Not that I deem these short essays precious, but hey: some drops of life have been brewed in, so:
INFO ON COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENTS  
[ or: ]

After all we all live in a jungle, it is said.
Well, I'm under the very same impression at times: for I can smell the presence of nearby game.
This obviously doesn't provide me with any guarantee whatsoever that I'll ever lay my clutches on the pray; none the less it proves to me with an absolute certainty, a certainty that to me is beyond any reasonable doubt like what the nose suggests is to the predator beyond any dispute, that the game is there, is near, that it is close; behold: it certainly roams in the surroundings, and many a times I've just squatted in the high lawn with the same kind of desperate patience a hungry predator might arguably experience, peering the night with a blind gaze, heaving quietly. Like when you go in a new city and you enter your room and you lay yourself on the bed and just stare at the fan on the ceiling, waiting for the hour.
I know there is something there.
 
Should they ask me what a Lodge is, if I were under a mood like Neruda when he wrote "love is so short and forgetting so long", I might even let the tide overwhelm me and just and finally answer the way I'd have liked to answer since ever: a Lodge is the empty place where either an echo dwells or a ceaseless wind blows.
 
Think of it, if you're a Brother or you've read our rituals. Endless questions echoing from side to side, as if an ocean would separate Brother from Brother, a perilous ocean that nothing can actually trespass (how would you dare, Brother...?), such its sweep that nothing can actually win but a winged thing like the word: what haphazard can successfully cope with its latitude?
Melville might describe this sense of immensity that seems having been invested into our rituals, wanted in by our forefathers. We even have Deacons, to carry the word: as if we where in a place meant to signify something much, much larger than the physical walls surrounding us. It wants ambassadors, specifically trained to toil on the vastitudes of the trail. An enormous room, where you can't even see and only an echo is fit to reach you from time to time, like a drumbeat. Ever considered there is a supernatural parallelism between the echo and the whisper in the ear? They both signify the presence of a power that speaks but can't be seen, and its utterances are so mysterious they have to be recalled every time, like the waves.
This symbolism is not moot, is not equivocal. It is astoundingly clear: the Lodge is meant to be immense, so immense that you should consider it even dangerous: an infinite, insidious country you can't really and safely travel.
But if so, against what this echo bounces? Is it, perhaps, a wind which carries the words? So something generates this wind.
Now, tell me my companion: what such a place is? Ever been in similar a place?
Let's keep this question in mind, will you?
 
Mine's just another attempt to catch this game. I've been struggling with his presence since a long, long time ago. It was 6 years ago methinks. Not that long, actually; but you know, there so frequently visits a time when you feel as if each year, seen and rethought in retrospective, belongs and partakes of the immemorial algorithm of the geological ages: indeed, time is marbled. Nothing happens in our years; but when you look back at them without anger, the triflesome years suddenly unfold and appear glowing with an eerie twilight of centuries you have never, never cooperated to make shine over there.
So it was 6 years ago I had this impression first: Masonry is a phantasmal, an apparitional entity. I wrote then a somewhat puzzling small essay a few Brothers still wonder about titled "La Prescrizione dello Stupore nei Rituali d' Iniziazione della Libera Muratoria" - that is: A Prescription for Amazement in the Initiatory Rituals of Free Masonry.
 
Not reproducing it here; moreover it was in italian. Moreover, some might complain it carries a few literal quotations. But whether you a Brother or you ventured read our rituals, you can't but concur with me on these points: have you noticed the sense of astonishment how strongly it is stressed? So strongly, that was my thesis, that we can assume it was even... prescribed.
We wonder on who's knocking - as if we wouldn't have known. We wonder on the name - as if we wouldn't have known.
A couple of excerpts I tried to translate into english:
 
"The cry echoes in all the lounges, as if everybody should be presumed unaware, as if the insistence of a reverberating command would be the only fit attitude to deliver the absolute urgency of a critical information, and thus elicit a recollection from a widespread, shared, immemorial slumber encircling all the Brothers. My Brothers! they knock in a profane way at the door! Oh well, as if everybody wasn't waiting, almost hands in hands tapping fingers, and wouldn't have gathered precisely for that."
 
