The importance of television in our society

First posted: 03 october 2009

Some people, like me, are addicted to videogames, there are some who use common drugs (trying to smoke even tea bags or ideating a system to create a sort of opium with the poor poppy seeds taken from the edge of a polluted road), some people are addicted to being stressed and there’re some who prefer massification. To tell you the truth, what, in my opinion, worries me most is the last group that I define: “men without qualities”.

Without the passive and destabilizing use of television, these people cannot survive, they can’t concentrate during the study, they can’t even fall asleep (probably because they need to be lulled by the soothing voice of Bruno Vespa - an italian anchorman of a tv talk show dedicated to politics, with politicians discussing and debating about various topics and subjects) and they aren’t able to find a solution if, by chance, their precious survival set is broken.
It’s not important what sort of programs they usually watch, it’s the action itself, thaat is being in front of a television, that makes them feel good, relax, entertaining them gently and giving them the possibility to freeze their brain, that passively absorbs material devoid of substance, or the possibility to talk with their friends, socialize, and then they chat about useless topics, wasting their time (for example, you could hear them saying “Who’s who? Is that person doing the right thing? Is that famous person behaving well in his/her personal life?” and things like that, mostly gossip stuff). It isn’t the single act of a person (who, perhaps, after working all day long, is tired and needs to freeze thoughts, desiring to free is mind and having fun) that I blame, but the reiterating routine and the looking for an action of incapable de-individualized people where the only desire is to immerge themselves in the confused and meaningless “helzapoppin” of the tv smoky fog everyday 


I have the chance to observe groups of young people beyond my imaginary glass case where I place them: they live in a psychiatric hospital while I’m the researcher who takes notes, or, maybe, I’m a patient who secretly drinks a bit of “Milk corrected with mescaline (Milk plus)”, and the team of doctors try to bring me back to reality, unbearable for me (and I’m sure they would try to force me to accept the state of things, but they would miserably fail).
I need major themes, profound topics, depth, i am a seeker of intellectual efforts, but only books, and very few elected persons, lately, are able to share them with me: it’s a pain thinking that most people is trapped, blocked, frozen in a stall position where they cuddle themselves without consciousness.

In this situation, television becomes a paradigm of what I don’t want to approach, that is the android man, totally mechanic and cybernetic, compared to the true self, a human being fond of learning through art, books, travelling, etc.
Pasolini (and I’m sorry to talk about him because, too many people are deliberately manipulating his theories adapting them to their viewpoints and their frame of mind) realized what this medium was able to cause if used like a marketing “tool”. He wrote about television like a mean that, if badly oriented, generates the implosion and degradation of the tradition of our own idiom: today even journalists, in Italy, don’t know their language well.

The most disappointing thing is, however, reading an university essay and finding that: there is no consistency, the verb tenses change in every phrase or they’re omitted, there is no punctuation (maybe they think to be a new junior “Joyces”), there isn’t any knowledge of the syntax, and the spelling is to be deciphered or decrypted. We can blame teachers but this is a “disease deeply persistent and deadly” in the italian society: all people are suffering for it but they don’t do anything to remove it because they’re not interested in improving their own intellectual/cultural foundations, but they prefer to survive getting used to television programs.

Healthcare System: a Legend?

First posted: 10 october 2009

People say that the Italian health system is the best in the world, we can try to enumerate its merits. Seniors, an increasing category in Italy, could be the turning point (or bolling point, to speak properly) to test the situation.

When, for example, a grandfather had an operation for some attack or a broken limb, obviously (as you know), to facilitate the recovery procedure he is followed by a physical therapist, at the hospital, for five long minutes until he’s discharged.

If old man’s relatives are quick and they ask for RSA (health care residence), by the hospital, just when the grandfather has been admitted in the hospital there is the possibility to find a room in one of these “random” houses (because they can’t choose a specific structure), otherwise, as soon as possible he’ll come back to his home without any chance to fulfill a further request of admittance.

This type of structures always is hi-tech systems (you can guess if I’m telling the truth, all the alarms are broken), fresh and clean (who dares to use the toilet, in case there is one?…) managed by a staff of professional workers who (should) care about patients with love (except for the neglectable issue that most of the workers in there come from foreign countries, and, consequently, they’re not able to have a human communication with the hospital residents).

