and make up are made with whales
When you buy these cosmetics
It is with a spear that you make up your face.




My boyfriend is French too. And he recently told me that he did not vote for that 'mechant' of Sarkosy which is good, but... that his country was spending so much in military (as you can see in the picture below) and selling weapons around.
Even though many people think that a country needs to be powerful from a military point of view to count something I believe that the only people who are going to benefit from the French government investing public money in weapons in order to sell them to starving children in Africa are the rich owners of the big companies that produce them, and their best friends Sarkosy and Carla.

Another idea for my small island (continuation of previous post)

I have got another evil idea for my small island.
I will start producing weapons that all the kings of the other islands will buy from me. They love shooting at each others...they are so dumb. But I need money to produce them so I can sell them. What can I do...mmm.
I got it. I will tell the stupid inhabitants that I need to produce weapons in order to use them to fight Bubu, so they won't question why I am using the money they give me to build them instead of using them for any other purpose.
I will tell them that Bubu hides himself in a cave in an island next to ours with a huge amount of dangerous enemies.
Two hundred.
And I need money to build weapons to fight him and to send my army of about ten thousands soldiers to fight them....Mmm maybe they will think that my army is to big for just two hundred cave-men. Noooo. If I use the machine I will invent, the one that tells them how dangerous and evil Bubu is while entertaining them, to tell them that this is necessary, absolutely necessary, no other solution is thinkable, I am sure they will fall for it.
They fall for anything, why shouldn't they fall for this one too? They won't notice that the cave-men are just two hundred. I will tell them that we need to protect our little island, our small paradise, from such an evil bastard. And at the same time we'll help the island that Bubu owns. We'll make of it a paradise just like ours.

Comment on Echoes in the warp post on China missiles

I agree. China will never send a missile to his best market. Why losing customers by killing them? I like the last sentence: Conflict is about as likely as Wal-Mart sending nasty letters to it's customers. China is like Walmart and the USA is its customers. Would they do something to annoy the customers?

They pretend to be communist but they are more capitalist than the USA: what's more capitalist than making profit by making people work 23 hours a day for a small wage to produce a cheap product that will be sold abroad because the people who produce it are too poor to afford it?
And what about all the American multinationals in China? If China hates you they should not allow it. I am sure the rich Chinese that lead the country secretly love the rich Americans if they give them money.
But they tell the Chinese people they hate the USA because an enemy is always good. Anytime people complain about human rights and so on they just start blaming the USA.

If one day I will have my own small island in the sea and I will be very evil I will invent an enemy called Bubu and I will tell the stupid inhabitants that work for me like slaves that he is the one to blame for their miserable condition. It always work very well. Then I will tell them that he supports slavery while I am an anti-slavery person. And they all sould thank me for protecting them from that evil bastard. That Bubu, bleah. Oh..how they will fall for it very easily...I will invent a machine that can repeat it to them every single minute of the day to make sure they remember it. I don't know how this machine should be like but I will find it out. Maybe it should look like something that entertains them so they will be more willing to listen to it. Oh, that's such a good plan... My own small island, and I will be sunbathing and partying all day long.

Is Europe a strange country?

This is just a small space to express my cultural shock:

Is a country like Italy, with public education and public universities a strange country? No, it’s just normal there.

Is a country like the Spain, with a public TV not too much controlled by the goverment a strange country? No, it’s just normal there.

Is a country like the UK with a public health service a strange country? No, it’s just normal there.


Is it strange to regulate and moralize the global economy? No, it should just be normal.

America’s next top model

TV programs like American next top model not only make women believe they are rich and famous while they are not, so that they would defend the interests of rich and famous women instead of their own, but they also make women believe they are dumb sex objects, always thinking about buying clothes and make up and becoming hysterical all the time for no reason. Which don’t serve their interest at all.

All throughout history men have told women: you are weak, you are dumb, you are hysterical, you are either a saint or a whore. And for this reason you have to work for us without asking money. You stay at home and work but no money for you unless we feel like giving you some. Or later, if you work, you do not very well paid jobs and obviously no politics…Women and politics? No way, this means that they could defend their interests…no…we, men are going to tell them what their interests are, which strangely correspond to the men’s ones, but men will make them think they are theirs…what kind of shared interests are those according to which men get all the power? And this has worked for centuries: women started really thinking that they were dumb, weak, irrational, emotive, superficial, and so on. Which are not very positive qualities to have if you wanted to count something. As Simone De Bouvoir once said ‘one is not born a woman, but one becomes one’, as to say ‘one is not born a dumb sex object like in next American top-model, but one becomes one as one watches too much TV. And this is the new trend…if all women dress like this or act stupid like this then there is no chance anyone is going to take them seriously…or vote for them in an election which is not America’s next top model. If they think only about their bodies then it is not good for the brain...