"A profane at the Temple's door? As if the remark would have not been heard clearly enough yet, as if a confirmation would be quite, absolutely necessary; as if the bewilderment caught the Lodge's members drowned in a gap where even the most obvious, the most traditional of the commitments (adding a member), and the most sensible of the implications (who isn't a member yet, is necessarily a profane and can't knock but as such) got lost and irremediably forgotten."
 
"But the fact is: this continuous exhibit of a perpetual befuddlement, creeps and then detonates everywhere, refuses to be satiated by showing up just in the epiphany of an initiation, and is so emancipated by whatever precise situation that it eventually succeeds in settling itself deep within the most ordinary positions, characterizing every single aspect of a masonic ritualized life.
What's the first, the second task of a Warden? Oh, so doesn't he know yet?
Why you sit there? Oh, did they forget it, after having heard it every week?
Are all the present persons freemasons? Oh, you see: somebody doubts it…
I recognize them by the signs. Oh, so the faces weren't enough: he even forgot he witnessed the initiation of each of them! As if the avail of an interpretation were required to assess the fact."
 
So wide this space seems to be, whoever may enter actually: which is clearly a paradox: you can't at the one time enforce a security measure wondering who's knocking, when at the same time you acknowledge whoever might already be in. Correct, Brother? I feel socratic today, LOL.
 
None the less, there it is: such paradox has been put into our rituals, and who put it there couldn't be unaware of such crystal clear magnitude.
Seems we, the masons, are prescribed to remember we are rooted in an ethereal void (which tantamount not to be rooted at all! we're eradicated!), our senses either muffled or made impotent by the distances as when you try to guess the sea from the sky in the remotest horizon, and you wonder; and you wonder; and a shiver makes you recoil and you need some human reassurance to go on and don't get dismal at the mounting ripple; as if we're already treading on the heavenly meadows.
Inhuman spaces surround us and hinder our communications. Either deaf or blind or ghostly: but "tertium non datur", we cannot believe we're bodily humans, my Brother. This is what the Rituals seem suggesting.
 
I swayed my paw a couple of times in the void, when I felt the pray closer; but there once again it escapes, to jump happily free like a graceful gazelle in the savanna, and beyond my reach once again.
Now it happened again, it was close once again.
There is a painting by Rembrandt titled, if I'm not mistaken with my english, the Cloth Merchants. It portrays a group of 6 men sitting around a table covered with a finely embroidered red drape (nearly a carpet, actually); these men (who are they?) are gathered for they're busy (or, at least, have been engrossed until one moment ago) perusing a thick book: maybe an account file? One of these men, all dressed in alike a manner, still holds in his fingers a page he was about to turn.
Something, clearly, has interrupted the activity. But what?
You, my Brother. For they are all intently gazing at you.
 
BIG ENJOYABLE REMBRANDT'S CLOTH MERCHANTS REPRODUCTION
 
Listen how a french writer, Ronald Barthes, describes this painting in an essay he wrote in 1953:

«Consider Rembrandt's cloth merchants - one of them even stands up to get a better look at you. You become a matter of capital, you are an element of humanity doomed to participate in a numen issuing finally from man and not from God. There is no sadness and no cruelty in [their] gaze; it is a gaze without adjectives, it is only, it completely is a gaze which neither judges you nor appeals to you; it posits you, it implicates you; makes you exist (... ... ...) What happens when men are by their own means content? What is left to man? The answer is: a look is left. In this perfectly content patrician world, absolute master of matter and evidently rid of God, the gaze produces a strictly human interrogation (... ... ...) Depth is born only at the moment the spectacle itself slowly turns its shadow toward man and begins to look at him.»

Seems a variation on the well known sentence by Nietzsche, "if you stare long enough into an abyss, then also the Abyss will stare into you"; don't you think so, Brother?
Yes, it is the picture who is looking at you.
The gap of the vertigo seizes you for a moment. Uh! Who's watching Who?
That is, as well: what disposes of the destinies of men?
For these men have a book, have identical clothing, they all are dutch: therefore no misinterpretation declaring they undoubtedly belong to a Craft, also if not in the masonic modern sense of craft.
However, albeit such a suggestion should necessarily stop here for nothing would effectively bolster it beyond what I just stated, notwithstanding there is an invisible hand that pulls us back and coerces us to indulge into second thoughts before giving up and leaving.
In fact, what makes a contemporary Lodge perfect is what the Tradition bequeaths: 7 Master Masons as the minimal required quorum.
 