If the old patient is lucky and he is admitted in a bit more serious structure he could be followed by a physiotherapist for ten minutes three times a week: all know that such a little time isn’t enough to help the recovery of the patient, so familiars have to take a personal physio or to perform that role by themselves (personally I tried the second option with two different grandparents).

Should I talk about how the patient is cleaned, rearranged, etc. by the paid personal of the hospital, or did I give enough information about the failure of the organization: that is spoiling and affecting the italian health care system? An example could be how many times a day the hospital personal changes diapers to an invalid person who (my apologise for my next words) happens “to surf” in his physical needs and excrements for hours.

I won’t mention all the viral diseases patients can be affected by, while being in contact with their relatives, or with other hospital mates such as pneumonia and other types of various infections.

If we consider that i’m talking about an actual situation of the north of Italy (a sort of scandal we have to cope with, facing the reality), we can just imagine how the patients are followed how they care about hospitals residents in the south of Italy, where the situation is very serious and there are lots of problems.

I can hear around (reading newspapares, listening to common people, talking with friends, etc.) that our health care system is considered to be one of the best in the world; am I supposed to trust those persons or (being practical and rational) should I blame the progressive collapse of the welfare in general, including hospitals and health care?

Lolita's paradigm

First posted: 25 september 2009 

It’s really shocking to know that prostitution exists in our schools and that all are surprised (as if they lived in Wonderland’s reality or Narnia’s realms) to hear or read the daily news.

In nowdays living, the teens often ask for money for sexual favors but the difference between the present and the past is that now they don’t hide this unusual “transaction”, because they think it could be cool or trendy to prove their ability in earning easy money.

When our journalists started to talk about this situation, italian people got upset because they usually like to avoid the problem, close their eyes. They prefer not to listen people who talk about the “performances” of their little “babies” (used to advertising their sexual skills), but, in my opinion, they have to consider that.

Teenagers usually start to offer sexual favours at 11-12 years old (medium average registred statistics), so, they can buy something more, compared to their usual amount of usable money and (unbelievable but true) they’re not ashamed of this because it’s a completely normal thing for them.

For young teens, moms and daddies are not supposed to notice that (as if they were blind, or totally indifferent to the state of things), so, even if they discover the unconvenient truth, they never happen to discuss the problem or face the misbehaviour of their loved “kids”; in most of the cases parents (after knowing this unbearable truth) pretend to neglect it, convincing themselves that their little “angels” could never committ those uneducated, immoral, vulgar acts. So the relationship between crazy chicks and their parents usually is surrounded by a useless veil of conformism, conventions and unsaid reprovals.

Then, a bizarre and idiot thing (recurrent in Italy) is that the media, the public opinion, etc criticize and blame customs, habits, social routines of other foreign countries (for example attacking nations such as the States, taken as the main reference of a country whose model and paradigm spread and diffuse bad habits, trends etc); this is the common way to skip the truth of the real facts and to create a sort of general catharsis by naming a public enemy (symbolized by foreign countries habits and customs) to defeat in order to preserve the integrity of our own country moral and ethical principles. 

Today in Italy (that is the specular product of the so-called “Berlusconi’s “age”, that promotes a sort of self made Italic prototype of ideal citizen, moulded by the gods of consumerism, money addiction, simulacra of power, greed, superficial appearence and self regulated market operations, homemade and irrational, directionless) sex is still a taboo: in the familiar context it’s very difficult to talk about it, according to parents opinion, it’s an ashamed topic, at school sexual education is ridiculous because, like at home, teachers aren’t prepared to have a mature speak with their students. Another very bad thing is that many guys don’t want, absolutely, have a virgin girl because, in their opinion, she requires too much affection and care, and, so, girls now aren’t interested about who to sleep with (they just do the thing by  removing their rational control and their moral principles, in a sort of self imposed consciousness’ blackout), then if they’re paid them it’s obvious that they should feel smart because they had a monetary income.

We also have to consider how our society is currently set on the competition basis, whether sexual oriented or not is largely irrelevant: the girls start to compete with their shool mates or close friends to see who can be the winner in the cycle of exchanging favours for money, and they can also have fun while gaining some coins, so why not to try that? They know the risks of their behaviours, but they believe and pretend to be older than their age as the majority of children/adolescents aim to prove.

