With Courage and Dignity

I was surprised to flick through some Italian papers and read that Fabrizio Quattrocchi (read Kuattrokki) had become a hero. I wasn’t clear why somebody who was picked randomly and killed with a shot on his head had become a hero. It sounded like an exaggeration, like some pathetic emotionalism, but it wasn’t. Quattrocchi realised what was happening, tried to take the hood off and told his executor “I show you how an Italian dies”, with courage and dignity.
I’m not indulging in nationalistic pride, I’m simply finding out how little I know of ‘how an Italian dies’. Italy shies away from portraying its own courage and heroism and feels embarrassed by it. It is the heavy legacy of fascism, ‘Italy’ was something we weren’t brought up to respect, but to be ashamed of. Won WWI but used as a tool for the exchange of territories, lost WWII being occupied both by the ‘Allies’ and the Germans (the Germans effectively occupied Italy after the fall of the fascist regime in September 1943).
Italians don’t like war, they repudiated it after WWII and enshrined this in the 1948 Constitution. So, at school we hardly talked of the battle of the Piave, never mind the last charge of the Savoy at Isbucevski, or the martyrs of Cephalonia where General Gandin held a referendum among his troops asking whether they wanted to fight hopelessly or surrender and they chose to fight. Or El Alamein when the British butchered a small squadron isolated from other troops and so on.
It doesn’t fit the Italian stereotype, the stereotype Italians believe themselves, so this post is for me to push me into studying Italian history a bit more.

Swansea wettest city!

In a recent survey, Swansea was revealed as Britain's wettest city with an average rainfall of 1360.8mm (53in) a year, costing the city's residents an estimated £582.4 million while Cardiff is the fifth wettest city.
Don't we know? Now that we spend our days getting wet leafletting or surveying. Problem is that if the leaflets get wet they look horrible!
Pity the survey didn't take into consideration the 'political costs', I wonder whether in sunnier parts of the UK LibDems score better ;)

Ehm... NO!

Mo Mowlam has called on the British and American governments to open talks with Osama bin Laden and al Qaida around a negotiating table.

Mo, your recipe for Northen Ireland doesn't apply everywhere. Osama is probably dead and Al Quaida is not the IRA (hierarchical organisation), but a loose network! No, you can't negotiate not even if you wanted (which wouldn't lead you anywhere, at least now). The way forward is to increase police and intelligence cooperation, stop bombing places and changing regimes and increase EU development and governance work.

The Mechanical Bride

I was reading today on an Italian newspaper that a recent survey suggests that 93% of women don't like themselves. They see themselves ugly, fat and tired. They are also uncomfortable with their sexuality. The first thing that came to my mind was the mechanical bride by Marshall McLuhan.
The Mechanical Bride refers to the sensation experienced by the sailor who's lost his way in the maelstrom. It was this sensation born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the labyrinth. For McLuhan the goals of the mechanical agencies are clear: manipulate, exploit, control in order to keep everyone in this helpless state by prolonged mental rutting.

I remember reading it when TV commercials started using the Tombraider character to sell tampons and so on. In the commercial, the computer-generated woman replaces the real woman so much that the real woman (A Jolie) had to look like her. I could probably write about this for many pages but to stick to the point of women's self-image, I find striking that we measure ourselves against what we see on TV, cinema and computers (images that are too often edited and changed). It might be because I have spent the past few weeks reading pretty much all Jane Austen's novels but it seems to me that beauty now is almost quantifiable. The length of your legs, the weight of your body etc. We forgot about countenance, education and manners. Although Austen's female characters are a bore (yes, Elizabeth Bennett too), since they are asked to be beautiful, be musical and draw, today's Mechanical Bride is even less. Yes, we've come a long way… but where? There's still discrimination, gendered violence and, above all, the choice between what 'society' decides you should be and what you want to be. My advice is stick to Jane Eyre!! :)