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Anger and Pride by Oriana Fallaci
Best essay I ever read about 9-11. Written by an Italian for Italians. It is long but read the whole thing.
You ask me to speak, this time. You ask me to break at least this once the silence I’ve chosen, that I’ve imposed on myself these many years to avoid mingling with chattering insects. And I’m going to. Because I’ve heard that in Italy too there are some who rejoice just as the Palestinians of Gaza did the other night on TV. “Victory! Victory!” Men, women, children. Assuming you can call those who do such a thing man, woman, child. I’ve heard that some of the insects of means, politicians or so-called politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, not to mention others not worthy of the title of citizen, are behaving pretty much the same way. They say: “Good. It serves America right.” And I am very very, very angry. Angry with an anger that is cold, lucid, rational. An anger that eliminates every detachment, every indulgence. An anger that compels me to respond and demands above all that I spit on them. I spit on them. Angry as I am, the African-American poet Maya Angelou roared the other day: “Be angry. It’s good to be angry, it’s healthy.” And I don’t know whether it’s healthy for me. But I know that it won’t be healthy for them, I mean those who admire Osama Bin Laden, those who express comprehension or sympathy or solidarity for him. Your request has triggered a detonator that’s been
waiting too long to explode. You’ll see. You also ask me to tell how I experienced this apocalypse. To give, in other words, my testimony.
****
I prefer to talk about the invulnerability that many, in Europe, attributed to America. Invulnerability? What invulnerability? The more democratic and open a society is, the more it’s exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe. And that now take place, magnified, in America. It’s no accident that non-democratic countries, countries governed by a police regime, have always hosted and financed and helped terrorists. The Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's satellites and the People’s Republic of China, for example. Ghadaffi's Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Arafat's Lebanon, Egypt itself, that same Saudi Arabia of which Osama Bin Laden is a citizen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, of course, and all the Islamic African regions. In those countries’ airports or airplanes I have always felt safe. Tranquil as a sleeping newborn. The only thing I was afraid of was being arrested because I used to write bad things about the terrorists. In European airports and airplanes, on the other hand, I always felt uneasy. In American airports and airplanes I actually felt nervous. Twice as nervous in New York. (Not in Washington DC, though. The plane at the Pentagon was a complete surprise to me.) In my opinion it was ultimately never an issue of “if”: it was always one of “when”. Why do you think that on Tuesday morning my subconscious felt that anxiety, that sensation of danger? Why do you think that despite my habits I turned on the TV? Why do you think that one of the three questions I was asking myself while the first tower was burning and the audio wasn’t working was that of a terrorist attack? Why do you think that when the second airplane appeared I immediately understood? Since America is the strongest country in the world, the richest, the most powerful, the most modern, almost everyone fell into that trap. The Americans did themselves, at times. But America’s vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It’s the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.
It comes from America’s multi-ethnic being, its liberality, its respect for its citizens and guests. Example: about 24 million Americans are Muslim-Arabs. And when a Mustafa or a Mohammed comes, say from Afghanistan, to visit his uncle, nobody tells him he can’t attend pilot training school to learn how to fly a 757 jet airplane. Nobody can keep him from enrolling in a University (something I hope will change) to study chemistry and biology: the two sciences necessary to wage bacteriological war. Nobody. Not even if the government fears that this son of Allah might hijack that 757 or that he might toss a vial full of bacteria into the reservoir and unleash a disaster. (I say “if” because this time the government knew absolutely nothing and the disgrace of the CIA and FBI goes beyond all bounds. If I were President of the United States I’d send them all packing for stupidity with well-placed kicks to the posterior.) Having said that, let’s go back to the original thought. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology. Those impressive skyscrapers, so tall, so beautiful that while you raise your eyes to gaze at them you almost forget the pyramids and the divine buildings of our past. Those gigantic airplanes, oversized, which they now use as they once used sailing ships or trucks because everything here is moved by airplane. Everything. The mail, fresh fish, ourselves. (And don’t forget that they invented the air war. Or at least they’re the ones who developed it to the point of absurdity.) That terrifying Pentagon, that fortress which scares you just looking at it. That all-present, all-powerful science. That chilling technology that in a few short years has completely changed our daily lives, our millennial ways of communicating, eating, living. And where did he strike them, the reverend Osama Bin Laden? In the skyscrapers and in the Pentagon. How? With airplanes, with science and technology. By the way: do you know what gets me the most about this wretched multi-millionaire, this AWOL playboy who instead of courting blonde princesses and running wild in the night clubs (as he used to do in Beirut when he was 20 years old) enjoys himself by killing people in the name of Mohammed and Allah? The fact that his endless wealth comes from the earnings of a corporation specializing in demolition, and that he himself is a demolitions expert. Demolition is an American specialty.