Now, let’s concentrate on the “money factor”: we live in consumistic era where, for example, our parents try to spend more than  they can afford in order to be able to buy expensive stuff (that would show their economic prosperity as a status symbol of success).

Many families suggest to their kids to attend at universities that tutor and educate students in scientific fields, such as medical business, engineering, economy, marketing etc. This prejudice (about first choice universities and unimportant and underestimated ones) affect humanistics in general, considered to be losers’ universities, due to the fact that the future, eventual jobs obtained through humanistics backgrounds and curricula usually (in my country, Italy) are less paid.

So, they have in mind a sort of equation like:

Scientific Universities = Solid work plus Moneys => Living without worries plus Don’t work much = Ideal Life

I wonder why, in Italy, the number of registered students is quickly decreasing. I also wonder why the guys tend to give this big importance to money, thinking that prostitution (that teens prefer to call “not for free” dating) is one of the easiest, quickest and smartest way to obtain “money spending” customers.

In the end my personal conclusion could be summarized like that: Lolita (not the literary little nymph described and invented by Nabokov) was an “heroine” that played a significant role in the middle class crisis (and the main tragic character in the fall of the intellectual aura of the erudite, academic researchers) and we can say that Lolitas nowadays still exist, with the evident difference that they belong to the the dangerous process of degradation and moral collapse which are submerging the intimate patterns of our society.

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

First posted: 23 september 2009

Science Fiction: I had a conversation, with ups and downs, with a professor because we didn’t share the same idea in defining this wonderful world. In his opinion, it is inextricabily linked to the robot, like Asimov’s works, indeed I think it is like the creation of an alternative world and that it shouldn’t be necessarily connected to the new high tech discoveries, like Ballard’s works for example.

This discussion focused on a specific book that I liked very much: “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury.

Some time ago I tried to talk with a girl about this book but the answer to my question (how much did she appreciated it, what kind of interest did she find reading the book itself) was disappointing: “I prefer Truffaut’s film.”

The fact is that I didn’t care to know whether she liked it or not, but what she thought about this book, which was her viewpoint about that work, if something in it amazed her, if the text itself had inspired any kind of empathy, mental involvement, intellectual stimulation, aspects that could turn out to be  similar to a clockwork mechanism of orbiting spheres, mirroring the structure of her mental disposition and intellectual “ontology”.

The problem is that, currently, all tended to support evasive answers without substance; i wish that someone could try to do one more little step of the normal tendency to superficiality, trying to struggle to an higher degree of analysis towards a comprehension, in this case about a textual level, so people will stop rambling about nothing and and their brain will start to collapse under the pressure of the concentration.

The nowadays trend works just with mindless people, who revolt against the plesure of thinking; Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man” and Eliot’s “Hollow” man, that is human beings not capable of free thinking and personal reflections.

The same book, that I just mentioned, is, more or less, based on this concept and extends it to an higher Will, represented by a totalitarian state which attempts to stifle the born of any form of independent thought, because it is judged too dangerous and unmanageable.

In this form of politics, the enemy is represented by books (my lifeblood) because they’re the only media able to give us the opportunity to be active and, so, to use our reason and comprehension to understand what we’re reading and, also (why not?), to use our precious imagination.

In this fictional world the firefighters’ work isn’t to extinguish fire but their quest is burning books.

What i liked when I started to read “Fahrenheit” was the “cinematic” writing style, I mean a dry and clear way of writing  with a wide use of adjectives that can evoke images, creating the sensation of watching a series of film sequences and not reading a book.

We can find this feature also in the story, easy to read, fluid, even if it hides, in the unsaid undergrowth, a world apart: the beauty of a girl who attracts a firefighter thanks to the strange things she said, about some books told her by her uncle, her unusual vanishing and what this event causes in the man’s mind, who starts to understand his need of reading books and, so, of thinking autonomously; couple problems regarding the fact that the wife is addicted to television broadcasting, idleness’ symbol, and she can’t understand her husband with his need of escaping from that prison built in order to make humans pawns (their will is not just subdued by external events but they force themselves to serve and to live as slaves) because she likes this type of life, because in her opinion the lack of thoughts is the only possibility to be happy, that is, to avoid every type of self-emotion.

