What if Soccer is the most reliable social marker?
In Italy, football matches determine in people picturesque and dangerous socio-pathological phenomena, which are easily measurable on social networks.
“Italians lose wars as if they were football matches, and soccer matches as if they were wars”: this is how Sir Winston Churchill commented on one of the peculiar characteristics of the Italian people: in the great military defeats, they demonstrate a formidable capacity for absorption, while a soccer match with a negative outcome often turns into a catastrophe.
Unfortunately, all this denounces an unsolved immaturity of the Italians: a worrying inability to worry when it is appropriate to do so.
A century and a half of incorrigible “southern question”
A country in trouble without anyone noticing?
Proof of this is that, in these leaden times of sickness and economic hardship, most of them behave as if nothing were wrong: as if an unprecedented occupational and economic disaster were not looming over the peninsula.
It is as if all Italians, from Val Pusteria to Capo Spartivento, were performing a De Filippo play: as if Naples were everywhere, with its amusing fatalism and dramatic inconsistency.
But this is not the subject of my speech this week, but rather the other side of the coin: the other aspect of the matter. Football.
I’m from Bergamo and, partly because my city is not particularly well versed in theatrics, partly because I’m not a soccer fan, I’ve always lived the vicissitudes of Atalanta with a certain detachment. Of course, it is the team of my heart: if it wins I rejoice and if it loses I regret it.
However, I confess that I’ve never felt any particular interest in the destiny of Atalanta when it comes to football: besides, I play tennis and ski, which are sports in which a certain aplomb is a must.
This time, however, it was a little different: Atalanta, a poor and scattered team, always in the balance between Serie A and Serie B, has been playing a leading role in the national championship and in the European Cups for a few years now.
Don’t ask us for words: in Italy we no longer have any…
So, my lack of interest has decreased and, the other day, when the Nerazzurri took the field against the noble Juventus in the final of the Coppa Italia, I felt quite euphoric.
Then, the match went the way it did and, for the first time in my life, I wrote a post on Facebook in which I complained, not too acidly, about the obvious referee’s contribution to the victory of the Bianconeri.
I must say that I write posts every day, on the most varied topics, from politics to history, from costume to literature, often cutting very dry and sardonic judgments, without ever having the slightest problem.
The unsustainable and eternal stupidity of the censorship algorithm
A post on Facebook as a magnet for legions of imbeciles
This time, however, I have witnessed a real festival of the fan: a legion of idiots, completely unknown to me, has produced comments to leave a port of Hamburg astonished.
One in particular, untraceable, since, after the comments, he escaped online, sneaked into my post, insulted me in a gratuitous way, and disappeared. Thus, gratis et amore Dei.
Well, I choose him as the eponym of this all-Italian bad habit (or rather, no, to tell the truth we share it with some Third World countries): this Mr. “Oswaldo de Tocqueville” represents the metaphor of a people who can not stop being plebs.
Even a wrong idea of State can generate holocausts
Dramatic roundup of holocausts of the European twentieth century
The inability to distinguish between “panem” and “circenses” in their DNA
A people who have not yet learned to distinguish between real life and circus games and who infuse their frustrated anger into every action. Perhaps, in the real world, this gentleman would turn out to be a meek underling: a harmless rafter.
But, in his anonymity and football fury, he insults, offends and assaults anyone who stands in his way. Including someone like me: who wouldn’t want dear Oswaldo even as a roofer and who, from a football standpoint, doesn’t hold it against anyone.
Here, in Italy, the Parisian viscount, forerunner of sociology, becomes an avatar behind which such a character is hidden. As we said at the beginning, Italians don’t take anything seriously: not even Tocqueville. Except, of course, football. Hélas!
One hundred and sixty years of Italy, not even one of federalism….