When we met I found you almost stupefied by the heroic efficiency and admirable unity with which the Americans have faced this Apocalypse. That’s right. Despite all the shortcomings that always get rubbed in their face--that I myself always rub in their face (though those of Europe, and of Italy in particular, are even more serious)--America is a country with important things to teach us. And speaking of heroic efficiency, let me sing a paean to the Mayor of New York. That Rudolph Giuliani to whom we Italians should kneel in gratitude. Because he has an Italian last name and an Italian origin and he makes us look good before the whole world. Rudolph Giuliani is a great mayor, one of the greatest. And that’s coming from someone who is never happy with anything or anyone, starting with myself. He’s a mayor worthy of another great mayor with an Italian last name, Fiorello la Guardia, and many of our mayors ought to go and study under him. They ought to come to him with bowed heads, or better with ash on their heads, and ask him: “Signor Giuliani, sir, please tell us how it’s done.” He doesn’t delegate his duties to others, no. He doesn’t waste his time with bullshit and greed. He doesn’t split himself between the tasks of a mayor and those of a minister or deputy (is anybody listening in the three cities of Stendhal--Naples, Florence and Rome?). He ran over there immediately, and immediately entered the second tower, at the risk of being turned to ashes with all the others. He only made it out by a hair and only by chance. And in the space of four days he put this city back on its feet. A city with nine and a half million inhabitants, mind you, and almost two million in Manhattan alone. How he did it, I don’t know. He’s sick like me, the poor man. The cancer that comes and returns has got him, too. And, like me, he pretends to be healthy: he works anyway. But I work at a desk, for God’s sake, sitting down! He, on the other hand... He looked like a general who joins the battle in person. A soldier who charges with his bayonet: “Come on, people, come on!!! Let’s roll up our sleeves, move!” But he could do it because those people were, are, like him. People without airs and without laziness, my father would have said, and with balls. As for the admirable ability to unite, the almost martial compactness with which the Americans respond to disaster and to the enemy, well: I have to admit that then and there I was astounded as well. I knew, yes, that it had exploded at the time of Pearl Harbor, that is when the people huddled around Roosevelt and Roosevelt entered the war against the Germany of Hitler and the Italy of Mussolini and the Japan of Hirohito. I had caught a whiff of it, yes, after Kennedy’s assassination. But that had been followed by the war in Vietnam, the lacerating rift caused by the war in Vietnam, and in a certain sense it had reminded me of their Civil War of a century and a half ago. So, when I saw whites and blacks crying in each other’s arms--and I mean in each other’s arms--when I saw Democrats and Republicans arm in arm singing “God Bless America”, when I saw them drop all their differences, I was flabbergasted. Just as I was when I heard Bill Clinton (someone for whom I've never harbored much tenderness) declare: “We must stand behind Bush. We must have faith in our president.” I felt the same when those same words were forcefully repeated by his wife Hillary, now senator for the State of New York. And when they were reiterated by Lieberman, the ex-Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency. (Only the defeated Al Gore remained squalidly silent). I felt the same when Congress voted unanimously to accept war and punish those responsible. Oh, if only Italy would learn this lesson! It’s such a divided country, Italy. So factious, so poisoned by tribal pettiness! They hate each other even within their own parties in Italy. They can’t stick together even when they have the same emblem, or the same banner, for God’s sake! Jealous, bilious, vain, small, they think only of their own personal interests. Of their own careers, their own petty glory, their own small-town popularity. For the sake of their personal interests they spite each other, they betray each other, they accuse each other, they expose each other... I am absolutely convinced that, if Osama Bin Laden were to blow up Giotto’s tower or the Tower of Pisa, the opposition would blame the government. And the government would blame the opposition. The heads of the government and the heads of the opposition would blame their own party people and comrades. And having said this, let me explain where the ability to unite that characterizes the Americans comes from.