The reading act, that is the authentical profound message of the text, is the explosion of free will, breaking the chain of servitude, when can shine the fear and the shyness, the privacy, of self conscious people, who the fear and the shyness of who, in secret, reads without having the courage to rebel against this state of things, standing aside; and who is waiting for the right moment to return from a forced exile to teach again how to live a real life with thoughts because a totalitarian state cannot hold out forever.

Tripping in the traffic nightmare

First posted: 19 september 2009

The car: our status symbol. What could we do without it? How could we survive without this vital transport? How much would we miss its “closeness”, its “understanding”, its “hopeless” noise, our efforts to kill ourselves darting in the middle of a country while a little old lady is crossing through the street and a child is following a ball behind her? Surely the first feeling, could be panic, followed by cold sweats, blazes, loneliness and depression.


Obviously, without car, we can’t follow our son to school because the building is too far: after all, 300metres are endless, during this terrible and hard path we also might stumble or take a tile on our head. Going to shopping, in such a condition, it’s impossible: it’s better if we start to live with “bread and water” (thanks to the bakery under our house) or, instead, we could try to use internet and our credit card even tough we have always been against those strange devices.
We might go to the gym and solarium, or pool… absolutely not, or yes, or not, or yes … and here it comes an illumination, because the needs to lose weight to be more sturdy and then, in our opinion, to be more accepted in our society and at ease with ourselves, it pushes us to discover that there are other types of transportation (and not only our car): buses, metros, scooters, bicycles, and something that we couldn’t even image, our legs.


Slowly, forced by all this situation, you’ll realize that it’s not so bad: you’ll also feel lighter and more in shape after a bike ride or a walk. The stress traffic disappears: those horns, the process of being in a hurry heading out of the mess and that never-ending quest for a free parking vanished, leaving us a sense of ethereal peace (caused, probably, thanks to the Prozac, that we took because of the depression caused by our being without cars, to whom we sooner or later get addicted).
We’ll feel like Heidi surrounded by goats and we’ll skip along the main street of our city enthralled by the sense of new freedom, just tasted, and finding the same traffic cars on the sidewalk: hellish pedestrians walking like in a funeral, people watching from all sides and coming out from the shops who bump against us, and your desire it’s just to run away from that but it’s impossible: there is no escape but only the chance to cover us in some shop or in our apartment that is too far from our actual position.


We’ll try in vain to jump on a overflow bus to be able to enter there (long live to sardines!), we’ll look around disoriented and we’ll start to think about our lovable car: the place where nobody can stand on us or scream in our ears, and where we could stay sit down to shout against the world.
We’ll feel like dieing because of a slight panic attack, you will begin to run desperately to the only spot where, we are thinking, the oxygen passes, we fall down to the ground without forces, completely submerged by the city traffic and while trying to breathe, that mouthful of air, people, attracted by our illness, will gather together around us to see, understand, take an interest in … and you are left breathless, we’ll wake up in our bed, soaked, cursing the night before when we had the fantastic idea of trying an acid to relax.

The dark side of spiritual teachings

First posted: 17 september 2009

After I wrote the previous post, in Italy, the discussion about religion in our tv programs was hot.

Some days after that, in Friuli Venezia Giulia (a region in North-East of Italy) an eighteen years old girl, of Muslism origins, was killed by her own father. So, you can image how the italian journalists (I don’t know how they can be considered reporters because they very often don’t speak well in their own language and they seem to be “employees” paid by the political and institutional systems, so they’re not free to write what they really think) developed news on this event.

The attorney of Pordenone (the city where this has happened), listening to the declarations of family and her friends, that it was a religious issue and problem that caused the happening of this crime, as well as the age difference, in her relationship with a thirty-one Catholic male (hurt by her father trying to save her from father’s fury).

This isn’t the first case, and surely it will not be the last, in which religion played a very important role in pushing a human being to committ murders

In particular, the Muslim religion, currently, is the first to suffer blaming words due to the fact that some of its followers are somtimes fanatics (that alter the spirit of true and pure spiritual faith): stuffed like turkeys with informations shaped by some religious groups with the  purpose to build a society suitable to their conventional and dogmatic conceptions and strict principles, unable to understand that these informations are completely misunderstood and absent in their sacred text, that is the sacred Koran.

The problem that we should understand is that the Muslims people, like Catholics, often don’t know their religion in a  clear way and they are blinded by misleading interpretations.

