In the last weeks and months I have watched a subtle revival of thought developing in my steamy Roma. A repetition of themes, some old and time honored, others less so and its something that has finally driven me from my heat induced blog slumber in a way nothing else has been able to.
As summer approached, and with the precision of a Swiss Army watch or the ringing bells in the campanile above the church on my street, the Roman collective as in countless years past, has been inexplicably pulled, like bits of metal towards a giant magnet, to the subject of where everyone was going for their summer holidays.
Throughout the summer, the conversations weave and bob, but always surrounding this particular theme and a day doesn't pass where at least one of my Italian-born friends can be heard saying "Ufa!....the city is so hot...I cannot wait until I go [INSERT BEACH ISLAND RESORT OF YOUR PREFERENCE HERE] where I can finally relax and cool off."
Listening to them, I find it increasingly hard not to giggle. Because for the most part, most of us have already ceased to do much of anything in the 40 degree heat.
Damp and sweating, we look for whatever shade we can, eat gelato by the kilo and even die-hard red wine drinkers switch to whites. In an effort to stay cool, even the simplest of mundane tasks can seem like too much to drag us out of our collective heatwave induced coma. Hot, sticky, and miserable our brains are already in summer slug mode and there is little if any profoundly intellectual or challenging work going on at all.
Yet, as predictably as those
"Christmas in Bla Bla Bla" movies released every December can be, the season's conversations flow along the same inevitable riverbanks. Year after sweaty year, sooner or later I receive the predictable follow-up question of where I too am going for the summer holidays.
Playfully and as usual, I mess with the status quo.
I watch with humor as certain acquantences all but twitch when I tell them that for as long as I have lived in Italy, I haven't seen the need to bask like so many lizards on a hot sandy beach with 2 million of my closest lizard friends.
And in defensive reflex, it is usually at this point where I receive their annual scolding,
"Aaah but you must slow down.....everyone needs to relax...have you considered going to the mountains instead?"
Yet, each year my responses earn me varying degrees of horrified looks, sometimes even total incomprehension when I explain to them that "Yes, surely they are correct, I should slow down and enjoy life more but not this year".
To shake things up a bit, this year I have told them that I plan to work extra hard this July and August so that can have the time in late October to follow the vendemmia and to work with friends during this year's crush.
Usually it is at this point in the conversation that most people who don't know me well, begin to think that I am certifiably
fuori come un balcone.
But this isn't the repeating theme that I want to talk about today, nor is it what has brought me out of months of blogger hibernation on a steamy Saturday afternoon.
The breeze that is blowing is more sinister, and one that increasingly scares and disappoints me.
Fascism.
Always just under the surface, even in Rome's young neo-right youth who are too young to recall the atrocities committed in its name here in Italy, I am horrified to see it creeping out, loudly and boldly, outwardly accepted by so many seemingly normal people, Italian and foreigner alike.
Silvio Berlusconi and his xenophobic henchmen Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, in the Northern League, have begun issuing a draconian series of measures aimed at illegal immigrants, beggars and gypsies -- all under the guise of that increasingly sinister word "security".
No different that the United States and its civil rights violating Homeland Security rules implemented in the name of stamping our the spread of terrorism, Italy has begun fingerprinting all
Rom children.
Citing violent crimes, the rule has more to do with Romania's Rumeni (Romanians) and its place within the EU than the Rom people, who have lived in Italy since the 14th century.
Fuelled by yellow journalism and paranoia about security in general, the new rules have overtones that would make Benito Mussolini proud.
With Italian nationalism and xenophobia becoming more and more paranoid the politically powerful blame the country's painful recession on foreigners, seeing them as both rivals for jobs and scapegoats for the country's social ills despite there being statistically no connection whatsoever.
In a nation whose Fascist rulers once helped the Nazis deport Jews and gypsies during the Second World War, the fingerprinting is only one of many new measure being implimented to fight a phantom problem.
3,000 troops have been dispatched to guard railway stations and tourist spots. And judging by the responses I hear every day, the soldiers have won the hearts and minds of the commuting classes.
At a security screening at the last train stop on the way to Ostia, I watched with irritation, as soldiers asked for the documents of everyone in line who was a person of color. Redheaded and presumably Irish, I was allowed to pass, without being stopped for questioning, as every dark haired and dark skinned coconut salesman or tired umbrella seller was shaken down.
Why is this happening and if it isn't racially motivated, why were the Italians and presumed tourists excluded?
As frighteningly frustrating as witnessing this ethnic hatred was, I was shocked further in retelling the tale when the American expat I was speaking with stated that he believed that the stops were necessary. An American!!!!! How does amnesia of this kind set in and didn't we have our own civil rights movement outlawing this type of discrimination 50 years ago?????
With my mouth open...I remind anyone who reads this blog to remember this poem.
Original
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
"First they came…" is a poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. An early supporter of Hitler, by 1934 Niemöller had come to oppose the Nazis, and it was largely his high connections to influential and wealthy businessmen that saved him until 1937 wen he was eventually imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp.