It comes from their patriotism. I don’t know whether in Italy you saw and understood what happened in New York when Bush went to thank the rescue men (and women) who are digging in the ruins of the two towers trying to save some survivor but only coming up with the occasional nose or finger. In spite of this, they do it without giving up. Without resigning themselves, so that if you ask them how they do it they say: “I can allow myself to be exhausted, but not to be defeated.” All of them. The young, the very young, the old, the middle aged. White, black, yellow, brown, purple... You saw them, didn’t you? While Bush was thanking them all they did was wave their little American flags, raise their clenched fists, and roar: “USA! USA!” In a totalitarian country I’d have thought: ”Look how nicely organized this was by the Powers That Be!” Not in America. In America you don’t organize these things. You don’t manage them, you don’t command them. Especially in a disenchanted metropolis like New York and with workers like New York workers. New York workers are real pieces of work. Freer than the wind. They don’t even obey their unions. But if you touch their flag, or their Patria… In English the word Patria doesn’t exist. To say Patria you have to put two words together. Father Land. Mother Land. Native Land. Or you can simply say My Country. But they have the noun “patriotism.” They have the adjective “patriotic.” And apart from France, I can’t imagine a country more patriotic than America. God! I was so moved to see those workers clenching their fists and waving their flags and roaring USA-USA-USA, without anyone ordering them to. And I felt a kind of humiliation. Because I can’t even begin to imagine Italian workers waving the tricolor and roaring Italia-Italia. Oh, I’ve seen them wave plenty of red flags in the marches and rallies. Rivers, lakes, of red flags. But never very many tricolor flags. None at all, actually. Ill-led or tyrannized by an arrogant left devoted to the Soviet Union, they always left the tricolor flags to their adversaries. Not that the adversaries made very good use of them, I’d say. Nor did they waste them either, thank God. And those who go to Mass, ditto. As for that yahoo with the green shirt and tie, he doesn’t even know what colors make up the tricolor. I-am-Lombard, I-am-Lombard. That guy wants to take us back to the wars between between Florence and Siena. So the result is that today you see the Italian flag only at the Olympics if you happen to win a medal. Worse: you see it only in the stadiums, when there’s an international soccer match. Which is also, by the way, the only time you’ll ever hear a cry of Italia-Italia.
Well let me tell you something. There’s a big difference between a country in which the flag is waved only by hooligans in a stadium and a country where it’s waved by the entire population. Waved, for example, by indomitable workers who dig in the ruins to come up with an ear or nose of the creatures slaughtered by the sons of Allah. Or to gather the ground coffee.
The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It’s special also because the idea of liberty wasn’t fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti-Americans of the good-it-serves-America-right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!)
What’s more, it’s a special country, a country to envy, because that idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers. The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality. The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were, the Benjamin Franklins and the Thomas Jeffersons and the Thomas Paines and the John Adamses and the George Washingtons and so on? These weren’t the small-time lawyers (“avvocaticchi” as Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French Revolution! These weren’t the brooding and hysterical executioners of the Terror, the Marats and the Dantons and the Saint Justs and the Robespierres! These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.) Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it “Toscano”.) He spoke and read in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought him multiple copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled “Of Crimes and Punishments.” As for the self-taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered the electric nature of lightning and invented the lightning rod. Is that enough for you? And it was with these extraordinary leaders, these men of great quality, that the often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers rebelled against England in 1776. They fought the War of Independence, the American Revolution.
Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll that is the cost of every war, they didn’t do it with the rivers of blood of the future French Revolution. They didn’t do it with the guillotine and massacres at Vandea. They did it with a piece of paper that, along with the need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, put into effect the sublime idea of liberty--or rather of liberty married to quality. The Declaration of Independence. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...” And that piece of paper that we’ve all been copying well or badly from the French Revolution on, or from which we’ve drawn our inspiration, is still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them, rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality, to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did, prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary kings. My father used to say, “Communism is a monarchic regime, and it’s an old-school monarchy. Because it cuts off men’s balls. And when you cut off a man’s balls, he’s no longer a man.” He also used to say that instead of freeing the plebes, communism turned everyone into plebes. It made everyone starve to death.
Well, in my view America frees the plebes. Everyone is a plebe there. White, black, yellow, brown, purple, stupid, intelligent, poor, rich. Actually the rich are the most plebeian of all. Most of the time they’re such boors! Crude, ill-mannered. You can tell immediately that they’ve never read Galateo, that they’ve never had anything to do with refinement and good taste and sophistication. In spite of the money they waste on clothes, for example, they’re so inelegant as to make the Queen of England look chic by comparison. But they are freed, by God. And in this world there is nothing stronger or more powerful than freed plebes. You will always get your skull cracked when you go up against the Freed Plebe. And they all got their skulls cracked by America: English, Germans, Mexicans, Russians, Nazis, Fascists, Communists. Even the Vietnamese got theirs cracked in the end, when they had to come to terms after their victory so that now when a former president of the United States goes there to visit they're in seventh heaven. “Bienvenu, Monsieur le President, bienvenu!” The problem is that the Vietnamese don’t pray to Allah. It’s going to be much harder to deal with the sons of Allah. Much longer and much harder. Unless the rest of the Western world stops peeing its pants. And starts reasoning a little and gives them a hand.
***
And with that I bid you an affectionate farewell, by dear Ferruccio, and I warn you: ask nothing further of me. Least of all, to get involved in disputes or pointless polemics. I’ve said what I had to say. Anger and pride ordered me to. Age and a clean conscience allowed me to. But now I have to get back to work; I don’t want to be disturbed. End of story.
waiting too long to explode. You’ll see. You also ask me to tell how I experienced this apocalypse. To give, in other words, my testimony.
****
I prefer to talk about the invulnerability that many, in Europe, attributed to America. Invulnerability? What invulnerability? The more democratic and open a society is, the more it’s exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe. And that now take place, magnified, in America. It’s no accident that non-democratic countries, countries governed by a police regime, have always hosted and financed and helped terrorists. The Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's satellites and the People’s Republic of China, for example. Ghadaffi's Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Arafat's Lebanon, Egypt itself, that same Saudi Arabia of which Osama Bin Laden is a citizen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, of course, and all the Islamic African regions. In those countries’ airports or airplanes I have always felt safe. Tranquil as a sleeping newborn. The only thing I was afraid of was being arrested because I used to write bad things about the terrorists. In European airports and airplanes, on the other hand, I always felt uneasy. In American airports and airplanes I actually felt nervous. Twice as nervous in New York. (Not in Washington DC, though. The plane at the Pentagon was a complete surprise to me.) In my opinion it was ultimately never an issue of “if”: it was always one of “when”. Why do you think that on Tuesday morning my subconscious felt that anxiety, that sensation of danger? Why do you think that despite my habits I turned on the TV? Why do you think that one of the three questions I was asking myself while the first tower was burning and the audio wasn’t working was that of a terrorist attack? Why do you think that when the second airplane appeared I immediately understood? Since America is the strongest country in the world, the richest, the most powerful, the most modern, almost everyone fell into that trap. The Americans did themselves, at times. But America’s vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It’s the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail.
