"B" is for Bush, Berlusconi, Beelzebub?
Will Berlusconi-bashing replace Bush-bashing as the most popular European media sport of our day? On the face of it, the Italian prime minister hasn't got a chance against the American president. Euro media hatred of Bush is visceral and the bashing is wildly popular with the street and the elite. Silvio Berlusconi doesn't have the same appeal, mainly because he doesn't have power, outside Italy that is, so beating up on him is a game of diminishing returns and, anyway, everyone loves pizza and Chianti, right? That may be changing, though.
The barometer country in this instance is Germany, a land where not a day passes without a "report" from a "correspondent" that purports to be "news" about the US, but is, in fact, a screed against George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, neo-conservatism, capitalism, genetically modified food, fuel consumption, obesity, racism and stupid white men, to mention the top ten. Having smoked this stuff since last September, the German media is as high as a kite and it would take something drastic to bring the "journalists" down from the clouds. Well, something really drastic has happened. The holy cow of German-Italian holiday romance has been gored:
"During the summer holidays, German tourists nosily people our beaches, drunk on arrogant self assurance." Oh, my God, who said that? Why, it was no less a personage that Stefano Stefani, junior minister for tourism, of all things, in Berlusconi's government. Millions of Germans vacation in Italy pumping billions of euros into the economy but all Stefani sees are "?uniform, super-nationalistic blondes, who fall loudly around our beaches." His stunning comments appeared in La Padania, the newspaper of the Northern League, a junior partner in Berlusconi's government. And this follows on the heels of last week's brouhaha in Strasbourg, when Berlusconi suggested that the German Member of the European Parliament Martin Schulz would make a perfect Nazi concentration camp guard in a film that's being shot in Italy at the moment.
Much to the dismay of Chancellor Gerhard Schr?, Belusconi hasn't quite apologized for his remarks, and now comes Stefani's thunderbolt, which is all the more devastating because the place where the German leader loves to spend his summer holidays is, that's right, Berlusconi land. Now he's threatening not to summer in Italy. Unless the ruffled feathers are smoothed, and soon, escalation cannot be ruled out. When you've got six weeks holidays, where to spend them is a very serious business.
From the vantage point of Barcelona, the Liverpudlian economist Edward Hugh perceptively observed recently, "Europe is not only a 'fusion' of economies with differing characteristics, it is also an uneasy and unstable cocktail of different political cultures." Indeed.
So, who's Beelzebub? Bush, Berlusconi?
Diarist of the day: Cesare Pavese, 8 July 1938"He has found a purpose in life in his children. So that they in turn my find the same in theirs? But what point is there in this endless procreation? We care so little about other people that even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God. Man prefers to punch his fellow man in the mouth, and is such a fool that to give himself an object in life he has to produce a son."
