I hope US forum members will be able to celebrate this 4th of July.
As I am in Italy, an article from journalist Michele Serra caught my eye. I enjoy reading his witty opinion pieces.
The translation is courtesy of ChatGPT, source in Italian here behind a paywall.
Golden Towers and Nothing Inside
by Michele SerraHe is openly using his public office to enrich himself excessively, in the most degrading tradition of politics. He has blatantly favored his family clan. He is arrogant, uncultured, predatory toward women, and vindictive toward men who refuse to submit to him. In foreign policy, the only discernible criterion is siding with the strong and crushing the weak. He speaks a basic form of American English, with a very limited vocabulary. He despises culture because he cannot grasp its purpose. For his government, he has chosen cartoonish figures from the most vulgar fringes of the right wing—almost all of them unqualified for their roles.
Repression excites him: he named the new migrant detention center “Alligator Alcatraz” and, with a villainous B-movie sneer, claims that anyone who tries to escape will be devoured by alligators. His latest money-making gadget is a perfume sold with a golden statuette of himself—an object so gaudy that even Vanna Marchi would have trouble selling it. [Vanna Marchi: Italian telemarketer star who made a fortune selling tacky items and was later jailed for fraud]
One begins to wonder whether Donald Trump is truly the man of Providence: in the sense that he came into the world to embody the terminal phase of capitalism and proclaim its end. Golden towers, and nothing inside. Nothing left to emerge from money—except more money. Nothing left to sustain politics—except the will to preserve a shrinking caste of the super-rich. It’s difficult even to call this an expression of the “right”—it’s more like the embodiment of collapse.
Well-intentioned people, and especially the young, must prepare for what comes next without being too frightened by this stench of death.
