d onatella i zzo American 9/ 11 Culture and the Naturalizing of Italy’s Right-Wing Domestic Agenda 1 1 Translational American Studies Critical interrogations of September 11 - its significance, its representations, its aftermath - have proliferated in American Studies over the last decade, both inside and outside of the United States� Inevitably, Americanist investigation has focused on the application of such categories as “state of emergency” and “state of exception” to the United States of the Bush era� In this essay, however, I will take a slightly different route: bracketing the question of the transformation of the United States during and after the Bush era, I will attempt to investigate not so much the United States per se , as the reverberations of its policies in the political culture of my own country� As most local observers would agree, the mainstream representation of the United States in Italy has not undergone any significant change since September 11, 2001, in spite of the three different administrations (one center-left and two center-right) that have succeeded one another� 2 After the wave of universal sympathy in the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks, the political and journalistic attitude to the United States administration reverted to its usual dynamics, ruled primarily by the political orientation of individual commentators, while the popularity of the American people, way of life, and cultural products (perceived as not necessarily connected with, and indeed in some cases as opposed to the Bush administration) in Italy was not perceptibly altered during Bush’s presidency� If anything, the presidential campaign of 2008 and the subsequent election and inauguration of Barack Obama - minutely covered by the Italian media and passionately followed by unusually wide strata of the population - revamped the United States myth in the Italian eyes, marking a temporary revival of the progressive rhetoric of the “other America” ingrained in a significant part of the Italian left from the 1960s to this day� 1 This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the panel entitled “How in the World Do We Know that After 9/ 11 Everything Has Changed? ”, organized by Alan M� Nadel at the 2010 ASA conference in San Antonio� I wish to thank Alan Nadel for his invitation, his feedback, and his trademark wit� Thanks also to Paolo Barcella for his precious suggestions and insights about the Northern League� 2 A center-right administration led by Silvio Berlusconi ruled Italy from June 2001 to April 2006, succeeded by a center-left one led by Romano Prodi from April 2006 to May 2008, and then again by a center-right cabinet headed by Berlusconi from 2008 to this day (August 2011)� 102 d onatella i zzo And yet, a closer look at current Italian politics and culture tells a different story, showing traces of a new, emerging version of the United States, locally produced and customized for the Italian public as the result of a new kind of ideological manipulation� In this essay I will examine some of the new uses to which American catchwords and images have been put in recent Italian political culture, in an effort to clarify what I take to be a significant shift in representational strategies triggered by some post-9/ 11 developments� I will illustrate my point through a sampling of admittedly heterogeneous examples from recent Italian cultural and political life, which for clarity’s sake will be organized under three main rubrics: security and state of exception; freedom and liberalism; nativism and immigration policies� Making a convincing case for each would require a considerably more thorough investigation than I can afford here, but I hope that even my somewhat cursory analysis will be sufficient to point to their mutual connection, suggesting the way they collectively produce what might very well turn out to be the United States of the next Italian generation. I argue, first, that within the domestic dynamics of Italian politics, American icons and rallying cries are increasingly being used to circulate and naturalize a local right-wing agenda; and second, that this agenda is frequently mystified as a progressive one by expediently making use of the inbuilt democratic associations of things American in the political unconscious of post-World War II Italy� Sorting out the global and the local in such a process is far from easy; whether and to what extent this instability of America as a floating political signifier, open to the intervention of other actors, should be ascribed to the domestic interests served by such local representational strategies or to the inherent quality of the political discourse and praxis that the United States has been exporting for more than a decade, is a question that I will leave to my readers to determine� Since in this paper the United States is not, for once, the main object of inquiry, the relevance of such an analysis to the field of American Studies might be questioned� At the risk of stating the obvious, therefore, let me try to make my premise explicit: while the United States, as the Americanist’s object of observation, may have been changed (or not) by a historical event such as the September 11 attacks, the international Americanist’s locus of observation has in turn been changing on its own, moving on with its own history� That history, as has been repeatedly noted, is itself part of the knowledge production process of an international American Studies, as the lens filtering and orienting the observer’s gaze and providing it with a guiding set of questions or - as Liam Kennedy has effectively argued - with a “demand, desire or need” that deserves to be acknowledged and investigated (3)� I would like to push this argument a little further and suggest that if we are to take the notion of a transnational American Studies seriously, then that intellectual venture perhaps requires that we should take into account not just (as I have myself proposed elsewhere) the multiple differential ways in which the world at large produces Americanist knowledge by producing American American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 103 Studies within its own locally sanctioned disciplinary fields, 3 but also the way the world at large produces America itself, multiply inflected through the endless reverberations of the uses and understandings of America within the disseminated economies of the world’s local cultural and political histories� Even more than transnational , I would like to think of this practice as a translational American Studies, one that attempts to capitalize on the intellectual and political teachings of some recent reconfigurations of Comparative Literature, such as Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone � By focusing on such an instance of the translational use of America, therefore, I will be trying to create some meaningful synergy between my professional calling as an Americanist and my daily observations as an Italian citizen and resident - a synergy that, such is my hope, might possibly enhance my understanding of both fields. I am encouraged in this hope by some recent work in American Studies that has intersected with my own, confirming its directions