But nowadays women have the opportunity to have good jobs and take responsibilities and be politicians…but still they have to show very masculine characteristics to be successful, like being rational…so rational that in order to make money or get power you don’t care about anything…because emotions, feeling that some things are not quite fair,…no…they mean weakness…
So nothing has changed in the end. Only that some women are conforming themselves to the features men assign to them, others pretend to be men, and nothing changes. If all women decided to be as rational (i.e. no scruples at all) as men are supposed to be then the world would end sooner.

There should not be any dualism at all and feeling something …pity maybe…the voice of your conscience maybe…should not be considered a sign of weakness or something irrational but a sign of great honor, just like Homer teaches us at the end of the Iliad, when Achilles shows pity for the first time… an emotion… and only then he becomes a real hero.

Frost/Nixon: the truth is out there

When I was teaching in England I had to prepare students for their final exam, which would be having a debate on current affairs. And I am still wondering about the pedagogic effect of such practice. To learn languages is perfect, as it allows students to use language purposefully. But what about its consequences in educating them to language? It depends on how it is done.

The problem is that the difference between animal communication and human communication is that human communication is very creative. In other words men can lie or invent the most manipulative ways to get what they want. The funny thing is that this is one of the things that distinguish us from other animals.
But what is interesting is that we are all Pinocchios: we tell lies all the time, often not being aware of it, but we are very bad at recognizing them. Is this advantageous? Probably for the individuals who can speak all the time and be heard, but not for the majority of listeners. Very bad as far as the whole species is concerned.

Going back to debates, while preparing these debates for the students I realized that for certain topics I lacked the knowledge of the facts. In that case my arguments ended up being pure rhetoric, they could say anything and its contrary with no logical contradiction. A pure game. No relationship with the facts. Like some debates on TV. In other cases I knew certain facts that made the whole game completely fall apart. Like that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Bush, Blair, Berlusconi and many others wanted just to steal some oil from other countries, that they were not interested in spreading democracy because their allies were despotic countries such as Saudi Arabia, but that they just wanted to make money for themselves and the richest people in their countries while telling lies to the rest of the population.
And I will never forget myself pretending to be in favour on the war and asking a student this question an American student asks Chomsky: if we can benefit from it, why not? And he was 15 but he looked at me with such a disgusted face that I felt ashamed of what I had just said. Because to me it made a little bit sense...after all that writing essays on Machiavelli. I will never forget his look.




However, when we did debates where no facts where available due to my ignorance, the students might have thought that both the arguments were true at the same time. But no. They were valid but not true. They were valid arguments but nothing to do with the real world. They could have ended up believing that nothing is true in this world or two opposite things were true at the same time. But no. The truth is out there. Objective knowledge is possible if we have facts. They can destroy any biased knowledge (lie)or any biased knowledge disguised as objective (double lie). And the students need to be aware of how poweful and misleading language is and that facts are important.

This is what is the major theme of the movie Frost/Nixon, which should undoubtedly have won an Oscar... Two guys going along speaking for a whole movie, debating until a document comes out that explains everything and Nixon cannot but admit that he ‘was wrong’. And this is what should happen: journalists should find out facts and confront politicians with them. So that they could not tell lies anymore.

Now this language that allows us to lie is worrying. It probably appeared by chance. And it became a feature of the whole species as the individuals who could lie best and more were in a position of advantage and could reproduce more. But the final proof on whether this is advantageous for the species as a whole or not would be only the fact that from our species there will develop other species with the same feature. Like from the fist birds developed many other species with wings as it was advantageous to have them. If we go on lying like that and believing in lies we’ll end up destroying our habitat and I doubt that this will happen. But apart from being very selfish and good at telling lies we are still clever after all...

The problem with Pinocchio is that he could not see the truth which was clear in front of him (he had a pine in his eyes, from this comes his name in Italian). But once he could see and stopped acting as a puppet being manipulated by others and became a real boy.

How media manipulate us

Manipulation. What is being manipulated? This happens when we end up believing, in a way or another, that some things are good for us even though they actually go against our own interests. How can you say that such a nice word as freedom is not good? Everyone wants to be free. If someone comes to us and asks us: do you think that anyone should be completely free to do whatever they want, with no constraints at all? We would immediately say yes. But we could get as an answer: Well, then, because I am more powerful than you, idiot, I am free to kick you in the ass. This is an example of being manipulated, when someone believes in something that actually goes against their own interests without realizing it.

Yesterday in the class someone said that the problems of a CEO are more important that those of people who don’t get enough funding for education and deserve, for this reason, more attention by the media. This is because he wants to become a CEO. I hope he does. But what if Obama decides to cut all the funds for public universities and give them to the CEO and he has to pay a huge amount of money next year? And he would like to protest but they are all focusing on the CEO problems? Probably the only way for us to understand injustice is when we actually experience it. And because TV has manipulated our brain so that we tend to believe that our interests are the same as the rich and the famous, we believe that who is less wealthy has got less right to be taken into account, is worth less than the rich and the famous.