All this, including also a tendency, typically Italian, of not acceptance of a different culture, foments and nurtures a kind of racism and hysteria, dangerous, inclined to “attacking” anyone because judged a Moslem, and so, a priori, a fundamentalist.

It’s well known how the media and individual persons often happen and tend to judge and consider a particular type of crime against the law just by referring the crime itself to the religious beliefs and also to the national origins of a persons,as if, for example, a muslim should be always tought to be a fanatic or a lunatic persons because he/she respects the principles and spiritual teachings of the islamic sacred texts and traditions. And here in Italy nowadays arabian persons are blamed for being bad muslims, as if every muslim had to be born in Saudi Arabia or something like that and this fact could imply that he/she is inclined to commit crimes just inspired by his/her beliefs and spiritual, religious faith.

If the same act is committed by an Italian, by nature, is examined regardless of religious faith, recognized as a clinically deviance of a sick person, without connecting the nature of the crime to the dictates of the biblical book of Leviticus or another one.

"The Reader" a movie by Stephen Daldry

First posted: 08 september 2009

I have watched, the last February, “The Reader” by Stephen Daldry. It didn’t received enough advertising and not great acclaim from italian critics, but I don’t agree with them: in my opinion this is a film not to be missed by cinemas lovers. 


The trailer, deliberately, doesn’t show the real development of the plot but some simple flashes of the first sequences, in particular, to underline the title “The Reader”. In fact, the movie faces a very sensitive subject, not about love as many have said and thought, but about the simplicity of an uneducated woman, her inability not to understand the SS corps who she had chosen to belong to and the way in which, after war, the German “leaders” have tried to make their own faults to fall over the low ranks of the army. 


The whole plot revolves around the figure of this woman, played by Kate Winslet, who asks her lover Michael (David Kross in the first half of the film, Ralph Fiennes in the second part) to read a few books aloud. She refuses the well-deserved promotion at work, because it stands for a desk job, and she decides to join the new SS corps. The focus, then, shifts to the life of the boy (she abandons him to join into the army) who dedicates to law studies. A professor, of a course that Michael attends to, decides to bring his few students to a trial intented against Nazi crimes perpetrated against Jews. Here, the boy will recognize the woman who he had his first relationship with, among the defendants. 


The sensitivity of the film director leads us through a dimension beyond the fault, obvious, that the Nazis had, to come to an attempt of understanding the soul of an illiterate woman who, ashamed of an educational lack, lays on all the obscenities committed, even by others, without seeing that. She only did the orders that they imposed her. To the question: “Why did you bring people to death?” She replies, “because there was no place in the fields, and we had to create places for the people that were coming, what should we have done otherwise?” and to the question: “By which criteria did you decided who to bring to death?” she replies: “the older women because they were not able to work and we needed healthy people”. The film plays, at this stage, around to the ignorance of judges and the public, present at the trial, about the uneducation of the women and the belief that she’s only a monster to remove. Now, it arises, from this situation, an ethical question for Michael to overcome: “Should he tell or not what he noticed, that is the fact she is unable to read?” because this small detail, in part, could clear the situation and free her from accusations. 


The hidden theme line, which the film is based upon, brilliantly traced and managed by the director, shifts our focus on the humanity of the characters and their fragility, and it gives up offering us a different view point (skipping the black and white scheme of things). The director also doesn’t care too much about the historical context, in order to portray a situation, not deeply rotted in the contingent events. Without being able to know what the characters may think, however, we’re feeling the sensation of understanding them and, during the film progression, without realizing it, we see how easy it was for us to relate with a character so simple and, at the same time, so complex as Kate Winslet’s. Although we’re conscious of her mistake, we can get aware that she fully belongs to the human kind (with her qualities and faults) and she doesn’t symbolize or represent the conventional archetype and prejudice related to the “SS” fanatics or things like that. So she shouldn’t work (in our collective imagination) as a scapegoat for the expiation of nazi crimes. 


Actually, in my personal view, in this movie the main subjects to focus on aren’t love or justice. There’s no catharsis or superficial triumph (i mean that kind of triumph that covers and conceal the emptiness of useless conventions, social matters, dominant values etc.); the main topic is the dedication (of the director and of the public) to a dramatic, tragical figure, that is the key axis of a plot inspired by the pleasure to tell a story without mediations and compromises. So, for a while, the dangerous chance to forget such serious matters and facts won’t be able to steal our civil conscience and human awareness.