or pushing it into new ones� In introducing their Globalizing American Studies , Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar call for exactly such a shift in focus as the one I am tentatively proposing here, arguing in favor of a “multilateralism” that would displace the privileged locus of observation from the United States to the endless archives of its worldwide reverberations, thus “provincializing” the idiom of U�S� American Studies as just one of the field’s “vernaculars.” While I am aware that Edwards and Gaonkar are thinking in terms of an enlarged global multilateralism that effectively explodes the traditional U�S�-Europe bilateralism of American Studies, so prominent in much of the discourse of internationalization and transnationalism (and still figuring evidently in my focus on Italy), I do believe that my case study is sufficiently in tune with their argument, at least conceptually, to justify my retrospective appropriation of their paradigm as a larger framework for the kind of investigation I am conducting here� The other book that has had a powerful impact on my thinking, in more than one way, is Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism - a work that in its relentless focus on the United States may seem in sharp contrast with the enlarged scope advocated by Edwards and Gaonkar, but that I take to be in fact the necessary complement, as well as foundation, to their wide globalizing gesture� This is true, to my mind, not just in the general sense that American Studies is , after all, about producing knowledge on the United States and on “America” as its fantastic avatar, but also in the more specific sense that the kind of knowledge on the United States that Pease produces in his book is key to our understanding not just of the United States, but also of those “ archives of America abroad ” that Edwards and Gaonkar consider integral to Americanist discussion (17; emphasis in original)� And if this is so, it is not because America’s self-understanding precedes and founds any other nation’s understanding of America, but exactly the other way round, because in Pease’s account the exceptionalist self-understanding of the United States becomes simultaneously historicized and abstracted as the specific “horizon 3 See Izzo (2009)� 104 d onatella i zzo of intelligibility” legislating the relation of U�S� citizens to the state� Through his astute use of Jacqueline Rose’s notion of “states of fantasy” to investigate the genealogy of American Exceptionalism as the mundane history of the varying negotiations of the U�S� state with the U�S� citizens, Pease supplies us with a versatile theoretical framework to investigate not American uniqueness , but America as a case study for the ordinary operation of the modern state, thus laying the foundation for different kinds of comparative work� When the book first came out, I was struck by the way most of its argument - however specific its object and circumstantially definite its stages - could have been successfully (and instructively) transposed to Italy� What follows is an attempt to begin to effect that transposition, by investigating some instances of Italian political discourse that enable a comparison with the operation of fantasy and disavowal as analyzed by Pease, while the use of icons specifically marked as American in my case studies might further populate the disseminated archives collected by Edwards and Gaonkar� 2 After 9/ 11: Security Goes Global From a European point of view, September 11 was indeed a historical landmark, officially closing the transition opened by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ushering in a new kind of bipolarity, whose ruling logic is no longer the spatial one of the Cold War, signified by the “Iron Curtain” metaphor, but the more fractured and deterritorialized one of the War on Terror� Within this new logic, the United States has for some time operated as the superpower leading what was once called “the Free World” towards a culture of ever-escalating surveillance� To a European person of my generation, this recalls nothing so much as the obsession with control, the repression of individual freedoms, and the obstruction of the free circulation of people and ideas once stigmatized as typical of the Soviet bloc� Times change, of course� But what I find really striking in this process is the fact that such a change is not just represented as necessary but valorized as positive within a redefined notion of what a “free” society is about� This set of semantic shifts takes place by way of a massive revival of the most hackneyed Cold War tropes about the United States, creating a conceptual framework into which new, historically specific political meanings are then injected. A good example of this kind of rhetorical manipulation, where the past is deftly evoked as a smoke screen for the present, is the much-advertised (at least on Italian pro-government media) address of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to a joint session of the U�S� Congress on March 1, 2006 - a mutual exchange of favors between Berlusconi and George W� Bush, with Bush advertising the support of the only western European country which still had troops in Iraq at that time, and Berlusconi seeking legitimation as a world-class statesman in an effort to bolster up his faltering administra- American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 105 tion, just weeks before it lost its parliamentary majority� 4 On this occasion, Berlusconi successfully refreshed the “beacon of liberty” representation of the United States, dating back to the Second World War, weaving into a seamless discursive formation the war against Nazi-Fascism, the Cold War fight against communism - with the latter, an obsessive refrain in Berlusconi’s domestic political rhetoric, receiving decidedly more emphasis than the former - and the fight against terrorism: Many American citizens have Italian roots� For them, the United States was a land of opportunity that welcomed them generously, and they contributed their intelligence and their labor to help make America great� And I am proud to see that so many Italian-Americans are today Members of the Congress of the greatest democracy in the world� For my generation of Italians, the United States is the beacon of liberty, of civil and economic progress� I will always be grateful to the United States for having saved my country from Fascism and Nazism at the cost of so many young American lives� I will also be grateful to the United States for defending Europe from the Soviet threat in the long decades of the Cold War� By devoting so much to this victorious struggle against communism, the United States enabled us Europeans to employ our precious resources in the recovery and development of our economies� I will always be grateful to the United States for having helped my country to climb out of poverty and achieve growth and prosperity after the Second World War thanks to the generosity of the Marshall Plan� We remember today this generosity� And today I am still grateful to the United States for the high price in lives you continue to pay in the fight against terrorism to assure our common security and defend human rights