Ii is like if I said that Britney Spears has more right to have her problems taken into account than a poor girl because this is what TV has made me believe. But what are the chances that I become Britney Spears when I grow up? Let’s say 95%. And what about that 5%? What if something unexpected happens and I lose my money because I get ill and I have to give everything I have to the doctors, or Obama suddently and unexpectedly tells me that I have to pay a huge amount of money for my education? Then If I am just a little bit reasonable I have to take into account that 5% and admit that both if I become Britney or not I should have the same rights, my problems should be considered worth it being listened to just in the same way.

The Daily Show

Intellectuals and artists have always criticized discourse, often by means of satire. In particular when censorship would stop them from proposing a different discourse, they would focus on criticizing the dominant discourse.
In our world this is necessary as ever before, as discourse has become very powerful, because it is amplyfied by the mass media, and not very diverse, because the mass media are more and more concentrated in the hands of very few rich and powerful people. For this reason common people need more and more to be reminded of how powerful, dangerous and misleading words are. We need to be constantly reminded that words are often said by someone who would like to pursuit some private purposes, which might not be beneficial for us by the same degree.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
In Cramer We Trust
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor

The criticism that Jon Stewart addresses to the media industry in his program called The Daily Show is very interesting. In the episode of March 9 he criticized a financial analyst for giving false information to investors causing them to lose their money. Then he made a satirical report of the speech given by the English prime minister Gordon Brown during his visit to the USA. He laughed at him praising the USA and said a joke on him encouraging the USA to ‘invade the subcontinent’. Then he laughed at Brown copying Obama’s words in trying to imitate his discourse (and I believe Berlusconi is there trying to study the new rhetorical tricks coming from the USA to imitate them so that the Italian audiences can benefit from them too). This was a very good criticism of political discourse in general and of how politicians make use of standardized patterns of discourse that don't have anything to do with real facts just to seduce people. He said that Brown was copying Obama’s song just like a cover band would do.
Then, when talking about the gift exchanges between Brown and Obama, he laughed at the fact that Obama gave Brown DVDs, hinting at the role that Hollywood has had in making the USA discourse accepted worldwide (in spite of all the wars, weapons sales and so on) through the power of entertainment.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Brown in the USA
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Important Things w/ Demetri Martin Political Humor

The satire of political discourse done by Jon Stewart is a good way to remind people that they should pay less attention to words and more to facts when it comes to politics. I find it very beneficial that Stuart laughs very often at the way Obama is seducing American people with his words just like a play boy would do with a woman. Because it is important for people to ask their politicians more than beautiful words.
However, it is also important to take into account that laughing at important and delicate matters such as politics in such a light way could not be very beneficial, because it could make people accept them just as something to laugh about and not as something to take into account seriously. That is good when it comes to politicians' words, but not when it comes to important political matters which can have nasty consequences such as people dying.

Sleepwalkers

On Saturday I went to see La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) by Bellini at the Metropolitan Opera. The Sicilian musician composed it in 1831 but he was inspired by a French panthomime.
That was absolutely the best thing I have ever seen in my whole life. Imagine I am coming back home after the opera and you ask me what I have seen. I would tell you that it was good but the story was a little bit strange. There is a duke. But because the setting was in our times he was dressed like a business man. One day they find a woman in his bed but she was there because she was sleepwalking. You would tell me: “What? Are you dumb or what? This is the most absurd story I have ever heard. Obviously that was an excuse invented by the guy. He fooled everyone and you too! You are such a fool!” And I would say: “But I swear I saw the girl sleepwalking on stage….Ah. Now I understand. This is why at the end all the singers were dressed like the simple people from the Swiss village that was the original setting of the opera and they were kind of playing fool and laughing at us…The duke made a fool of everyone. I understand that the simple people of a Swiss village would believe this story. But…I was fooled by the duke too!”
There are a lot of plays and novels written in France at the time that followed the revolution which were dealing with rethoric and discourse. That was because during the revolution there would be people speaking at every corner of the street, and people believing in what they were told and acting consequently. When democracy appears in a society then rhetoric follows. And artists and intellectuals of that time dealt with this issue and warned people about the dangers of rhetoric.
How many times can you see that on TV nowadays that we are submerged by discourse thanks to the media? Have you ever seen an ad that at the end tells you: “You fool, that was a joke. Obviously our products are not natural but full of preservatives. You should not believe in all of what you hear or see. Keep it in mind.”
Only once it happened on the American radio. In 1938 Orson Wells was broadcasting The War of the Worlds, a novel about an alien invasion. When people listening to the NBC program changed frequency because of an intermission they could hear the story of an alien invasion reported in the style of a news broadcast, and they panicked thinking that a real invasion was in progress. Many people think he did it on purpose, to show us how powerful media are and how foolish we are. I decided to go and hire one of his best known movies, Citizen Kane, next week because it was among the movies shown at Ramapo one month ago and I missed it. I was very curious to watch it because I have heard people comparing Berlusconi to Citizen Kane, which was a magnate of the media industry. And now I am even more interested in watching it.