These men are darn close to such a number. Darn close. So close the temptation to believe Rembrandt is intentionally proposing them on the verge of attaining such a threshold is thrilling as a bell unexpectedly ringing in the still, motionless atmosphere.
Seven: A number that anyway has much deeper symbolical a legacy than number six has. Seven.
I mean: should we really believe such a refined, priceless a masterpiece, might have overlooked this factor, and might have bestowed no meaning to the number whereas in the meanwhile it counts even the fringes of the cushions?
You see: they miss just one, correct? Any desultory idea where the seventh might be in this group forming almost a tridimensional circle?
Can genius conflate and interweave so many threads mastering all of them at once? Answer is yes, it can.
 
Behold and consider the painting standing still before it: see, they clearly detected your arrival well before you saw them. You have not been shrewd enough, you see...
The man on the leftmost edge even seems to be moderately giggling at you (and yes, you do need to have the hands of God to paint like that such nuances, and make them speak from the canvas!).
Before him, is the man who gets up from his comfortable chair "to get a better look at you"; he shares the same ineffable of Leonardo's Gioconda, but he's more numb: maybe a sense of the Lodge is in the air? But he's not surprised, and he can even be said sporting a dull countenance: oh, your arrival didn't really surprise him, you see...
Now try to detect his chair. The chair he's lifting from. Can you?
 
The man next him taps his hand on the book and looks with reproval at the man who is going to stand, and seems urging: "we have serious matters to look after here, don't waste time once again with those...".
 
Beside him, the man who keeps a leaf of the book in his fingers and was about to turn it before you interrupted him: he clearly, openly looks at you: he's serene, as if he wouldn't even regret a laugh; in between these latter two merchants, there is what can clearly be considered an attendant: on the background, almost merged with the wooden tapestry (real or an apparition?), wearing no hat, he looks at you; and guess what: watch at him carefully, he is about to wink at you! Look!
 
On the rightmost edge the last merchant holds the money; you see, he looks at you as well. You have not perturbed him at all, although his arm seems as if it was about for a moment to fear and withhold the wallet; but he eventually and quickly realized it was just you... others are the dangers. And therefore you deserve his monetary attention.
 
You know what are they going to tell you? Something like, oh please since you here, well get in.
At the same time, you realize they appear bored by you as well. As if they know something about yourself you yourself cannot yourself know.
 
Now, what should we argue by this strange painting? What did Rembrandt mean to achieve? Certainly, he didn't mean just to play with you. For when a genius plays, he's hurtful.
If all the matter could have been conciliated with the reproduction of a strict figurative similarity with a earthly occurrence (an attempt to freeze the impression that someone entering a room may produce, that is), well then Rembrandt would have been worthless a painter: for in a competition with reality, reality just wins all the games anyway.
 
On the other hand, it couldn't just and merely be an effort to create a painting that watches who watches at it, for would it have been such, then the painting wouldn't have been more compelling than a well conceived crossworded midsummer's pastime. And painters like Rembrandt just happens not being kids.
 
What does it mean then? Just a trick?
These men watching at you do not scrutinize you. They already seem to be somewhat acquainted with you. When have you met them first? Do you remember?
They don't admire you, and none the less they do not despise your presence. Your arrival is not really taking them away from their work, although at the same time you clearly did.
It seems that you just drew them from some activity which is remarkably important, but that they can afford to quit temporarily, and this at least just in order "to get a better look at you".
 
It is as if they do not fear you could really subtract or distract them from their important work, which is spread on the table like a world map on which they arrange the fates of the globe; it is as if on that table is a plan which still concerns you.
So you're neither really unexpected nor really unwelcome; they are all noteworthy relaxed, these guys, and at their ease: they know nobody and nothing can really thwart their job.
You wonder who they are. But they do not; they do not even wonder who you are.
They know that the best is yet to come.
For they know they are dead.
 
Italy (apparently), 2002 (apparently).

«Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
That like two spirits do suggest me still;
My better angel is a man right fair,
My worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.»
[Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim]

We're eager to define rules, yes, which may guide us throughout life, or at least throughout an empty paper.
Rummaging in a closet a few days ago I could, for instance, see many relics from my past. What was (just like this writing) it all about?
What rules, if any, could be deduced? Have been some rules creatively broken in the process of the life that left behind that garbage? Did I create something new -or at least anew?
 