It comes from America’s multi-ethnic being, its liberality, its respect for its citizens and guests. Example: about 24 million Americans are Muslim-Arabs. And when a Mustafa or a Mohammed comes, say from Afghanistan, to visit his uncle, nobody tells him he can’t attend pilot training school to learn how to fly a 757 jet airplane. Nobody can keep him from enrolling in a University (something I hope will change) to study chemistry and biology: the two sciences necessary to wage bacteriological war. Nobody. Not even if the government fears that this son of Allah might hijack that 757 or that he might toss a vial full of bacteria into the reservoir and unleash a disaster. (I say “if” because this time the government knew absolutely nothing and the disgrace of the CIA and FBI goes beyond all bounds. If I were President of the United States I’d send them all packing for stupidity with well-placed kicks to the posterior.) Having said that, let’s go back to the original thought. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology. Those impressive skyscrapers, so tall, so beautiful that while you raise your eyes to gaze at them you almost forget the pyramids and the divine buildings of our past. Those gigantic airplanes, oversized, which they now use as they once used sailing ships or trucks because everything here is moved by airplane. Everything. The mail, fresh fish, ourselves. (And don’t forget that they invented the air war. Or at least they’re the ones who developed it to the point of absurdity.) That terrifying Pentagon, that fortress which scares you just looking at it. That all-present, all-powerful science. That chilling technology that in a few short years has completely changed our daily lives, our millennial ways of communicating, eating, living. And where did he strike them, the reverend Osama Bin Laden? In the skyscrapers and in the Pentagon. How? With airplanes, with science and technology. By the way: do you know what gets me the most about this wretched multi-millionaire, this AWOL playboy who instead of courting blonde princesses and running wild in the night clubs (as he used to do in Beirut when he was 20 years old) enjoys himself by killing people in the name of Mohammed and Allah? The fact that his endless wealth comes from the earnings of a corporation specializing in demolition, and that he himself is a demolitions expert. Demolition is an American specialty.
When we met I found you almost stupefied by the heroic efficiency and admirable unity with which the Americans have faced this Apocalypse. That’s right. Despite all the shortcomings that always get rubbed in their face--that I myself always rub in their face (though those of Europe, and of Italy in particular, are even more serious)--America is a country with important things to teach us. And speaking of heroic efficiency, let me sing a paean to the Mayor of New York. That Rudolph Giuliani to whom we Italians should kneel in gratitude. Because he has an Italian last name and an Italian origin and he makes us look good before the whole world. Rudolph Giuliani is a great mayor, one of the greatest. And that’s coming from someone who is never happy with anything or anyone, starting with myself. He’s a mayor worthy of another great mayor with an Italian last name, Fiorello la Guardia, and many of our mayors ought to go and study under him. They ought to come to him with bowed heads, or better with ash on their heads, and ask him: “Signor Giuliani, sir, please tell us how it’s done.” He doesn’t delegate his duties to others, no. He doesn’t waste his time with bullshit and greed. He doesn’t split himself between the tasks of a mayor and those of a minister or deputy (is anybody listening in the three cities of Stendhal--Naples, Florence and Rome?). He ran over there immediately, and immediately entered the second tower, at the risk of being turned to ashes with all the others. He only made it out by a hair and only by chance. And in the space of four days he put this city back on its feet. A city with nine and a half million inhabitants, mind you, and almost two million in Manhattan alone. How he did it, I don’t know. He’s sick like me, the poor man. The cancer that comes and returns has got him, too. And, like me, he pretends to be healthy: he works anyway. But I work at a desk, for God’s sake, sitting down! He, on the other hand... He looked like a general who joins the battle in person. A soldier who charges with his bayonet: “Come on, people, come on!!! Let’s roll up our sleeves, move!” But he could do it because those people were, are, like him. People without airs and without laziness, my father would have said, and with balls. As for the admirable ability to unite, the almost martial compactness with which the Americans respond to disaster and to the enemy, well: I have to admit that then and there I was astounded as well. I knew, yes, that it had exploded