News USA

Viva Zapatero

It seems that the best solution for the media has been found in Spain.
The problem with the Italian public television was that it was controlled by the politicians. So once Berlusconi was elected because he had brainwashed Italian people onhis private televisions, he started abusing the power he had as a politician on the public television too. Suing people knowing that the law would prove him wrong, but just as a kind of psychological threat. Convincing people on his private channels and newspapers that he was right. And most of all either bribing or threatening, by means of his money and influence, the opposition that would support him both in parliament and in the public television commitees.

The Spanish prime minister Zapatero passed a law some years ago that made public television completely independent from the politicians.
As they say in this documentary, called Viva Zapatero, when the regime falls in Italy and the public television would not be just like another of Berlusconi's private ones, this could be the right idea.
I believe that this could be a way to guarantee a freedom of expression which is real and not just apparent. A television which is not only public but not under the influence if the politicians. And this could lead also to a better democracy, where common people are well informed and able to request from politicians that their needs, freedoms and rights are taken into account as well as those of the rich ones. Because this is what democracy is.

Probably before blaming discourse, (spaking for your own purposes) which is something quite natural, we should blame just the monopoly of discourse and the restricted access to knowledge it causes for those who are excluded from it. The monopoly of rich people who own the private media or of politicians who control the public ones. When many opinions, all being equally really able to be heard, one is really forced to check the facts to know the truth.

On freedom again

Yesterday my Chinese flat-mate experienced how freedom, the freedom we believe in, in all its multiple forms, could lead to very nasty consequences. She had ordered a laptop on the internet because here in the States they are very cheap compared to China. She was very happy she had done a real bargain when she realized that the thing in question had been shipped straight away from China. She turned furious.

And we had a very free speech on how unfair all that is going on in her country is.
The problem is that China is a communist country. And what happens in China is that the big American companies go there and hire people who work night and day for a very little wage that is just enough to live. Then they sell some of the products they produce to a very low price in the States because there people don’t want to buy laptops when they are too expensive. But the biggest amount of the products are sold in China itself, the biggest market in the world, for a very high price. And both the American and Chinese government agree on that.

I was a little bit shocked, first because I thought they did not like each others so they could not agree on anything. Secondly because I was not familiar with this meaning of the word communist because it means something else in Italy. In Italy it means ‘anyone who opposes Berlusconi’.

I suggested that she should express her dissent and call CNN or Fox news to tell them to say such kind of things on the news. She did it but they answered that they were free to say whatever they wanted because they were private channels. Because of the freedom of the media companies. And no journalist would take her case into serious account being afraid to get fired. So she called the Chinese TV and asked them to talk about it. But they did not want to because in China people are not allowed free speech. I told her that this was free market, the kind of market that guarantees all kind of freedoms, including the freedom of Chinese people not to accept such an exploiting job and starve because ‘We’ll find someone else who is so desperate to do it anyway’.

No different opinions around: people get mad

What are the consequences of the fact that in Italy every TV channel says the same things and no TV channels says that the Prime Minister controls the media? People believe that saying that Berlusconi owns the media is something bad. Something evident but that it cannot be said. They think they are not allowed to say it. But there is freedom of speech in the country. But people don’t believe it anymore. Now they are convinced there is not freedom of expression. Soon they will be convinced there is no freedom of thought…and without thinking twice we will vote for him again.

Not mentioned by the media

A nasty consequence of a very beautiful word such as free market is being free to sell whatever you want. Apart from drugs, because they could kill people.

On the February 6 2009 issue of the Fpif (Foreign Politics in Focus), an on-line Think thank on USA foreign politics (that I have been addressed to during another class I am attending at Ramapo), I have read an article on USA weapons sales. I wondered how many people know about it. Since it is a very important matter for the nation, people should be aware of it. But why, then, I have never heard any comment on it on TV or the papers. Not even last weekend when the president presented the budget to the public and raised again, like every year, the tax payers money destined to military expenditure, under the name of ‘defense’ expenditure? People should know how the government spend their money. Or maybe this is so obvious that it is not even needed to be mentioned in the news? When I read the article I remembered I already had heard about it from a book I studied at university for an exam of contemporary history. But then, because nobody has never mentioned it again to me, I kind of removed it from my mind.