around the world� As I will never tire of repeating, when I see your flag, I do not merely see the flag of a great country� Above all, I see a symbol, a universal symbol of freedom and democracy� 5 The Second World War scenery is again evoked at the end of the speech, offering an allegedly personal episode - one that in its conventional quality and lack of circumstantial detail is strongly reminiscent of the war movie: Let me conclude by telling you a brief story - the story of a young man just out of high school, whose father took him to a cemetery that was the resting place for many brave young soldiers, who had crossed the ocean to restore dignity and liberty to an oppressed people� In showing him those crosses, the father made the young man vow that he would never forget the ultimate sacrifice those American 4 Berlusconi had insistently solicited this opportunity since the previous October as a self-advertising move to be spent as an asset on the domestic scene, as has since been confirmed by some notes from U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ronald Spogli, dated October 26, 2005, released by Wikileaks� 5 The official text in Italian can be found at http: / / www.governo.it/ Presidente/ Interventi/ testo_int.asp? d=27662. The first few paragraphs of the speech, quoted here, were actually delivered in English and I am reporting them as transcribed from videos broadcast by Italian television� The rest of the address was in Italian; the translation of the part quoted below is mine� 106 d onatella i zzo soldiers had made in defense of his freedom� He made him promise that he would be forever grateful to their country� That father was my father, that young man was me. I have never forgotten that sacrifice and that vow, and I never will. Note the convenient lack of any specification regarding the kind of enemy that the brave young soldiers had fought against and the precise nature of the oppressor that had threatened the people’s liberty: in light of the fact that some of the political inheritors of the Fascist party were at the time, and still are, an integral part of Berlusconi’s government, such reticence is easy to understand� But the vagueness responds to an even deeper need than just obfuscating embarrassing connections: discarding all historical specificity helps to mystify today’s struggles, recasting them in yesterday’s terms� Nicely framed by two symmetrical bookends that look back to that unassailable moment in twentieth-century American warfare, the Second World War, Berlusconi’s address is entirely devoted to buttressing the ongoing war and its sustaining ideological rationale for a U�S� audience, while justifying the Italian engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan in the eyes of his domestic constituency� Through a series of semantic slippages and historical substitutions, the democratic struggle against Fascism is abstracted from its original context and then reassociated first to an anti-communist, then to an anti-terrorist agenda, with “liberty” acting as the magic word effecting the equivalence� The United States, in its reiterated association with liberty, acts as the guarantor of this continued fight for freedom and, by extension, as the guarantor of the democratic, freedom-enhancing value of the permanent state of exception that has become the norm in most Western countries since September 11� It is by way of a similar train of associations, put in place by a similar rhetoric, that a new set of catchwords is now marketing the prioritization of security through technological surveillance as a desirable product “made in the USA�” A case in point is the sudden popularity of body scanners after the failed terrorist attack by the so-called “Christmas bomber,” 23-year-old Muslim Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the Amsterdam- Detroit flight on December 25, 2009. On that occasion, the authorities declared that the plastic explosive that Abdulmutallab had hidden in his underwear and tried to ignite during the flight might have been detected by existing full-body scanning technology, such as backscatter x-ray machines and millimeter wave scanning� Already in use for some time at U�S� airports, and in fact already available, but not routinely used on all passengers, at the Amsterdam airport where the alleged terrorist had embarked, body scanners rapidly proliferated not only in the U�S�, but also throughout the European Union� Following the example of the United States, several European countries, including my own, rushed to equip their airports with the new technology� In an interview broadcast a few days after the failed attack and given wide resonance in the media for several days, the Italian Foreign Affairs Minister of the Berlusconi administration, Franco Frattini, solemnly declared that “The right not to be blown up in an explosion is the precondi- American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 107 tion of all other liberties�” 6 This original piece of political philosophy did not take into account the vote with which the European Parliament on October 23, 2008 had rejected the use of body scanners as an unacceptably intrusive technology constituting a violation of passengers’ fundamental rights� Thus, in a perverse new twist of the universalist rhetoric of liberty and rights, an intrusive surveillance technology was represented as the foundation of the fundamental liberties guaranteed by a free country� What to me is even more striking - and troubling - is that this escalation in surveillance was approved by a majority of voters in an informal online poll in January 2010, organized by La Repubblica , a daily whose readers are overwhelmingly educated, center-left-leaning professionals or intellectuals, and virtually all anti-Berlusconi voters� And indeed, the securitarian rhetoric has been widely embraced by the center-left as well as the centerright of the political spectrum� In some ways, it is as if the “made in the USA” trademark - especially when coupled with the optimistic progressive image originally associated with the advent of president Obama - operated as a safe conduct for the kind of measures that not so long ago would have been condemned as totalitarian state control, legitimizing them as inherently democratic qua American� The global spread of a culture of surveillance has been fostered by the worldwide success of a number of American TV shows, and Italy has been no exception� As several critics have observed, shows like 24 and NCIS - and even, I would add, series ostensibly unrelated to homeland security like CSI , Without a Trace , or Dexter 7 - all revolve around a number of shared concerns: a tale of universal guilt and suspicion; the paramount importance of personal and collective security; the constantly amplified threat posed by the penetration of hostile aliens; the breathless pace of an investigation intent on averting impending doom; the justification of vigilantism; and the need for a permanent state of exception in the superior interest of individual and national defense� 8 To the extent that these shows embody and circulate an ideological agenda, it is of course in the first place an American one targeting a domestic audience� Still, these shows are transnational both in their commercial circulation and in the ideological attitude they promote� This applies, I argue, not only to the inevitable worldwide span of the so-called “war on terror,” but also to more local considerations� 6 The interview was broadcast on January 5, 2010 by the radio channel Radio24 � My translation� 7 A special issue of Ácoma , devoted to the international circulation of American TV series, featured essays reading 24 and CSI in this key, by Hamilton Carroll and myself, respectively. See Izzo and Cinzia Scarpino, eds. (2008). 