EUXTV, “Berlusconi Keeps Merkel Waiting At NATO Summit,” (April, 2009)

What does it mean to be a man today? Not in the sense of a human being, but in the sense of a man and his virility. Yes, this epoch is quite effeminate, and nothing is harder today than to give a clear definition of what is to be a man. The ancient model of virility was crushed under the bombs of the World War II.

Man forged in the fires of an authoritarian, warlike model of education gave over to another kind of man-on the rise for one-thousand years-that is, the clerk and his contemporary avatar, the modern intellectual, for whom Sartre has been the purest incarnation.

But the victory of the Philosophe over the Warrior didn’t last long. Clerk-philosophers and warriors were the two faces of the same world. In the shadows of this conflict, another Man was surging forth — the New Man.

There he is arriving! The New Man!  Here he is! He is getting out of his metallic Mercedes, wearing a  double-breasted coat, a hand lining his pocket, a woman waiting for him. Eh oh! Angela! You wait just a minute! I’m on the phone! The man is tending to his business… Surely a woman can understand!

A hand down at the bottom of his pocket, near of the very centre of his spiritual life. Probably caressing it. This is the New Man: the wheeler dealer! He does not possess any special qualities. In fact, he’s quite ordinary. He is neither cultivated nor beautiful, strong nor fast… but he is flushed with money and this is the propellant of his credibility. A lot of money produces power; power produces prestige; prestige produces credibility; credibility produces money… Only at the end of this process does this ordinary man’s charisma appear… What do we find at the very origins of this power circle? That’s the mystery.

- Marco Pitzalis

BBC, “Silvio Berlusconi Reacts to L’Aquila Earthquake,” (7 April, 2009)

A man so pure and extreme, like the idiot character conjured by Dostoyevsky, a man endowed with the enchanted eye of a child — a man like that exists! He suffers an extraordinary condition: “Headquakes” — spontaneous discharges of words, words from deep in the magma chamber of his soul, shuddering upward, something very natural, like a natural disaster, his mouth emitting shrill sounds that carry the lilt of banality and the strength of a revealed truth, yet without any awareness of their emission.

Headquakes can be experienced as clarity of mind or great excitement, and are traditionally the symptoms of insanity, heroism, or sanctity. They can also be produced by deep stupidity. The man’s infantile glance — always creating a playful atmosphere around him, even in the most formal and dramatic situations — remind us that life is a game (and he the ontological winner). His bemused expression can turn the evacuation of a city destroyed by earthquake into a happy week-end of camping, or a deadly war into an entertaining diversion with people blowing up like pop-corn. Is he a fool? No. He is an Artist. A Genius. A Holy Man. The Idiot.

- Marco Pitzalis

Reuters, “Queen Tells Off Berlusconi” (2009)

That woman! Decked out in a rose gown, sitting atop the long process of civilization, the embodiment of that process, the end point of that process. How could anyone, who is not totally insane, believe herself to be a queen? And not just any ordinary queen: the Queen of England! How could this band of men, triumphant in their cynical pursuit for power and prestige, driven by great ambition and extraordinary narcissism towards a totally alienated life—how can they really believe that an extravagant old woman dressed in pink is a Queen?

How could a man (even if only as tall as a child), one of the richest men in the world, possessing any number of powers, allow himself to be scolded by an old auntie in pink? Where does this woman derive her power? Does it really exist?

“What is it? Why does he have to shout?” she says. What moves the little old auntie in pink to say these words? Why did she have to put Berlusconi in his place? Because she couldn’t let an ordinary man ridicule the grandeur of her inherited office? She is one with what she symbolizes, and so that symbol is the very source of her existence. The power of monarchy is delicate, fragile; it needs to maintain its distance to be preserved, susceptible as it is to the slightest irreverence, ready to wilt at the slightest touch.

This is the function of etiquette—the apparatus that so governs the life of the epical English. Distance is in itself their difference. Merely achieving the appearance of difference, an inherited privilege may became an ontological status. The pink lady—in appearance sane—really believes herself to be a queen, and her reaction is no less ridiculous than the petit bourgeois excitedly calling out Mister Obaaaaaaaaaaaaa- maaaaaaaaa. That little man is as ordinary as I am. Why shouldn’t he shout?

- Marco Pitzalis