“The Pentagon announced last October a deal for the sale of $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan, including 30 Apache attack helicopters, 330 Patriot missiles, and 32 Harpoon missiles.
The Taiwan sale is but one of hundreds of deals the Bush administration made in its two terms. In 2008, as in each of the previous seven years, the United States led the world in arms sales at $32 billion. In 2006-2007, the U.S. sold weapons to more than 170 nations, up from 123 at the start of the Bush administration. These arms deals are supposed to accomplish a range of foreign policy goals: winning influence, gaining access, maintaining and encouraging friendly regimes, as well as bolstering the U.S. balance of payments and domestic economy. At the same time, these large-scale weapons sales prop up teetering regimes and dictatorships, sow discord, promote violent solutions to international problems, and result in widespread civilian suffering. In fact, U.S. weapons "played a role in 20 of the world's 27 major wars in 2006-07," according to a December 2008, report from the New American Foundation. Weapons from the United States are now present in half of the major armed conflicts currently taking place worldwide. And 13 of the 25 leading U.S. clients were either undemocratic and/or guilty of human rights violations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Korea, Kuwait, Egypt, and Colombia.”
Senator Joseph Biden complained in 1982. "We had close to $30 billion worth of the most sophisticated arms in the world in Iran." And yet, "without a shot being fired, the Shah was marched out of the country." Now, "all those weapons are either lying dormant or have become accessible to the Soviet Union." Indeed, massive arms sales proved better instruments for dealing with balance of payments problems than for charting a sustainable foreign policy.
Though the years immediately after the end of the Cold War brought a sharp decline in arms sales, this trend was soon reversed. Within a few short years arms-makers adapted, and the administration of Bill Clinton obliged with aggressive marketing and massive subsidies. Presidential Decision Directive 34, issued in February 1995, articulated the new strategy of promotion of arms sales: "the United States continues to view transfers of conventional arms as a legitimate instrument of U.S. foreign policy — deserving U.S. government support — when they enable us to help friends and allies deter aggression, promote regional security, and increase interoperability of U.S. forces and allied forces." Both directly and indirectly, neoliberalism and globalization of the post-Cold War decade were very good to arms exporters.
Building on this trend — and spurred by the events of 9/11 — the Bush administration took arms exports to a new level.
James Carter, "Obama: Cut Arms Exports," (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 6, 2009).

I was wondering why these facts are not in the news every day if they are so an important for the foreign policy of the country? What do you think? They should be forced to mention such kind of things? No, they are actually free not do mention such things. Why bother? It is disturbing. This is not what people want to hear. But they are the one who pay for it. Shouln't they know what they pay tax for?

Why the government does not mention this too much? When they do they call it defense. The government could tell the tax payers whose money are used to build these arms: “Listen, we are investing your money. These sales are beneficial for the economy and you will benefit of them too.” Why not? Probably because the government is aware that building an economy on selling weapons (as their primary use id that of killing people) is immoral.

They don't mention it also because making this public by talking about it on TV every day could lead American people to protest and say that they don’t want to invest their money in such kind of business sector. Some of them would say that they prefer to invest in something that does not kill people, even if it is less profitable. I believe many American people would do so. If reminded constantly on TV they would do it. But if reminded just once they would forget about it the day after like I did.

Some people could think that this is a result of the unstoppable flow of progress. And this is just another way to say that they find it OK as they think they could be benefit from it too. But are we really sure that the fact that the rich companies in a country become richer means that everyone becomes richer?
It is a little bit like in Italy. Some people voted for Berlusconi (including myself, and twice as far as I remember) because they thought that if its companies were getting rich the country would benefit from it too. To be honest nothing of the kind has happened so far. Not at all. People still get the same wages. Where are these money? So could it be that the ones who benefit from these sales in the USA are most of all big companies? What is the relationship between these big companies and people in power? How do they convince them in investing money in their business? Threatening them? Like it happens in Italy?
Other people would not want it to be said. Because it harms the reputation of the nation abroad. But this is even more immoral, isn’t it?

I really share the hope of the author of the article that things are going to change. And I believe that yes, they can. Especially as the Vice president seemed to oppose such kind of things. But people should say something to convince the government on such a matter. Otherwise the government could think that people are not concerned by this at all. But who should tell people if both the government and the press are free not to do it?

Post n. 7 (of my own choice) Italian TV 150 years ago

Opera: how Italian TV has changed in just 150 years


Yesterday I felt I needed to confront with a different point of view on the world so I decided to… dress up and go to the Opera. To relax and indulge in a very posh activity I went to see… Il Trovatore by Verdi.

I am absolutely amazed by how they did not censor it at that time. Probably it was not considered too subversive. Probably thanks to Berlusconi our idea of subversive has changed. Nowadays Berlusconi would censor it straight away. And fire Verdi with recorded delivery mail. But that were other times. When people were allowed to criticize people in power. Even though there was a monarchy. And they were in a much better mental health than Italian people at the moment.