8 One of these series, CSI , actually antedates September 11, having been run on CBS since October 2000 - and indeed, to the extent that it deploys a logic and rhetoric strikingly similar to those prevailing after 9/ 11, it bears witness to the fact that some of the cultural and political processes associated with the “war on terror” were already in place before that date� Without a Trace has been run by CBS since September 2002� NCIS , a spin-off of JAG , premiered on CBS in 2003; Dexter premiered in 2006 on Showtime� 108 d onatella i zzo It should be remembered in this context that virtually all of the TV system in Italy is in the hands of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, either indirectly, through his government’s political control of the three public channels of the public TV company RAI, or directly, through his personal ownership of RAI’s major private competitor Mediaset, which has three channels� 9 Given the significant interconnections between TV ownership and political life in the country, it is safe to surmise that TV programming is not just a matter of commercial consideration, but is also heavily influenced by political agendas� In this view, the increasing prominence of U�S� shows in Italian TV programming which feature violent crime and promulgate the preeminence of investigative needs over individual rights can hardly be seen as accidental� The shows mentioned above, for instance, all began to be aired in Italy after September 2001 and met with astonishing success� 10 Conveying a gloomy and lurid image of a world constantly threatened by extreme violence and in need of harsh, unconventional, and illegal measures for its defense, the paranoid fictional microcosm created by these series exactly mirrors the one that Italian right-wing political discourse is relentlessly and effectively intent on producing at a local level. Through their smooth mechanisms of identification and blatantly Manichean moral dramas, TV series are ideally suited to create in their audience a kind of ready-made, knee-jerk ideological response that makes the administration’s political rhetoric and practice more palatable, by projecting them back on a set of fictionalized images that naturalize both the rhetoric and the practice, thus encouraging their translation from the U.S. context to the Italian one. This can be verified through an examination of Italian fan blogs and forums, where one can find entries such as the one that follows, referring to 24 : “24 is a spectacular series […], with fabulous characters, especially Jack� I have watched as many as 12 episodes on end of Day 4 - impressive! I love the anti-terrorism genre, with secret services and plots� 24 is very real, not at all farfetched. […] I’m going to get an action figure of Jack to keep on my dresser, so while I’m sleeping I’ll have Jack protecting me�” 11 The next one is on Dexter : “Dex is a unique character, outside all canons and patterns […] and given the state of justice in Italy (and elsewhere) who could blame him for what he does? ”; 12 another forum participant declares: “I think everybody likes Dexter because he’s an almost utopian character�” 13 Serial 9 To be precise, the Berlusconi administration controls two of the three public, statesubsidized channels of RAI (the third channel is allotted to the parliamentary minority), while the Berlusconi family owns Mediaset with its three commercial channels� Pay TV accounts for a minor share of the audience and its major provider is the Sky network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, with Mediaset holding an increasing share of that market as well� 10 CSI has been aired by Sky starting in 2001 and by Mediaset in 2002; Senza Traccia ( Without a Trace ) has been run on RAI 2 since 2004; NCIS has been running on RAI 2 since 2005; Dexter started running in 2007 on Fox/ Sky and in 2008 on Mediaset Italia 1. 11 www.telefilm-central.org, January 3, 2008. 12 www.telefilm-central.org, November 16, 2009. 13 www.telefilm-central.org, February 12, 2008. American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 109 killing as utopia? Rather, I think what is praised here is the same disregard for the rule of law as a limit to the exercise of the sovereign will that was such a significant part of the operation of political power in Bush’s United States, and is even now the guiding principle of the administration’s political thought, speech, and action in Berlusconi’s Italy� 3 The Freedom of the Marketplace and the Marketplace of Freedom The troubling slippages of “freedom” that I have just recorded - from political freedom from Nazi and Fascist dictatorship to the freedom of “the Free World” as opposed to communist rule; from the free acceptance of limits to one’s personal freedom in the superior interest of the West’s collective freedom from Islamic terrorism to the untrammeled freedom of one’s impulses and will - are, of course, neither new in philosophical nor in political terms� In Italy, though, the recent history of the concept “freedom” has been marked by a particularly wide oscillation, which makes the inherent contradiction of some of its uses appear especially glaring� The notions of “freedom” and “liberty” - both rendered by the single Italian word “libertà” - have been long associated with democratic institutions and with the political left’s celebration of the anti-Fascist roots of the Italian republic: for the World War II and baby-boom generations, freedom was defined in terms of reclaimed political democracy, as opposed to recent Fascist rule; April 25 th , “Festa della Liberazione” (Liberation Day) is a national holiday commemorating the insurrection against Fascism and the liberation of Italy from the Nazi-Fascist troops thanks to the joint efforts of the Italian partisans and the Allied forces� Over the last two decades, however, the notion of a “liberation” from Fascism has come increasingly under attack, with the Prime Minister and his political allies refusing to celebrate it as a historical landmark and trying to reconfigure it as a generic “Festa della Libertà” (Liberty/ Freedom Day)� 14 Meanwhile, the notion of freedom has been increasingly appropriated to the lexicon of the political right, to the point of becoming synonymous with Berlusconi’s party, originally called “Forza Italia” and twice renamed over the last decade, first in 2001 as “Casa delle Libertà” and then, in 2007, as “Popolo della Libertà�” The freedom evoked by this use of the word, of course, has nothing to do with egaliberté ; rather, it has been shifted from the terrain of radical democratic politics to that of laissez-faire capitalism and right-wing libertarianism - a