Our America: My America
- By A. Minerva
You may say that America, perhaps, is not mine. I have a right to be here, for now. But it’s not mine. I get to pay taxes without representation, because I am a scholar, not a citizen. Will I still be welcome here a year from now? Will I still be able to get a job during these next four years? As a woman, will I still be able to make decisions about my own body? Will my friends of color ever feel safe here?
Five days after the latest elections, I am still in shock, haunted by the uncanny feeling that “I have lived through this already.”
I was born in Italy and I grew up in the shameful era of Berlusconi: “The Knight.” I was fifteen when he first showed his face on one of his TV channels, mumbling about “entering the field.” That “field” was the Italian political scene. Everyone laughed. My schoolmates and I, on our long walks to school, laughed. What was left of the political class after the scandals of “Mani Pulite” laughed. I had the impression that even my horses and my terriers laughed. He was never going to make it. No political experience. Sketchy business history. A TV buffoon with a penchant for pretty, young women. He also had a few trials in course and evidently was running just to gain the immunity from prosecution that Italy grants its politicians. He became Prime Minister just three months later. The political class continued to laugh, thinking he was not going to last. I started being very perplexed. Some people began to admit that they’d voted for him. . .
Since then, Berlusconi, the creator of the first commercial TV empire, the owner of three TV channels, of newspapers, and publishing companies, was elected Prime Minister nine times. A post-war record. He was a member of the House of Deputies for nineteen years, and he didn’t just change the course of Italian politics: he changed its methods—the level of the political debate—very profoundly. Italy hadn’t recovered from its Fascist history yet, and I think is this is the major reason why we gave the reins to a man untrained in politics, with authoritarian leanings and a keen interest in pursuing under-age women, as well as his own interests.
Through the control of the majority of both the private and the public TV channels, Berlusconi also changed Italian culture—its ability to imagine both itself and the world—with long-term effects that I fear will remain unchanged. Women are just bodies that can be used as men please; sex can get you money and a job, maybe even in the Parliament (our Minister for Equal Opportunity was a calendar starlet who had a liaison with The Knight); parents started advising their daughters on “proper” uses for their bodies (to make money). The TV landscape became at the same time horrific and normalized: women wearing almost nothing would serve a man, they would dance sexily with each other, around some man, at any time of the day, including the revered “prime time,” when Italian families sit at dinner with their children, and sometimes with the grandparents too.
The world started laughing at us. Italy, once synonymous with the “Renaissance” and “Dante,” was now identified with the curious anthropological practice of celebration referred to as “bunga-bunga.” Racism and racial slurs were everyday bread for the House and the Senate—so just imagine the streets. And this “successful businessman” also let the ship sink, bringing Italy’s economy and international power to its lowest postwar level. I am part of the huge wave of immigration that ensued, different from the previous boatload because they called us “brains”: young people with college and graduate degrees, a public good, free of cost in Italy, from which other countries were now benefiting. My entire cohort from college landed important jobs. Abroad.
So I ended up in your America. With Bush, not exactly a great upgrade, but then also Obama. Okay, not perfect, but still, a few steps forward and, wow, the first African American President in the Country Founded on Genocide and Slavery.
In the thirties, we had already had Mussolini for a decade, and you guys started looking up to us, in search for your own charismatic leader. Ah, you don’t believe me? Watch the Columbia 1933 celebratory documentary called Mussolini Speaks. Read the documents from your Congress, for example, when, not long after the scare of the ’29 market crash, Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania claimed: “If a country ever needed a Mussolini, we need one now” (75 Cong. Rec. 9644, 1932). Mussolini invented fascism, and you wanted to copy it. Though that time you were smarter, and you elected FDR.
My friends and I fought Berlusconi, in Italy and also from the countries where we ended up. We organized demonstrations, gathered funds, drew banners, printed tons of fliers, and we tried to educate our fellow Italians as well as people from everywhere about our political situation. About the tricks he was pulling, “reforming” the law so it could suit his interests and allow him to avoid imprisonment. You probably know how it ended.
It did not end: the current PM (supposedly a “leftist,” whatever that is supposed to mean nowadays) speaks the same language as Berlusconi (and the Italian TV still exploits intolerably the bodies of women; implausible plastic surgeries continue to be ubiquitous); he’s calling for labor and constitutional reforms that I do not recognize as part of our leftist tradition. You may think we were just screeching. But look at the rise of the right in Europe. In the East! It is happening again.
Trump. Folks: you have elected Trump. Trump will be your president. My president. The president of Our America. Even if Trump will end up impeached (he does not really want to do this job, right? he won, so he can go home now), we will still have Pence, and the House and the Senate controlled by Republicans.
Americans—your fellow humans in India, in the Philippines, in Turkey, in Italy have been there, or are there right now. You’ve been duped. Seriously, profoundly duped. Remember the housing bubble, the internet bubble? Did you lose all your retirement funds? Well, this is going to be much worse. Just take a look at Trump’s tax plan (it will take you about 70 seconds, just like his attention span). And who knows which plan he is going to actually implement. If you are a millionaire, good for you, you will save over 300 grand on average every year of the Trump’s administration. If you are not a millionaire, bad times are awaiting. And if you are a woman, or if you are not white, or if you have a brain and a conscience. . . I know, you’re hurting already. I am hurting, for myself and for you.
Are you ready to fight?
Read more voices on #OurAmerica here.