The reason why people in power would tolerate Verdi’s opera is that at that time the Sabaudian kingdom was trying to unite Italy under its power and send away the Austrians who were occupying the north-east. Nabucco would incite Italian people to get their land back, just as the Israelites in the Bible. But Verdi wrote much more than that.

Both in Rigoletto and Il Trovatore the role of the artist is discussed in his relationship with power. In Rigoletto the artist who serves power is finally betrayed by his master in the most awful way: he seduces, abandons and kill his daughter (a symbol of his artistic work). In Il Trovatore the artist fights against power. Takes away from the Count the woman he wants (to symbolize that he is taking away his art and stating its autonomy from the dominant discourse) and gets all the public support for his fight. Until he dies. And we find out that he was the Count’s brother. Just to make clear that the guerrilla man is nothing but the brother of the powerful man. It is just by a matter of chance that he is in that position. Because he was brought up in a different place.

In Rigoletto it is amazing how Verdi criticizes the discourse of the powerful nobleman and play-boy: when he repeatedly sings the famous aria ‘La donna è mobile’ (Women are easy) after seducing and abandoning many women, including Rigoletto’s daughter, people in the audience really hate him. What he says really does not match with what is going on. He can convince poor women to fall in love with him with his words but he won’t convince the audience to approve his behavior by saying that it is women’s fault. Because it is them who are easy. Here we find again the discourse of seduction by the play-boy to symbolize and criticize political discourse. And you go away not being able to remove from your mind that song, ‘La donna è mobile’, as a warning to keep in mind the next time you hear a politician speak.



I must thank Professor D’Angelo, who is in charge of the Italian Department at Ramapo College, for making me get to know opera. She took us visiting scholars and a bunch of students to see Madame Butterfly last November. One of the many cases of poor women seduced and abandoned. And that made me understand how much I like opera. W Verdi!

Post n. 6 CNN and Fox News

In my opinion both CNN and Fox news are partisan because they are private channels. No journalist would ever say something that goes against the interests of the companies that financially support the channel he or she works for.
In Italy there are three private channels owned by Berlusconi, who is the person who has got all the economical power in Italy. No one has ever heard of a journalist that said something against him on his own channels. They know very well they are going to be fired if they do so.
The journalists who were sued by Berlusconi were working for the public television and, thus, they could not supposedly be fired by anyone. But Berlusconi sued them and send them away unlawfully. Even though the judges sentenced that they had to be restored in their work place they weren’t because Berlusconi treated public television as if it was private once he was elected. And nobody, including me, wondered how it could have happened.

CNN is known as being liberal, whereas Fox News is republican. Both of them are private channels. I don’t know which one I like the most. At least an average person could tell immediately that the very strong critiques that Fox News journalist make are partisan. In Italy Berlusconi copied the idea and called it TG4. And he also copied the idea of CNN which is called TG5, which was meant to look objective. But because he could sack the journalists who worked for both of them, they can be considered partisan. However, because TG5 looks objective it is even more manipulative than TG4.
I believe that any time journalists can be fired as they work for a private channel, then the channel they work for is partisan. This guarantees only an apparent freedom of information, which is based on self-censorship. They will never say something that goes against the interests of the big companies that control the channel.

On the contrary, a public television is usually under the control of the politicians. For this reason it should allow the expression of different opinions. However the problem in Italy is that economical forces have became so powerful to control the whole political scene. Now that Berlusconi is in power, also the public TVs are controlled by him, and because there is no real opposition, as the economical power of Berlusconi guarantees him a general support from the politicians, the members of the opposition who work for the public TVs are not opposing him. Even when he was not in power his money guaranteed him control.

post. 5 (of my own choice)

This afternoon I went to see the Kite Runner at the Sharp Theatre at Ramapo College.
Before starting they asked us if we have ever had a secret that we did not tell anyone. Well, yes. And I am going to tell it in this post, which is going to be very personal. In a way it does not have anything to do with media. In another way it does.

Last week I was preparing a lesson for my Italian course about Italian art. And I was thinking about what I should tell the students. I tried to remember what I had learned about it when I went to school. I remember writing many essays on Reinassance art, which would be my favourite ever. Florence, such beautiful paintings and statues...And I got very high grades. On the book it said that this kind of art was expression of the ideals of Reinassance, that the rich merchants would pay many artists and architects to represent their vision of the world. This vision would be the following: man is at the centre of universe, he can do whatever he wants with nature, he should leave behind any moral ties and do like Machiavelli's Prince, dominate fortune with intelligence and wit.
I was charmed: I thought that if this ideals were behind this beautiful kind of art they must be good. I remember believing in them, writing tons of essays praising this kind of art and these ideals.
I was just preparing a power point on that when I suddently stopped. Only when you have to teach someone you really take responsibility of what you think.
I thought: this is complete ****: can I tell my students 'Look at these beautifil paintings, these are paid by rich merchants who believed they could have no moral ties and control nature as they wanted, without even thinking about the consequences of what they were doing? This is what our society believes in now. This is what we have on TV. They don't need me to teach it to them.