transition made seamless by the role played by the United States on both stages, then and now� 14 In a clear attempt to deny legitimacy to this celebration of the anti-Fascist roots of the Italian Republic, Silvio Berlusconi has never once been present at any April 25 th ceremony, breaking a custom established by all former prime ministers, and despite much criticism� 110 d onatella i zzo The distinctly neoliberal and anti-statist twist in the current political use of “libertà” might open the way to interesting potential comparisons with political and economic thinkers in the United States, were it not that it would be virtually impossible to trace any reference to current American conservative libertarian discourse in Berlusconi’s speeches� Such a practice would evidently be non-remunerative in political terms, since none of the conservative politicians, thinkers, or commentators familiar to the U�S� public enjoy any significant popularity in Italy; 15 but a further reason is that, as most observers would agree, the Berlusconi administration’s intellectual platform is haphazard at best, and its appeal to liberty and libertarianism is less a coherent theory or an ideology than the cover for a gigantic and ramified conflict of interest, and for massive diversion of public resources from the public sector to private companies� In this process, a special role is played by the use of American terms, by now endemic in the world of finance, business, and state administration� A case in point is the use of a lexicon borrowed from U�S� academia in the ongoing process of corporatizing Italian public university, a use so systematic that it would in itself warrant a separate study; suffice it to mention the recurrent expression “tenure track” (always in English) in government documents and press announcements to define the newly introduced system under which Italian university teachers in the early stages of their career - hitherto tenured from the rank of assistant professors - can only be hired on temporary three-year contracts, at the end of which they can be dismissed if the university lacks the budget to make their appointment permanent� Such a misleading version of the notion of “tenure track” is hard to read as anything but an act of bad faith; but even when such pseudo-concepts are not so evidently fraudulent, they are being used to create an aura of successful competition and progressive modernity around practices that would be immediately perceived as unpalatable if they were spelled out in Italian, and that in any case may vary considerably from their alleged American equivalents� In other words, more than being used as models or inspirations, U�S� practices and institutions are being terminologically showcased - put on display as baits or diversions� Another specific actualization of the rhetoric of freedom in recent Italian politics, one that is inspired by the U�S� political discourse to the point of overt plagiarism, is the recent transplant of the Tea Party� The “Tea Party Italia” movement was launched on May 20, 2010 during an anti-tax demonstration in Prato, near Florence; its rallying cry as summarized on the Tea Party Italia website was “against all state intervention and against the socialization of our economy� To reclaim our right to personal autonomy and individual responsibility�” 16 On October 11, 2010 the first national meeting of the Tea Party was called in Milan at Università Bocconi, a renowned private business 15 With the possible exception of Sarah Palin, due to her role in the 2008 presidential campaign� Michele Bachmann is just beginning to get some limited coverage in the Italian press in the wake of her increasing visibility in U�S� political life� 16 See http: / / www�teapartyitalia�it/ index�php/ tappe� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 111 school, on the occasion of the “European Liberty Conference” organized by ISFIL, Italian Students for Individual Liberty, a small student association in partnership with the Milton Friedman Society - a neoliberal student group at Università Bocconi - and with the American SFL, Students for Liberty organization� Their goal as stated on the ISFIL website is to promote the values of “individual liberty, private property, free entrepreneurship, market,” and “to involve the younger generations in the fight for a free society, ultimately creating a unified students movement in favor of individual liberty.” 17 All but one born in or after 1987, the founders and leaders of the ISFIL attend elite schools and explicitly present themselves as intellectuals and/ or future professionals in the financial or legal fields; some of them are actively involved, as national representatives or local organizers, in the Tea Party Italia movement, while others declare more theoretical interests in questions of political philosophy, political economics, geopolitics, or political sciences� 18 One interesting feature of the Italian Tea Party movement is its aforementioned demographics, since this elite intellectual origin makes it the very opposite of a populist grassroots movement� Unlike the American Tea Parties, whose adherents tend to be over forty-five, the Italian movement’s proponents are young students of classical economic liberalism who are clearly trying to make their bid as future leaders of the country; unlike the marked nationalism of the American Tea Party movements, out to reclaim their own vision of what America is about, the Italian Tea Party has an emphatically international attitude, as shown by its explicit Americanization: it is allied to the Tea Party Patriots in the U�S�, it quotes Milton Friedman, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it proudly exhibits the American flag during its meetings, 19 and it flaunts its connections to local representatives of the Tea Party in the U.S. as well as to American academic and political figures - including Jim Lark, former chair of the U�S� Libertarian Party and one of the keynote speakers at the founding conference of Tea Party Italia� An unsigned article published in Il Sole 24 Ore (the daily newspaper owned by Confindustria, the Italian association of manufacturers) on October 12, 2010, reporting on the conference in a sympathetic but somewhat condescending tone, commented that the low average age of the participants, the evident high rate of people holding Ph�D�s among them, and their fashion-conscious looks, did not bode well for the start of a mass movement, in spite of the potential wide appeal of its anti-tax platform: this group, the article concluded, felt more like “a club of nerds in love with America�” And yet, Tea Party Italia - which has been encouraged and endorsed by political characters and spin doctors very close to the present administration - is clearly eager to move into a larger arena, recruiting its adherents among the public at large� 17 See http: / / www.isfil.org/ p/ chi-siamo.html. 18 See http: / / www.isfil.org/ p/ il-team.html. 19 See the pictures on their flickr website: http: / / www.flickr.com/ photos/ teapartyitalia/ 112 d onatella i zzo While it is clearly too early to predict whether this attempt will be successful, an intriguing element in the Italian Tea Party’s approach to the Italian public