at the time of Pearl Harbor, that is when the people huddled around Roosevelt and Roosevelt entered the war against the Germany of Hitler and the Italy of Mussolini and the Japan of Hirohito. I had caught a whiff of it, yes, after Kennedy’s assassination. But that had been followed by the war in Vietnam, the lacerating rift caused by the war in Vietnam, and in a certain sense it had reminded me of their Civil War of a century and a half ago. So, when I saw whites and blacks crying in each other’s arms--and I mean in each other’s arms--when I saw Democrats and Republicans arm in arm singing “God Bless America”, when I saw them drop all their differences, I was flabbergasted. Just as I was when I heard Bill Clinton (someone for whom I've never harbored much tenderness) declare: “We must stand behind Bush. We must have faith in our president.” I felt the same when those same words were forcefully repeated by his wife Hillary, now senator for the State of New York. And when they were reiterated by Lieberman, the ex-Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency. (Only the defeated Al Gore remained squalidly silent). I felt the same when Congress voted unanimously to accept war and punish those responsible. Oh, if only Italy would learn this lesson! It’s such a divided country, Italy. So factious, so poisoned by tribal pettiness! They hate each other even within their own parties in Italy. They can’t stick together even when they have the same emblem, or the same banner, for God’s sake! Jealous, bilious, vain, small, they think only of their own personal interests. Of their own careers, their own petty glory, their own small-town popularity. For the sake of their personal interests they spite each other, they betray each other, they accuse each other, they expose each other... I am absolutely convinced that, if Osama Bin Laden were to blow up Giotto’s tower or the Tower of Pisa, the opposition would blame the government. And the government would blame the opposition. The heads of the government and the heads of the opposition would blame their own party people and comrades. And having said this, let me explain where the ability to unite that characterizes the Americans comes from.
It comes from their patriotism. I don’t know whether in Italy you saw and understood what happened in New York when Bush went to thank the rescue men (and women) who are digging in the ruins of the two towers trying to save some survivor but only coming up with the occasional nose or finger. In spite of this, they do it without giving up. Without resigning themselves, so that if you ask them how they do it they say: “I can allow myself to be exhausted, but not to be defeated.” All of them. The young, the very young, the old, the middle aged. White, black, yellow, brown, purple... You saw them, didn’t you? While Bush was thanking them all they did was wave their little American flags, raise their clenched fists, and roar: “USA! USA!” In a totalitarian country I’d have thought: ”Look how nicely organized this was by the Powers That Be!” Not in America. In America you don’t organize these things. You don’t manage them, you don’t command them. Especially in a disenchanted metropolis like New York and with workers like New York workers. New York workers are real pieces of work. Freer than the wind. They don’t even obey their unions. But if you touch their flag, or their Patria… In English the word Patria doesn’t exist. To say Patria you have to put two words together. Father Land. Mother Land. Native Land. Or you can simply say My Country. But they have the noun “patriotism.” They have the adjective “patriotic.” And apart from France, I can’t imagine a country more patriotic than America. God! I was so moved to see those workers clenching their fists and waving their flags and roaring USA-USA-USA, without anyone ordering them to. And I felt a kind of humiliation. Because I can’t even begin to imagine Italian workers waving the tricolor and roaring Italia-Italia. Oh, I’ve seen them wave plenty of red flags in the marches and rallies. Rivers, lakes, of red flags. But never very many tricolor flags. None at all, actually. Ill-led or tyrannized by an arrogant left devoted to the Soviet Union, they always left the tricolor flags to their adversaries. Not that the adversaries made very good use of them, I’d say. Nor did they waste them either, thank God. And those who go to Mass, ditto. As for that yahoo with the green shirt and tie, he doesn’t even know what colors make up the tricolor. I-am-Lombard, I-am-Lombard. That guy wants to take us back to the wars between between Florence and Siena. So the result is that today you see the Italian flag only at the Olympics if you happen to win a medal. Worse: you see it only in the stadiums, when there’s an international soccer match. Which is also, by the way, the only time you’ll ever hear a cry of Italia-Italia.