At first I felt very ashamed of what I had written in all those essays. I thought I was clever instead I am just a stupid ass. Then I tought of Dante. He was 35 when he found himself in a dark wood and had to confront with three beasts: greed, power and lust. I am just 27. I am still in time. But then I thought that when I was a child I used to have very high morals. Every child could tell you that lying is not fair, stealing is not fair, that you should think about the consequences of what you do. If my lessons have to be biased at least they should teach these kind of things. Those things that any 10 year-old child would think of as pretty obvious.

This afternoon I went to see the Kite Runner. And I think many people in the audience felt like Dante when he started his moral journey. They were crying and they all called it a life changing experience. Too bad that they were all 85 on average (no student there, even though it was free for students).
The story is the following: there are two children in Afganistan in the 1970. When the country was quite peaceful. Before something happened that I don't know and I should look up tonight.
There is a poor child and a rich child. The story is not that the poor child steals something and because he was poor we could justify it. The story was clear. There was a rich child, who used to read a lot. And a poor child. They were playing together and the poor child would defend the rich child. But one day that the bad children take the poor child and get revenge of him defending the rich child, the rich child was there. At that point he wss facing a moral dilemma. He knews very well what was going on but he pretended not to see and ran away. After that day the rich child was tormented by having known and not having done anything and started being nasty with the poor guy. He even accused him to have stolen his watch while he had hidden it under his bed. And the poor guy, very ignorant but with very high moral standards, said 'Yes, I stole it' not to make the rich guy be in trouble with his father. A very good metaphor of our world today. People knowing, because we do. It is clear as the sunlight. But not caring.

I feel so ashamed now for what I wrote in those essays. This is the secret I could not keep for myself. But at least I know now, before 'teaching' stipid things to my students.

Post n. 4 (of my own choice)

Yesterday night I went to see the play Othello by Shakespeare in New York. That is a great tragedy of 'discourse'. Shakespeare did talk about it centuries before the modern linguists.
Discourse is the way language can be used to contruct thoughts and ideologies that support the interests of specific groups and have a direct effect on the world. Language can indeed affect the world. Expecially nowadays, when we are exposed to language on a large scale because of the media and TV.

In the play Iago was speaking all the time and he was using all the time what linguistist call presuppositions. He did not tell Othello: "Listen, since you are black your wife is cheating on you with a white guy". That would sound suspicious. Othello would wonder what was the purpose of Iago saying that. On the contrary, Iago was insinuating things all the time, and Othello was making his own inferences, making his own logical links among the various disconnected sentences. And little by little in his mind would grow the idea that black is bad and women are bad.
This is how certain ideas are installed in people's mind and become common sense. People start thinking that it is natural and obvious to think so. Their mind made very logical connections. But they were not aware of the fact that they were being manipulated by someone pursuing very specific purposes meant to make his own interest. While watching the play one would like to shout at Othello: "Why don't you ask yourself the reasons why Iago is saying all these things, what his purpose could be? He is making an effort in speaking so much that he must have a reason to do so!" And then : "Why don't you go and ask other people's opinions? Why don't you make sure that those words reflect the real situation? Why do you trust words so much?"

And this is what happened in Italy with Fascism, as shown in the video. People were reading newspapers and listening to political speeches that all said the same things, without questioning. And once certain things had become normal in their minds, then they were unable to question anything anymore. Even what was clearly unacceptable.
And they became like the woman in the movie The Reader who did not think twice before burning alive about one hundred Jews in a church because in her society that was considered as perfectly normal.
The point of the movie was that the fact that she could not read was the cause of her doing so. But what should she have read? We've just said that most of the things written on newspapers would support these practices, and thus be the cause of her behaviour...
She should have read Shakespeare, Flaubert, Moliere, Dante, Voltaire and all those writers who did not write to make pople accept the dominant ideology, but who did write to make people think about it, to give them a different opinion.
Many of them used satire or metaphors because they would not be allowed to speak freely, and they used presuppositions to share with us their views. Did they want to manipulate people? For what purpose? They had no interest in doing so. They did not receive money from those who had economical or political power, they were censored by them.
They did not want to convince people of their ideas, they just wanted to tell them: "Hey, here you have an idea which is different from the dominant one. Are you sure that what people in power say is true? Why don't you check it?"
Many great writers talked about the power of language and of discourse a lot in their books, to make people aware of their powerful effect. They used language to expose the dangers of language.