is what I would describe as its schizophrenic translational strategy in regard to its American matrix� On the one hand, the connection of Tea Party Italia with a number of present-day movements and organizations in the U�S� is constantly underscored on its websites, along with the predictable catchwords “freedom” and “liberty,” and the call for competitive individualism, anti-statism, and fiscal responsibility (a notion that in the Italian political context is likely to be understood as a code word for massive tax evasion)� The definition “Tea Party,” however, is rarely explained: to the best of my knowledge, there is only one Tea Party Italia document that illustrates its origin, its very first one, tellingly titled in Italian - “let the revolution begin! ” 20 While it is safe to assume that the organization leaders are perfectly familiar with both its remote and its recent history, the expression “tea party” can hardly be taken to evoke any historical association in the minds of most Italians the way it does for Americans� 21 Rather than evoking classic economic thought, philosophical liberalism, or a historical moment of nation-building within a colonial context, in short, the complexities of meaning that lend the American Tea Party its multilayered political effectiveness, grounding its fantasy in a welter of patriotic associations, 22 the Italian “Tea Party” solely conveys an idea of anti-statist tax revolt� This strategy is calculated to appeal to the vast majority of tax rebels - or just plain tax evaders - among the ranks of Italian entrepreneurs, owners of small businesses, and professional people at all levels� Its explicit reference to the Tea Party movement in the United States is complemented by a strong emphasis on national and local realities (for instance, the homepage features pictures of various Italian cities where tea parties have lately been held)� 23 Far from keeping up with the rather self-complacent high-brow tone of its original proponents, the website of Tea Party Italia advertises the movement in a very straightforward, down-to-earth fashion through simple catchphrases such as “meno tasse più libertà” (less taxation, more freedom) and “meno stato più mercato” (less state, more free market), which seem to suggest a two-tiered movement led by a self-appointed political-financial intellectual elite with a cosmopolitan education and addressed to the capitalist “animal spirits” of a wider, less educated, and more locally rooted public� Especially interesting in this sense are the gadgets on sale on the website: 24 let me mention, by way of example, a choice of tasteful underpants for men and for women, stating “fotti lo stato” 20 See Riccardo Cavirani’s article “Che la rivoluzione ricominci,” posted online on June 30, 2010 on the occasion of the creation of the first Tea Party Italia group in Prato. 21 On the U�S� Tea Party’s relationship to and reclaiming of national history, see Jill Lepore’s recent book The Whites of Their Eyes. The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History � 22 For an analysis of the operation of state fantasy in the U�S� Tea Party movement see Pease 2010� 23 See www�teapartyitalia�it� 24 http: / / teapartyitalia�spreadshirt�it/ American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 113 (fuck the state) and “lo stato non mi avrà mai” (the state won’t have me), respectively - a heavily gender-inflected message in tune with the conservative gender politics of the political right in both Italy and the U�S�, but presumably not the kind of underwear that the “club of nerds” at Bocconi university would pick for themselves� In a translational perspective, however, what I find most interesting in this kind of merchandise is not just the way its symbols and slogans - ranging from crass sexual allusion to relatively sophisticated wordplay - cater to the potential tastes of a diverse and diversely educated audience of prospective supporters, but the different strategies they adopt in transposing their U�S� originals� A crucial element has to do with the choice of icons for the Italian Tea Party and with their color coding� Reinforcing the sense that support for the Tea Party movement need not involve an awareness of the historical origin of the expression (perhaps, in spite of their love for anti-tax rebellions, the movement leaders by and large prefer to gloss over revolutions), the Italian Tea Party has chosen a tea pot as its emblem - something that, as far as I have been able to ascertain, does not frequently appear in the emblems of U�S� Tea Parties, since of course the original “tea party” never involved a tea pot� The pot in question (itself a curiously incongruous object in a country whose unifying trait, paraphrasing Mark Twain, might probably be found in a widespread devotion to coffee) is blue on a white background with “meno tasse più libertà” inscribed in white across it, and has a very small red-whitegreen paper label hanging on the string of a tea bag emerging from under the pot cover. This label is the only trace of the colors of the Italian flag in an iconography that is otherwise entirely pervaded by the U�S� red, white, and blue� Not quite the old glory blue, though: the blue that appears everywhere in the Italian Tea Party iconography is a lighter shade - to be precise, it is the exact shade of blue that has characterized every one of Berlusconi’s parties’ emblems - a choice that creates a seamless, subliminal continuity not just between the Italian and the American Tea Party, but also between the Tea Party and Berlusconi’s party, and between both and an indefinite but powerful set of values and traditions embodied by the stars and stripes� An examination of the individual gadgets available for sale reinforces the impression of a translational strategy at work, which alternately suggests overt borrowing and deft adaptation� T-shirts are most revealing� While the inscription of a U�S� slogan such as “T�E�A� Party� Taxed Enough Already” may make sense to at least the English-speaking part of the Italian movement, what’s the point for a supporter of Tea Party Italia, I wonder, to be wearing a t-shirt announcing (in English) “Pro Gun, Pro Life, Pro Drilling”? The pro-life part certainly has a flourishing tradition in the Vatican-inspired Catholic fundamentalism of many Italian parties, but guns and drilling have never been prominent issues in Italian politics, and I suspect that many potential buyers of such shirts have no idea what debates these signifiers refer to� By selling this kind of merchandise, the Tea Party Italia is quite literally transposing Italy into the United States� We are all American: by inviting its supporters to embrace fights that are highly context-specific, Tea Party Italia 114 d onatella i zzo in fact creates a sense of belonging to a transnational resistance against state oppression and leftist agendas� Prominent among the latter is, of course, the issue of race, which Tea Party Italia does not address explicitly, but which is foregrounded in the programs of other similar groups� 4 Moving West If, as I am suggesting, local establishments may be using the U�S�-related cultural imaginary as an effective marketing device to promote their own agendas, this is