Berlusconi managed to get the world’s eye on L’Aquila by staging the G8 summit there. So now everyone can see what a chaos this place is, after the earthquake which devastated so many homes and families. The count is 300 people dead and 50.000 people homeless.
At the risk of being cynical, I’d state that even with the entire world watching, Italy or its government, or even the Mafia in one of its many guises, will still be able to screw up Big Time. I have seen Italy juggling the aftermath of an earthquake in the past, and it wasn’t pretty: I personally remember a big one that flattened many houses and killed many people in Friuli, a region in the north of the country, where my family originates from. I can still see the temporary housing in which we had to sleep for a long time before everything was built up again.
We were even relatively lucky: a decade or so before the quake in Friuli, an earthquake shattered Sicily (or something southern in any case), and the area was still in shambles long after Friuli had repaired its towns and cities again. The reason was that the Mafia had its fat fingers all over the rebuild effort in southern Italy. They siphoned off so much money and made the actual work so difficult, that most of the people who needed new homes, schools and shops were literally left in the cold.
What I am venting above is the friendly version of an explanation as to why southern Italy was unable to pull up its pants properly. Ask my father, and he will tell you something entirely different: He will tell you that the people in southern Italy are no good, barely people at all actually, who can only survive because of the work that is done in the North. If it were up to him, Italy would be a lot smaller, and Tunisia or Morocco a lot larger.
Maybe some deem my father’s sentiments about the southerners to be accurate, but I assume there is some ancient animosity in there, too. After all, no Italian feels “Italian”, so any Italian Nationalism is bound to be artificial. They simply don’t like each other across the country, thus any form of National Solidarity is thoroughly defeated. I have said all of this this before, but this lack of national cohesion does offer an explanation as to why Berlusconi can be elected Prime Minister several times in a row, and why this can happen despite his obvious contempt for the law, his blatant tycoon-ism, and his obvious lack of good taste. Especially the latter should have pissed the Italians off. But for some unfathomable reason it doesn’t.
So now mister Nice-Guy B has summoned all the world’s big-shots to L’Aquila, to rub their faces in the disaster that happened there. I presume he did this to mobilise funds from abroad. But in the mean time, he should actually be ashamed for his incompetence. The Italian state is the most expensive in Europe, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this questionable honour is a global predicate. And how effective is this “nation state” anyway? Ask any Italian and he will tell you that as far as he is concerned, he has no government. He will tell you that they’re just a bunch of stealing bastards, who became civil servants with the sole purpose of gaining job security…. with a no-work guarantee.
If I had any say in this G8 thing, it would be an advice to all these government leaders: “Don’t waste your money on L’ Aquila. Let the Italians sort out their mess first. Any relief effort put in there, will be wasted on lining the waistcoats of the Mafia, and increasing their yacht-per-capita within the ranks of their type. Italy has to pull its head out of its arse before it should be eligible for help from outside.”