POSTS N. 2 and 3 SATIRE IN ITALY on TUBE VIDEOS

In Italy, a few years ago, the censorship of a satirical program called RAI8 (Riot) and of many other satirical programs, which were broadcast on the public television RAI and which criticized the Prime Minister Berlusconi, has brought about a debate on satire as a genre.
Berlusconi, who owns most of the press, the private televisions, and controls the public ones for being head of the government, did not approve the fact that some rumors concerning his past would be exposed to the public attention and sued those who accused him of corruption for label as they could influence his electorate in a negative way and create a climate of tension and discontent in the whole society. He said that the facts exposed were not true, could not be proved and were just meant to damage him.
As a consequence, these programs have been censored, the journalists fired and the only way to see them is on You Tube. A comedian made a documentary about all these happenings that is also available on youtube.
In my opinion these programs should not have been cernsored because they were meant to be the expression of the opinions of Berlusconi's opponants, and people were aware of it. Moreover, even if the facts they exposed could not be proved by documents, the existence of rumors concerning them is widely known by the Italian public. On top of that, many of the satirical remarks adrressed to Berlusconi were about the fact that he controls the media, which is a matter of fact.





Satire is a very ancient genre. Public opinion in the Athenian democracy was remarkably influenced by the political satire written by such poets as Aristophanes for the theatre. His plays are known for their critical political and social commentary, particularly for the political satire by which he criticized the powerful Cleon (as in The Knights).
The characteristic that defines satire as a genre is the use of humor and sarcasm in order to expose facts concerning politics and social issues that the author disapproves, with the ultimate intent to make people aware of them.
Because saying these facts often meant exposing the misconduct of people in power they would lead to consequences if stated in a direct way. For these reasons they were usually brought about by intellectuals who assumed the status of buffoons in order to get impunity for their presupposed madness and who would use irony to make people infer what they were referring to. As a consequence, satirical irony usually does not have the purpose of entertaining people, but to expose in an indirect way facts that would otherwise be liable to censorship.
Moreover, satire is obviously meant to be partisan: it is the opinion of a person, and for this reason cannot be objective. It is meant to be an opinion that differs from the dominant one so that people would question the fact that the dominant one represents the truth and ask who is in power for clarifications and material proofs of what they say.




Many of the Prime Minister’s supporters would criticize these kind of satirical programs by saying that they did not make them laugh at all, and that it was not satire. And they would give as examples of good satire certain programs broadcast by Berlusconi’s TV such as the mock news called 'Striscia La Notizia', that makes fun indeed of the Prime Minister and also unveal various kinds of scandalous facts, making people laugh at the same time. They said that satire has the function of 'making politicians look more human, more appealing and releave social tension' and that 'satire cannot influence public opinion'.
I believe that this kind of program belongs to what the Nobel Laureate Dario Fo in the video calls 'sfottò' as opposed to satire, which is just making fun of someone without mentioning substancial facts and having as a consequence that of making this person look more human.



The mock news Striscia La Notizia are an example of how it is possible to manipulate people by use of ‘genres mixing’.
Swales characterizes a genre as "a class of communicative events" having "a shared set of communicative purposes" and similar structures, stylistic features, content and intended audiences. In addition, Swales notes that a genre is usually named and recognized by members of the culture in which it is found. Because the matching of specific structure and specific purposes of genres is perceived by people as natural, as ‘common sense’, it is easy to mislead them on the purpose of a communicative event whose structure correspond to that of a precise genre. Striscia la Notizia has got all the characteristics of satire, even the intensity of the invective. However, is its purpose that of exposing facts which have political relevance in order to raise the awareness of Italian people and make of them an informed electorate?
There is an easy way to prove that its purpose is not that of exposing relevant facts: the facts that it deals with are completely irrelevant. While the Prime Minister is making laws for its own economical interest, this mock news program makes satire of facts such as the one shown in this You tube video. The owner of a bar in Rome is making tourists pay 1 euro more than local people for a coffee.



The real purpose of this program is that of distracting people from the substantial facts that are happening in the country and make them believe that such a piece of news is the most relevant and outrageous they could get with such an effective government in power.
Moreover, the fact that Striscia La Notizia is a source of entertainment, as it makes people laugh, makes of it part of Berlusconi’s use of entertainment as a form of manipulation. Since he was elected in power, not only his private channels, but also public TV, are completely based on entertainment. No issues that could lead to people to discussing and debating are shown on TV. What Italians are exposed to are only semi naked women (as in Striscia La Notizia, which is broadcast at 8 pm and also meant to be for children, who love the red character called Gabibbo!) and gossip.




Entertainment is one of his most powerful instruments Berlusconi is using to keep people satisfied and completely unaware of his past and present policies. Berlusconi knows well how entertainment can be a powerful tool for getting consent: how denying a vote or consent to that person who provides me with such a good entertainment so that I can forget about my financial problems and relax?