Well let me tell you something. There’s a big difference between a country in which the flag is waved only by hooligans in a stadium and a country where it’s waved by the entire population. Waved, for example, by indomitable workers who dig in the ruins to come up with an ear or nose of the creatures slaughtered by the sons of Allah. Or to gather the ground coffee.
The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It’s special also because the idea of liberty wasn’t fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti-Americans of the good-it-serves-America-right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!)
What’s more, it’s a special country, a country to envy, because that idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers. The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality. The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were, the Benjamin Franklins and the Thomas Jeffersons and the Thomas Paines and the John Adamses and the George Washingtons and so on? These weren’t the small-time lawyers (“avvocaticchi” as Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French Revolution! These weren’t the brooding and hysterical executioners of the Terror, the Marats and the Dantons and the Saint Justs and the Robespierres! These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.) Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it “Toscano”.) He spoke and read in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought him multiple copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled “Of Crimes and Punishments.” As for the self-taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered the electric nature of lightning and invented the lightning rod. Is that enough for you? And it was with these extraordinary leaders, these men of great quality, that the often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers rebelled against England in 1776. They fought the War of Independence, the American Revolution.
Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll that is the cost of every war, they didn’t do it with the rivers of blood of the future French Revolution. They didn’t do it with the guillotine and massacres at Vandea. They did it with a piece of paper that, along with the need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, put into effect the sublime idea of liberty--or rather of liberty married to quality. The Declaration of Independence. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...” And that piece of paper that we’ve all been copying well or badly from the French Revolution on, or from which we’ve drawn our inspiration, is still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them, rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality, to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did, prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary kings. My father used to say, “Communism is a monarchic regime, and it’s an old-school monarchy. Because it cuts off men’s balls. And when you cut off a man’s balls, he’s no longer a man.” He also used to say that instead of freeing the plebes, communism turned everyone into plebes. It made everyone starve to death.
Well, in my view America frees the plebes. Everyone is a plebe there. White, black, yellow, brown, purple, stupid, intelligent, poor, rich. Actually the rich are the most plebeian of all. Most of the time they’re such boors! Crude, ill-mannered. You can tell immediately that they’ve never read Galateo, that they’ve never had anything to do with refinement and good taste and sophistication. In spite of the money they waste on clothes, for example, they’re so inelegant as to make the Queen of England look chic by comparison. But they are freed, by God. And in this world there is nothing stronger or more powerful than freed plebes. You will always get your skull cracked when you go up against the Freed Plebe. And they all got their skulls cracked by America: English, Germans, Mexicans, Russians, Nazis, Fascists, Communists. Even the Vietnamese got theirs cracked in the end, when they had to come to terms after their victory so that now when a former president of the United States goes there to visit they're in seventh heaven. “Bienvenu, Monsieur le President, bienvenu!” The problem is that the Vietnamese don’t pray to Allah. It’s going to be much harder to deal with the sons of Allah. Much longer and much harder. Unless the rest of the Western world stops peeing its pants. And starts reasoning a little and gives them a hand.
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And with that I bid you an affectionate farewell, by dear Ferruccio, and I warn you: ask nothing further of me. Least of all, to get involved in disputes or pointless polemics. I’ve said what I had to say. Anger and pride ordered me to. Age and a clean conscience allowed me to. But now I have to get back to work; I don’t want to be disturbed. End of story.