nowhere more evident, to my mind, than in the blatantly mystified use of American icons in the political propaganda of the Lega Nord, or Northern League� The Northern League is a political party which in U�S� terms might be understood as something in-between the Tea Party Movement and the Redneck Manifesto: originally based in the rural areas of northern Italy as a populist movement, it rapidly expanded its influence over the whole North of the country - the wealthiest and most industrialized region in Italy - to the point of becoming the area’s leading political group� Now it is a major party nationwide, by far the most powerful in northern local administrations and rapidly expanding in other areas, and one of the mainstays of the present center-right national government� The party’s platform is based on a mixture of localism; conservative populism, anti-elitism, and anti-intellectualism; fervent anti-statist sentiments, ranging from requests for fiscal federalism to calls for secession; a gender politics based on “phallus worship” and “Mama Grizzlies”; 25 and last but far from least, a xenophobic, sometimes overtly racist attitude to immigrants and immigration� The whole unsavory mixture is kept together by a set of invented traditions - such as the notion of a “Padanian” identity stemming from fantasized Celtic origins� Given the militantly localist position of the Northern League, the degree of its self-styled Americanism is perhaps surprising� Among the many Cowboy Festivals and Cowboy Nights advertised throughout Lombardy - events that might be taken to refer to icons of masculinity rather than icons of Americanness - let me choose a particularly telling example, a hit by “Il Bepi,” 26 a local singer from Bergamo, a rich Lombard city and Northern League stronghold� The song, whose catchy tune is immediately recognizable as typical Ameri- 25 The phallus worship is quite literal: one of the earliest and most widely known (and parodied) mottos from a political speech by the Northern League leader Umberto Bossi, summarizing the party’s rising political power and uncompromising intentions, is “la Lega Nord ce l’ha duro,” “the Northern League is hard/ has a hard-on�” 26 It should be noted here that “Il Bepi” (a local diminutive of Giuseppe comparable to Joe) started as a satirical persona embodying a soccer fan from Bergamo in a local radio show, and developed through a number of songs and performances in Bergamo dialect into an enormously popular local character, especially when the return to dialect as the official language of the area became a rallying cry for the Northern League. Bepi, whose real name is Tiziano Incani, is now a regular star of local League festivals, and his song “Kentucky” is a hit� For more information see http: / / www�bepiberghem� com/ wikibepi�html� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 115 can country music, is sung in the dialect of the Bergamo area, almost incomprehensible to outsiders, the return to dialect as the only legitimate language being one of the political claims of the Lega� Interestingly, it features no standard Italian words, but is interspersed with several English expressions, including the whole final stanza. I will provide the original text followed by my English translation, using italics for the words that are in English in the text: Ho lagàt la mè cà zo n’del Kentucky E ma so trasferìt sota Clüsù E ‘nvece di nisüline a maie i cachi E ‘nvece di serpencc a go i bisù A ghìe ü pick-up enorme piè de polver Che ‘nvece i ma dacc ön Ape rot A fa la cùa ai Fiurine coma ü màrter Oter che la fa eta on the road Ma mè sto bè po a chè Semper inàcc e ‘ndrè E ‘nvece de des miglia Rìe fo al bar a pè Ma mè sto bè po a là E mpo’ per ol parlà A mè i ma ciàma amò l’Americà Ardàe ol basket in dol Kentucky E che al ma toca ardà zügà a balù In Las Vegas very Lucky In Alsöre cülatù Purtàe ol capèl de cow boy stèle e stese E chè l bretì Bob Marley col canù Andà a vensì i rodeo l’ìa ‘l me èse Che ‘nvece ‘ndo söl Dalmen col furgù Ma me�� I left my home Kentucky I left my home far away There Elvis Presley here Don Backy Pessi Cola and casonsèi� I left my home down in Kentucky / and I moved under Clusone/ Instead of peanuts I eat kaki/ instead of snakes I have watersnakes�/ I used to have a huge dusty pickup / and here all I got is a broken Ape van/ held up in the traffic like a martyr to get to the Fiorine hills/ no way like a life on the road �/ But I like it here too, always back and forth,/ and instead of driving ten miles I can walk to the bar,/ But I liked it there too, and maybe because of my accent/ they still call me “the American�”/ I used to watch basket on tv in Kentucky / and all I have here is soccer/ in Las Vegas they called me very lucky / in Valzurio they call me “culattone” [Lombard dialect slur for gay]�/ I would wear a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat/ but here I wear a Bob Marley cap with a joint/ My hobby was winning rodeos / Now I go looking for hookers on the Dalmine road in my van�/ But I like it here too, …/ I 116 d onatella i zzo left my home Kentucky/ I left my home far away / There Elvis Presley here Don Backy [the American-sounding pseudonym of an Italian singer who enjoyed some celebrity in the 1960s] / Pepsi Cola and casonsèi [a typical Bergamo pasta dish]� Enormously popular throughout Lombardy, this song has been repeatedly posted on youtube accompanied by several videos, including one that seems tailor-made for my argument: a home-made cartoon made by a fan, illustrating the song through a juxtaposition of alternate images from the Bergamo valleys and from a jumble of American landscapes, on whose background a cartoon version of Bepi performs antics, wearing an assortment of cowboy outfits. 27 Evoking a playful nostalgia for a never-never land of American western stereotypes, and presenting its fantasized Kentucky side by side with a number of places, customs and objects from the Bergamo area that are simultaneously reviled and reclaimed in the comparison, this song plays ironically on the traditional Italian emigration song, subverting its nostalgic stereotypes of a home left behind� By paradoxically designating Kentucky as the “home” of an emphatically regional character singing in local dialect, the song is claiming an American identity that is seen not as conflicting, but as pacifically congruent with the local one. What the song achieves is to effectively bracket the Italian identity and the allegiance to Italy as a nationstate that the Northern League supporters militantly reject, by projecting the Bergamo region directly on a wider transnational stage represented by the United States, and specifically, by a version of the United States that itself foregrounds the region rather than the nation and the local rather than the global dimension - or rather, a version that by reducing the global to a local dimension, underscores the local as the universal� Such a use of American cultural icons, promoting an overlapping between the Lombard valleys and a generic “country-western” mythology where Kentucky and Monument Valley merge in a single, undifferentiated, dehistoricized image of “America,” seems aimed at lending a kind of cultural viability to the whole fantasy of