When we think of countries declining, we might think of Britain and its end of empire. Or we might look at the USA and its seeming ineffectuality. Personally, I've always thought the exemplar of decline would be Mongolia. They used to control all of Asia, now they have trouble putting a soccer team on the field.
But we have a new contender: Italy. They've had a pretty bad century: Recently I've been following the WWII in Real Time twitter account (which is recounting the entire war, as it happens, 72 year later) and we're at the point where Italy is trying to hang on to Greece and the Balkans, and getting pushed back by Greek militias. So in that battle of the has-beens, Greece is the easy winner.
What else has Italy done to embarrass themselves? The legal system isn't helping - first they charge scientists with not warning of an earthquake on spite of that not actually being possible. Now recharging Amanda Knox with murder, lets everyone on earth know they have no double jeopardy protection.
And then there's politics. Electing Berlusconi looked bad, nearly re-electing him after all his indiscretions looks pathetic. They also gave a quarter of their votes to a comedian. Okay, I can respect that; but he turns out to just offer simplistic populist ideas not unlike the unrealistic policies of every opportunistic far left/right parties in Europe right now. It would be like the Americans vote for a comedian and they pass up Jon Stewart for Jay Leno.
But the final blow is that the leftist party has come out and said that only a crazy person would want to govern Italy right now. Normally I'd congratulate someone on their candour for saying that. But as a party leader, he's essentially labelling himself as crazy. It often seems like politicians are trying to out-crazy each other, but this is the first time I've seen it happen so openly.
No comments:
Post a Comment