"There are infinite ways to miss the target, but only one to center it" wrote Aristotle, but alas the matter's even worst: I'm at times under the impression we're so carefully taking aim at the unknown target.
What do we search for, precisely?
For it's all blurred, and at times the trivial sentence (actually wrote first by a famous painter, Gaugin. He was writing this long letter to an art critic who didn't like him, and Gaugin ended up saying "people should not meddle with things they do not understand") "who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" seems something consistent, and no longer an idiocy. In life yearning for what treasure?
Quick, can you tell me? No, you can't. None the less, you yearn for it every day, correct? We long for it every single day, and none the less we can't tell immediatly what it is. Curious.
Is there life on Mars?
 
Have you ever read Shakespeare's sonnets?
You have. If you haven't, and you still here reading (which I doubt and don't blame!), I bet one penny tomorrow you will. So I can't lose much anyway, you see.

«From you have I been absent in the Spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose:
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.» [Sonnet 98]

Wow, with a bang not with a whine!
You see, Gaugin was right; for you may know that Shakespeare's sonnets got a, so to say, ill fated reputation to some degree, for a few witty and awarded art critics argued, with a happy momentum of intelligence and inspiration, that they were dedicated to a man, and spread the rumor.
Which obviously bore the usual endless streak of debates on the homosexuality of illustrious men. In other words, they concluded, that "you" had to be a person, for the sonnets of the greatest and more hermetic poet of all times as Dante was, dared write with a sense of intimacy: "you". And so there we go: they become the sonnets of love dedicated to a man. The sonnets of a hidden, petty "secret" to gossip about.
I really believe Gaugin was right: some should just not meddle with what they can't understand; which makes of all of us a big, whole, strongly united family. For how many are the things we can understand?
 
Obviously (and you wondering what this shares with our lovely debate) the chase started immediately: let's find the man. Documents scribbled, closets rummaged, scottish and sussex country towns turned upside down, court reports carefully sifted: we have to find his name, the critics argued.
None the less, guess what: they still can't find this "man"; and none the less neither for one second they doubted, nor for an instant they ever considered they might have been searching for the wrong thing in the wrong places. To date, such man has not been identified with anything even remotely close to certainty. Centuries have elapsed, my dearest friends, giggling at us from upon down.
Shakespeare's sonnets are regarded as deeply hermetic. Many wonder: who is this mysterious man? And what are they all about?
 
But quit for a moment the idea they are meant for a person, and all of a sudden, immediately, with a thrust which overwhelms you and overturns you to the ground, writhing under the impact, at once all their meaning and sense thoroughly unfolds plain and exposed right before your eyes: quit that idea, and they yield like a fortress teared apart from its hinges and foundations. Every single sentence in each single sonnets suddenly becomes crystal clear, attains self evidence, its meaning explodes in dazzling, amazing sparkles dashing all over.
No man to chase after, no chercez la femme.
 
It gives a throbbing shiver through your spine, and I'm talking physical shiver. Just try it to experience this drug: read whichever Shakespeare's sonnet and do not think "you" is a person. At first think "you" it's artistic talent, that the artistic creations are the "kids" of this "man"; the pleas, so mysterious that they always seem to elude a definitive interpretation, get entirely obvious when you think it's a propitiatory supplication to the greatest power that inspires us and agitates us from our roots. Then think maybe it's an ethereal entity which hovers above us. The pattern of the milky way we always strive to emulate: the Pleiades, man.
 
"How thy worth my manners may I sing, When thou art all the better part of me?"
 
"Till the Judgement that yourself arise"
 
«O know sweet love I always write of you» [sonnet 76]. In fact, could he do otherwise? No, he could not. No way.
And you know: Shakespeare wrote quite a lot, yes? None the less, see with what ardour he endeavors to establish a satisfactory communication with something which clearly eludes him, see the humility, the awareness it is not his own worth, the sense he'd be nothing and nobody without "him" shaking him from within. For I say: would you call it it?
But see how deep seated this bias is: «Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not» [sonnet 92].
In italian it even gets translated: "Tu potresti tradirmi senza che mi sia mai noto"; you know what this translation literally means? It goes: "Thou mayst betray me" [tradirmi, from tradire: to betray, to be unfaithful]; by this I do not mean it is only a matter of translation, for the main sponsors of such dramatic a misunderstanding are anglo saxons.
But I mean the sonnet sounds: false. Why forcing it in order to make sure it can be interpreted the way we feel it should? "Tu potresti mentire" you mayst lie would have been a translation where the intention to (mis)lead the reader would have been less transparent.
My inspiration comes and goes; I do not master it. When it is within me, I feel like Machiavelli in his Studio:

«When I leave the wood, I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking. Then I move on along the road to the inn; I speak with those passing by; I ask them news of their places; I learn various things; and I note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the meantime conies the hour to dine, when I eat with my company what food this poor villa and tiny patrimony allow Having eaten, I return to the inn; there is the host, ordinarily a butcher, a miller, two bakers. With them I at times become a rascal for the whole day, playing at cricca and tric-trac, from which arise a thousand quarrels and countless abuses with insulting words, and most times we are fighting over a penny and yet we can be heard shouting from San Casciano. Thus involved with these vermin I scrape the mold off my brain and I satisfy the malignity of this fate of mine, as I am content to be trampled on this path so as to see if she will be ashamed of it.
 
But when evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the an­cient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I entirely deliver myself to them.» [Niccolo' Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori. Firenze, December 10, 1513]

Just tremble and bow, do not tamper.
I feel transfigured. Were it false, how could I tell? It takes over all of me with its unlimited visions I can hardly endure, I can't really transfix it with my gaze. Before it no real things were made, and only "it" eternally endures. Can Job prove God wrong?

«Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, and said:
Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskilful words?
Gird up thy loins like a man: I will ask thee, and answer thou me» [Job, 38]

When in an early sonnet he (Shakespeare?) writes of "straying youth", you can consolidate a sense of consistence if you think the gods that provide you with inspiration are whimsical, since Jupiter's times, and give and take away their "grace" at their own discretion since ever: it is precisely their characteristic, for the wind blows where it likes and gives no explanations since the Gospel according to St. John; but conversely you can't conciliate any longer such verses with verses like "you pattern of all those - better part of me" if you think the "straying" wasn't but a libertine. Will we let prevail the narrow sighted petty which explains one fourth, for the sake of the appearances, or the sublime strumming which explains it all, and that speaks from the core?
 
So I don't know what all these stories are for. Neither I know what those relics of my life looking at me from within the closet were exactly for, nor I can tell what my engagements precisely might have been chosen for. Neither I know what the melancholy which seizes your throat at night longs for. We all feel such melancholy methinks, precisely in the tiniest details as described:

«The Emperor, so it runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death----all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and lofty-mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire--before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way, too is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must fight his way next down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate--but never, never can that happen--the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own refuse. Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message from a dead man.--But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.» [Kafka]

Amidst the dire waters, the only sure thing I can say handling a Virginia Woolf's book in my hands, or brooding over an old photo, so carefully taking aim at the impossible target which can be missed in many ways but centered only in one, the only sure thing I can say is that you, you who are "pattern of all those", you're no longer here; but you're utterly missed, Brother. And seeing a few relics popping from beneath the burden in a closet, I understand, I eventually and fully understand that while "YOU away, as with your shadow I with these did play".
 
Morale: when you break a rule first be sure you understand what you're doing; then if you do, pray the others would understand what you really did. For the rule is basically this: who is you? As long as you can't answer the koan [*], the rule's who is gonna break you.
And in no case the public's gonna approve of you. Never. Winner take nothing, or a kick in the ass.

Democracy is a highly sophisticated machinery despised by those who don't understand it while they cash its monthly checks and keep living within its boundaries which everyone (even terrorists) can feeely cross and escape from in both directions.
That is democracy.
 
Tocqueville says democracy comes last, as a mature offspring of a longwinded process:

«This remark, indeed, is not exclusively applicable to the science of administration. Although a democratic government is founded upon a very simple and natural principle, it always presupposes the existence of a high degree of culture and education in society. At first it might be supposed to belong to the earliest ages of the world, but maturer observation will convince us that it could come only last in the succession of human history. (...) The incessant revolutions that have convulsed the South [=latin] American states [=countries] for the last quarter of a century are regarded with astonishment, and we are constantly hoping that before long, they will return to what is called their natural state. But who can affirm that revolutions are not, at the present time, the most natural state of the South American Spaniards? In that country society is struggling in the depths of an abyss whence its own efforts are insufficient to rescue it. The inhabitants of that fair portion of the Western hemisphere seem obstinately bent on the work of destroying one another. If they fall into momentary quiet, from exhaustion, that repose soon prepares them for a new frenzy. When I consider their condition, alternating between misery and crime, I am tempted to believe that despotism itself would be a blessing to them, if it were possible that the words "despotism" and "blessing" could ever be united in my mind.» [Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America - 1835]

So let me persuade you into the apparently impossible, namely that the sun which warms us is the same energy that might destroy us.
 