Padania by drawing on a stereotypical notion of the American West� By being projected onto an established western mythology, the invented ethnic identity of the Padanians acquires a sort of fake cultural depth, and Padania is ennobled as its own myth, a place of folksy ways, rugged individualism, and unimpeded economic expansion� This kind of fantasized Americanization, which the Padanian version of country music shows in its more harmless aspect, displays a more troubling potential when it evokes the American West as a place where management of conflict is untrammeled by the political refinements and legal subtleties of a far-away federal government� This is the implication conveyed by the widespread metaphorical use of the word “sceriffo” - Italian for sheriff - to designate those Northern League village and town mayors who take extreme, openly racist and frequently unconstitutional administrative measures against immigrants, especially those from Africa and Muslim-majority countries, regardless of their documented or undocumented status� Let me 27 Il Bepi, “Kentucky,” http: / / www�youtube�com/ watch? v=CRgRqZtH7BY� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 117 note that the sheriff is a kind of law enforcement officer that does not exist in the Italian police administration, and that the use of this term has nothing to do with county-level law enforcement agencies in the contemporary United States: in the Italian context, the notion evokes Western movies, carrying implications of summary justice and vigilantism, and depicting the latter as a desirable alternative to the lengthy process of ordinary law, perceived as an inadequate defense for the community� The notion of “defense” is key here: Northern League voters (among whom are many working-class people, as well as local entrepreneurs and owners of small businesses) share a sense of being threatened by economic globalization, which finds its ideal scapegoat in immigrants, triggering all sorts of xenophobic attitudes� A striking exhibit in this sense is the image that follows: The caption under this stereotypical portrayal of a noble, thoughtful, and impressive Native American chief reads: “They suffered immigration� Now they live on reservations� Think about it! ” Created by the Northern League for the Italian political elections of 2008, 28 this poster mobilizes the Ameri- 28 The poster was originally created by the Lega Ticinese in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, with no particular success, and borrowed by the Italian Northern League as suggested by its leader Umberto Bossi� 118 d onatella i zzo can West imaginary in a quite different, but in fact complementary key� No longer represented in terms of the close-knit and independent community of pioneers, northern electors are now asked to identify themselves with the losing side of history, the vanishing Americans threatened with extinction, dispossessed and confined within what was once their own land. Capitalizing on the anxieties caused by the sweep of economic globalization and its attendant migratory flows, the poster evokes the continental expansion of the United States and the genocide of Native Americans as a cautionary tale about the apocalyptic outcome of unchecked immigration� It matters little, of course, that in the Lombardy version of the story, economic, demographic, and technological considerations are all in favor of the natives, since the allegedly besieged community in fact comprises the overwhelming majority (90%) of the population; 29 moreover, it is the ethnic group that occupies virtually all upper positions in the financial, professional and entrepreneurial domains in a region which holds about one third (29.74%) of the overall wealth of the whole of Italy, but less than one sixth of the population� This poster, for all its counterfactual preposterousness, has been the most successful ever of the Northern League (with 200,000 copies ordered within a few days), and one of the most effective and widely recognized icons of recent electoral campaigns in Italy� 30 What it reveals is, of course, ideological dishonesty and historical ignorance, or rather, the totally dehistoricized and politically expedient fashion in which Northern League voters can be made to occupy interchangeably both opposite positions in a Cowboy and Indian drama (with the added ironical twist of an all-white, overtly racist movement donning the mantle of the Indian overwhelmed by the white man)� I would not only like to emphasize the bad faith underlying this use of the Indian, but the further twist presented by its appropriation of a former leftist icon to reactionary ends� Ever since the 1960s, support of Native American movements in Italy has belonged to a leftist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist political and cultural agenda, climaxing in the Indiani Metropolitani movement of 1977, when New Left students adopted the mask of the Indians to express their alienation both from capitalist bourgeois society and from traditional leftist political organizations� 31 Interestingly, both the leader and founder of the Northern League Umberto Bossi and his friend and party comrade (as well as present minister of the interior) Roberto Maroni were militants in far-left organizations in the 1970s; thus, when launching the Indian as a symbol of their anti-immigration campaign, they must have been perfectly aware of the associations it carried� The American Indian icon, like many other images originating from the United States, is here used as a powerful instrument 29 Immigrants in Italy constitute about 6% of the overall population, with peaks of 10% in the cradle of the Northern League, Lombardy� 30 The success of the poster is confirmed by its explicit quotation in different campaigns such as Filippo Penati’s when he ran for mayor in Milan, or struggles over the airports of Milan and Bergamo� 31 On the appropriation of Indians by the Italian student movement in the 1970s, see Mariani� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 119 in the creation of a symbolically effective fantasy: a mystifying device, dissimulating a right-wing agenda under established associations with democratic and radical struggles both in Italy and in the United States� America thus operates as what might be called a political euphemism for sickening practices� I will mention another one by way of conclusion: the decision of the Northern League mayor of a small town near Brescia to launch an antiimmigrant campaign involving a door-to-door combing of the town by the local police in search of undocumented immigrants in their hiding places� The campaign was launched on October 25 th , 2009 and it was scheduled to last two months, ending on December 25 th � That is why the mayor and the city council had the happy idea of calling the operation by an English name, the name of an American evergreen with unambiguous connotations in the operation’s context: “White Christmas�” 32 32 For an analysis of and comment on this episode see Portelli� 120 d onatella i zzo Works Cited Anon� “I Tea Party all’italiana tra entusiasmo giovanile e amarcord della marcia antifisco del 1986.” Il Sole 24 Ore. 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