wow! I could vote!
that's right... one of the many elections taking place each year was today and since it's a small, almost a private one (for deciding who'll take the post of the leader of the Democrat party), they let foreigners vote too. Nice, now I have some right to complain about the politics here.
Make no mistake - I don't care particularly much about politics. If anything, I'm annoyed by the duality of everything in Italy and how the right automatically opposes anything the left comes up with and vice versa. If the left is about supporting culture (human rights, helping the poor and whatever), then the right is against it. What would happen if the left would start holding up national ideals, talk about state security and legalizing money laundering*? Would they be stealing Berlusc*ni's agenda?
This duality means that if the parents make their children go to church the children get back at them by joining a communist or socialist party. As it seems, asking around: left is cool because left means intelligentsia, culture, human rights, attention to Burma and whatnot. Right are the yuppies who don't care about anything farther than their own wallet. The youth who listen to reggae are automatically the left. The middle-aged accountants are automatically of the right. I still don't know how to wrap my mind around this concept.
As the government changed one and a half years ago, I started hearing people say that the state TV suddenly has much interesting programs. This was new because the Italian TV must be one of the worst I've ever seen. Why? Because before the change the TV was made for earning. The masses don't care about documentaries, they care about reality shows. So why doesn't the right care about general culture? Answer: because it doesn't earn. This is the most plausible explanation I got out of my friends. And quite an appalling one, too.
It's (still?) quite different in Estonia, where being active in politics is mostly uncool and the uncoolest of all is the left-ish party who likes to call themselves "the centre". In Italy it's possible to hear someone declaring oneself to be Communist and proud of it. In Estonia this would be political suicide. I wish the naive young men handing out leaflets with the hammer and sickle in Padova would ever happen to go to Eastern Europe and try to convert someone. This should be fun...
* as a second thought, I think that's already legal.
Make no mistake - I don't care particularly much about politics. If anything, I'm annoyed by the duality of everything in Italy and how the right automatically opposes anything the left comes up with and vice versa. If the left is about supporting culture (human rights, helping the poor and whatever), then the right is against it. What would happen if the left would start holding up national ideals, talk about state security and legalizing money laundering*? Would they be stealing Berlusc*ni's agenda?
This duality means that if the parents make their children go to church the children get back at them by joining a communist or socialist party. As it seems, asking around: left is cool because left means intelligentsia, culture, human rights, attention to Burma and whatnot. Right are the yuppies who don't care about anything farther than their own wallet. The youth who listen to reggae are automatically the left. The middle-aged accountants are automatically of the right. I still don't know how to wrap my mind around this concept.
As the government changed one and a half years ago, I started hearing people say that the state TV suddenly has much interesting programs. This was new because the Italian TV must be one of the worst I've ever seen. Why? Because before the change the TV was made for earning. The masses don't care about documentaries, they care about reality shows. So why doesn't the right care about general culture? Answer: because it doesn't earn. This is the most plausible explanation I got out of my friends. And quite an appalling one, too.
It's (still?) quite different in Estonia, where being active in politics is mostly uncool and the uncoolest of all is the left-ish party who likes to call themselves "the centre". In Italy it's possible to hear someone declaring oneself to be Communist and proud of it. In Estonia this would be political suicide. I wish the naive young men handing out leaflets with the hammer and sickle in Padova would ever happen to go to Eastern Europe and try to convert someone. This should be fun...
* as a second thought, I think that's already legal.
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