Isn't a large majority a godsend? After all, the "estimated" number of pacifists is 80% in France: so many flies cannot be wrong.
 
We don't have a formula after which we can derive the correctness of a political behaviour in the same fashion we can draw the same result from a mathematical equation.
Now, what is the deal with majority?
Let me tell you a story about Italy.
 
Perhaps you know a man named Romano Prodi, currently the President of the European Union (a largely insignificant title under practical points of view).
Do you know how he landed there?
 
The left wing never won one single election in Italy. Never. Never. Never.
The communist party and the socialist party were literally stalinist parties (Palmiro Togliatti, the historical leader of the italian communist party -PCI- regularly attended meetings in USSR with Stalin as presiding officer!).
They had millions of followers but the Democratic Christians always managed to win over them.
 
Then communists and socialists split irremediably when Bettino Craxi got the office of Secretary of the italian Socialist Party (PSI) and reformed it so much that still today he is called downright a "fascist" and was lampoooned on magazines wearing the black shirt of the fascist age and in arrogant postures that aped Mussolini's most typical ones.
 
Craxi allied with the DC party and succeeded in setting up the longest premiership in the Italian history: 4 years nearly in a row (a legislature lasts 5 years - or it should).
Eventually he was overwhelmed by charges of corruption, had to resign power, and fled the country and died "in exile", as some argue: in Tunisia, cumulating insults and contempt by some propaganda that honestly appeared at times somewhat excessive. This is not a story from some millenium ago: it was january 2000.
He was the only man of the "left" ever to enter an executive room in Italy. And he was never considered a leftists but a fascist (these terms still recur in Italy: and they recur insofar as we still have some strong communist roots here, otherwise such stale dialectic would have stopped long ago).
 
In the meanwhile (80s and 90s) the communist party PCI changed name and became La Quercia (the oak - yeah). It went on losing all the elections. And every time it had some vote less than the round before, and despite it changed name, the communist idea that imposed to name military defeats as "strategic withdrawal" suggested to them to name each subsequent electoral defeat "a substantial confirmation and tenure of our following": because if you go down from 1000 to 1 by subsequent steps, each step is a "substantial confirmation", regardless of the fact the two edges are all but a confirmation.
 
Then La Quercia changed name again, in its whriting attempts to gain consensus, and become DS (Democratici di Sinistra - the democratics of the left). It went on losing all the elections.
 
Eventually they arranged a patchwork of minor parties to join them and here enters Romano Prodi: he was called to lead the coalition.
Now, Prodi had previously been an industrial manager strictly linked to the DC, not to the PCI.
Well, Prodi made the left win an election for the first time in 1994 if I am not mistaken by one year.
 
That was unprecedented.
 
Then Prodi did more: Italy was on the verge of being not accepted in the European Community to be formed after the Maastricht Treaty because we had the biggest deficit of the whole Europe.
In 2 years Prodi fixed that, and we entered with an economic profile that nearly outshined Germany.
 
Well, can you guess what happened then? Prodi started being perceived with great suspicion and mistrust by the other leaders of the alliance, and the DS (the last incarnation of the communist splinters, remember?) leader, Massimo D'Alema, managed to make the government fall and Prodi was not proposed again as Premier by the alliance that so much got by his premiership.
 
It sounds insane, doesn't it? Prodi had cumulated an immense prestige in Italy and he could have won any next election.
But no: he was too challenging and dangerous a personality for the other leaders of the alliance. D'Alema become the next premier (not with an election, but within the same legislature - in Italy we can do these things...), so that the idea he was behind Prodi's dismissal got substantially corroborated.
Prodi was offered a place as President of the EU commission, which he accepted (D'alema said to a reporter "I never damage a person, I can only attack a politics"). So bye bye Prodi, enjoy at Bruxelles as long as you're out of Rome, and when you can send to us a postcard...
 
