The Provincial Parade for Obama

Barack Obama’s visit to Milan was a shameful provincial parade, which Milan did not deserve. Matteo Renzi defined it as the first act of return to the world political scene of the personality that represents the point of reference for Democrats on a global level. But the reconfirmed secretary of Italy’s Democratic Party is provincial. And he did not realize that the homage to the former president of the United States did not assume any political meaning of global reach. (Always removing one’s tie in the name of Obama’s politically correct fashion sense is not the liturgy of an innovative ideology.) But it was a singular demonstration of pedestrian provincialism, done not in adherence to a cultural vision meant to mark the future of the planet, but in homage to the rites and the fashions imposed by the society of image and spectacle.

Barack as a rock star? The comparison holds, also because the banalities on climate and food pronounced by the former president of the United States were all in all similar to the banalities on the same subjects repeated by more or less politically active singers. However, that is with the added caveat that none of the provincial homage payers, first among them Renzi, got it into his head to highlight how the American guest does not have successful songs in his past but years of failing political action, not only on a domestic level for the U.S., but especially on the level of the Mediterranean basin, with our country at the center of all the events that have been consuming it for centuries.

Renzi, who, when he sees Obama, seems like Alberto Sordi in “The American in Rome,” has every right to dress like his role model. But it becomes concerning when he tries to turn him into an Allah and be his Italian and European prophet, because Obama has not just been one of the worst U.S. presidents – we could perhaps compare him to poor Jimmy Carter – but is also not, under any circumstance, the indisputable leader of an entirely nonexistent Democratic International. That is, obviously, as long as the politically correct culture imposed by the privileged American and European classes does not get confused by the provincialists as a kind of reformed and updated version of the Third International.