The Great Desperation
By ROGER COHEN, NYT
LONDON — Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, famously dismissed talk of crisis in Italy, noting that restaurants were full and seats on planes hard to find. He also suggested that one reason to invest in Italy “is that we have beautiful secretaries.” In short, he was an unserious man for serious times. Yet he is the longest-serving postwar Italian leader and headed the government for a couple of years after the euro came under grave threat.
This is a puzzle, and no less so now that Berlusconi has been convicted of tax fraud, banned from public office for two years, and handed a one-year sentence he wants to serve by doing community service, perhaps returning to his former life as a crooner.
Italians are not frivolous people; there are few more serious or industrious places than Turin and Milan. Was Berlusconi — a billionaire at a time when the super-rich stamp their gilded existences on the world’s agenda — emblematic of the zeitgeist well beyond Italy? He was a performer for a time when European politicians in reality wield little power, an entertainer for a post-ideological age, an outsized figure for the bored and drugged-on-reality-shows masses, a sharp dresser for a world where image is everything.
There is something to all that. This has been a strange European crisis. You catch glimpses of desperation across the Continent but there is enough bread and a sufficient variety of circuses, it seems, to prevent an uprising. People want to be amused; technology caters to that. There is anger at the rich but also a strong undercurrent of fascination. The centers of European capitals drip with money, real-estate brokers and brands. There is a market, among the global super-rich, for the rule of law. Old Europe has that.
(More here.)
LONDON — Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, famously dismissed talk of crisis in Italy, noting that restaurants were full and seats on planes hard to find. He also suggested that one reason to invest in Italy “is that we have beautiful secretaries.” In short, he was an unserious man for serious times. Yet he is the longest-serving postwar Italian leader and headed the government for a couple of years after the euro came under grave threat.
This is a puzzle, and no less so now that Berlusconi has been convicted of tax fraud, banned from public office for two years, and handed a one-year sentence he wants to serve by doing community service, perhaps returning to his former life as a crooner.
Italians are not frivolous people; there are few more serious or industrious places than Turin and Milan. Was Berlusconi — a billionaire at a time when the super-rich stamp their gilded existences on the world’s agenda — emblematic of the zeitgeist well beyond Italy? He was a performer for a time when European politicians in reality wield little power, an entertainer for a post-ideological age, an outsized figure for the bored and drugged-on-reality-shows masses, a sharp dresser for a world where image is everything.
There is something to all that. This has been a strange European crisis. You catch glimpses of desperation across the Continent but there is enough bread and a sufficient variety of circuses, it seems, to prevent an uprising. People want to be amused; technology caters to that. There is anger at the rich but also a strong undercurrent of fascination. The centers of European capitals drip with money, real-estate brokers and brands. There is a market, among the global super-rich, for the rule of law. Old Europe has that.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home