When the next elections came, guess what: the leftist lost again.
Fantastic.
Who won was Silvio Berlusconi.
 
The leftists started wondering how it was possible they lost the elctions and came to this conclusion: that they lost them because they ousted Prodi. How smart.
 
Now, they don't have Prodi, none the less they want to win again. And guess what is the idea: since there is a pacifist movement, let's side with it as strongly as possible - with the amazing consequence that D'Alema, the leftist premier who was in charge during the Kosovo war and lent troops willingly and compelled then the parliament to vote pro the Kosovo intervention, is now intensively lobbying not only against the Iraq war but, more puzzingly, they even voted against the dispatchment of 1,000 italian soldiers in Afghanistan (soldiers committed because Berlusconi's majority voted for their dispatchment: we now have Alpinis patrolling Afghanistan knowing that if some of them dies, there is half Italy who might mourn and another half that doesn't really and fully supported them like you'd support your troops).
 
It is a master strike worth of being mentioned in the manuals and of the most sophisticated political intelligence: making first a move that by all accounts is definitely going to subtract millions of votes from your side by sending away a great and learned leader, in order to make a second move meant to regain an half of those votes by taking in a worthless and highly unlearned pacifist movement (for Rifkin and Tobin have as much to share with it as Nietzsche had with fascisms: nothing except the tie)...
Clap your hands.
 
There is a majority to follow and there is a majority to lead. And there is a majority to gain; and also a majority to prostitute to.
So, in itself, majority means little: what matters is the type of relationship the leader entertains with it. What the leader wants by his majority? And, most of all, is it his majority?
 
So yes, perhaps Chirac is following his majority. Is this enough to praise him automatically as a mathematical result follows with infallibility from an equation?
Or coudln't we deduce different things by these "politics"? Who knows...
 
Don't bee overtly enthusiastic when a majority enjoys big figures. I myself am wary of any majority above 59%, even when it is mine, for I consider it dysfunctional to me and the minority both: big majorities always spelt disasters.
 
That a wide majority better serves the purposes of a good cause is oblivious of the fact that wide majorities on a good idea have ended up with totalitarism.
Romania, Bulgaria, USSR all enjoyed vast (fake, actually) majorities. In this line another example is mr. Saddam Hussein claiming his 100% victory in a 100% affluence electoral contest on october 2002 as "a unique manifestation of democracy, which is superior to all other forms of democracies".
It is as if he believes that voting is only a blundering that democracies commit in the pursue of an implicit goal: getting full unanimity. Therefore, Hussein seems to argue: why bothering with such a process which appears as an unnecessary complication in regard of the presumed intention?
 
But a democracy -the forma imperii which typically votes- doesn't want to solve the social strife by excluding (annihilating the opponents), but by including them.
And it doesn't want to include them by crushing them into obedience, but by institutionalizing the social conflict into a recurrent check (votes) where no stand off on the decisions can occur for the majority wins and therefore enacts: the groups who lose have a variety of subsequent minor chances, and then general elections again. It is the understanding of the logics of this device (voting) performing as a balance that generates social inclusion of diversity and variety, which is missing.
I do not deny 100% may occur, although it is unheard of in universal history.
But I do say that 100% as a intentionally searched for result is not democracy, but the negation of democracy: for democracy treasures varicolored difference, not fully compliant homogeneity.
 
Out of the fake line, large numbers in democracy are an ominous sign. The first sign a population is even too eager to give up some pieces of its prerogatives and rights to the politicians lured by them, is an overwhelming majority.
 
Pursuing a majority is certainly a praiseworthy goal, but when these majorities reach 70% or 80% my smirk fades out and I start wondering where I may have been mistaken: because what men really covet is to be reassured about their prejudices. Therefore a wide majority scares me even when it is for a good thing like peace.
Nothing good ever came out of big majorities, they are a symptom of weakness not of force: some ample majorities provided the enthusiastic followers with teocracy, others with communism: all the followers were for peace and industrialization.
Ample majorities are to be seen with suspicion, which is something that history tells us, and that not an opinion but the blood of my forefathers taught us.
 
This is not to say I don't appreciate 80% of folks who say they want peace: I'm in the figure if you ask me: do you wanna war?
But this is to say that immense majorities are to be feared most than admired; at least insofar a wave of 80% of alleged non conformists is still a wave of conformists.