Here is an interesting analysis of the Berlusconi scandal by someone who is not from the Western media...
Italy sees macho self in Berlusconi -
besides, right now, they have
no alternative to his leadership
by Rashmee Roshan Lall
THE TIMES OF INDIA
Jan 23, 2011
ROME - It says a great deal about Italy that even in this, the 150th year of the country's unification, Italians remain profoundly divided about whether Silvio Berlusconi stays or goes.
Berlusconi's image may be pock-marked by repeated eruptive bouts of scandal about his sex life and alleged proclivity for underdressed young women. He is politically weak, with just a tiny parliamentary majority and limited ability to implement any kind of legislative programme.
In December, rubbish piled up in and around Naples, a situation seen by many as a metaphor for the country's wasted state; parliament was adjourned for most of November and a cabinet meeting famously failed to set up a nuclear energy agency or appoint new members of the stock exchange watchdog, the Consob.
The parlous state of affairs led Emma Marcegaglia, president of Confindustria, the employers' association, to declare: "The country is paralysed, and the government is absent."
And yet Italians appear to see no reason to rise up as a man and seek the departure of a leader who must acutely embarrass a country with 3,000 years of history.
The Pope has weighed in – cautiously. On Friday, in his first apparent comment on the sex scandal engulfing the prime minister of this fervently Catholic country, Benedict XVI said public officials must offer a strong moral example and "society and public institutions must rediscover their soul, their moral and spiritual roots" .
It is being seen as a reference to a spreading stain across Italy's reputation. Caligula, the Roman emperor , may have been extravagant and sexually perverse but as one Italian opposition politician remarked, "compared with Berlusconi, Caligula was a prude". [An exaggeration by someone who has obviously not read enough history!]
Even so, Italian public opinion is still holding up. Fifty per cent of those interviewed in a recent Ipsos poll thought the scandal would not affect Berlusconi and could even boost his support in the event of an early election . Only a slight majority — 54 % — did not share the prime minister's view that he was being unfairly persecuted.
Much of the world might be entitled to ask: Is Italy immune to all sense of shame? No, but there are two reasons that Berlusconi continues in office and stands a good chance of re-election if polls are held earlier than the scheduled 2013.
The first is the state of Italian politics. The second is Italy's image of itself.
Politically, Berlusconi is boosted enormously by the TINA factor — there is no alternative (or there appears to be none) and the opposition seems disunited and directionless.
But more importantly, Berlusconi — even though his image is pitted by porn scandals — has in 17 years of public life always been viewed by supporters as a lovable rogue. The truth is most Italian men believe that Berlusconi has been doing what they would, given the chance.
At every turn, Berlusconi has shamelessly played to the gallery, stoking Italians' famous sense of inherent machismo. He has said it is "better to love women than to be gay".
He has mocked the suggestion he employed a ring of prostitutes and showgirls for orgies citing physical limitations: "I'd be better than Superman if I'd had orgies with 24 girls."
And in a quote with which many Italian men would fundamentally agree, he has denied consorting with prostitutes because "I have never paid a woman...I have never understood what satisfaction there is if the pleasure of conquest is absent."
Some would say that Berlusconi retains such a large bedrock of support because he illustrates and amplifies Italy's idea of itself as a unique culture even in this homogenized and politically correct 21st century.
As Mark Twain put it, the creator made Italy from designs by Michaelangelo. In Italy, men still treat women with gallantry and value machismo. A paternalistic society, men are still expected to be masculine and women to look good.
Repeated surveys have shown that a typical Italian woman dedicates five hours a day to the house, while men just one. A scant 5% of senior managerial positions are held by women. The appointment , three years ago, of Emma Marcegaglia to the helm of Confindustria, was something of a rarity in a country with one of the lowest rates of female employment in the European Union.
But the real point about Berlusconi and his love life is that it may all be a bit of a sham. The prime minister may have led an unregulated life — and thrown lots of bacchanalian "bunga bunga" parties — but he is 74.
A 389-page prosecutors' report of wire-tapped conversations between Berlusconi's babes appear to show him as a "cash machine for which you need no PIN" , an "old fool" and what one Italian newspaper headlined as the "tragedy of a ridiculous man."
This too, funnily enough, illustrates the real state of Italy's libido. Despite everything , Italy has the lowest birthrate in Europe and faces the economic implications of an ageing population. But like its prime minister, it seems desperate to maintain an image of la dolce vita, eternal youth and boundless virility.
It is, of course, very easy to chastise and see nothing good in rogues like Berlusconi, whio seems to enjoy being a rogue, but here is an editorial by Giuliano Ferrara who cuts Berlusconi some slack...
BERLUSCONI AND THE POPE
The Cavaliere does not owe anyone an act of contrition.
Not even the Pope, who has not asked it of him, as
claimed by the bards of a fake moralistic crusade.
But he should seek to explain himself to the public
simply and avoid further occasions of censure
Editorial
by GIULIANO FERRARA
January 23, 2011
Berlusconi does not owe himself, his friends or enemies – and not even Cardiinal Bertone or the Pope – an act of contrition. As Bossi said with his common sense, this is a man who has already been so barbarously besieged and hounded – in unprecedented ways that have nothing to do with the free functioning of the organs of legal order or of checks and balances in a modern civilian government.
Nor is there any right on the part of pseudo-libertine secularists - who have not only preached the legitimate separation of Church and State but even a grotesque scission between the rational ethos of a Christian culture and the criteria for public and private life in our time – to now demand a moralizing crusade by the Vatican, or behave as though they were the spiritual directors of the Prime Minister by order of the Italian bishops!
The Pope, who is a great intellectual and a a natural father by temperament - he is severe but understanding – explained Thursday quite eloquently that public institutions should rediscpver their soul, i.e., an ethos.
The Church is not asking to wipe out the new dimension of subjectivity which is so strongly present in the modern mentality and rooted in the Christian idea, borne out by the theological thinking of Vatican II, of freedom of conscience.
There has been progress, the Pope noted, in better protection for the individual private sphere which in the past was considered subordinate to a harsher institutional morality.
This is the literal sense of his words, which was read hastily and exploitatively as a banal censure of the human and public behavior of the Prime Minister.
The Pope's words have been read almost as though they were his direct response to the partisan demands directed at the Church by the preachers of 'decency' - the same who have always been his adversaries, opposed to him and his fight against the ethical relativism and moral indifference to the great questions of life and existence, exhibited by the ruling classes.
But the Pope also added that if modern society does not recognize an objective base for a personal and communitarian ethos - a base which, for the Pope, is God's love for man, and for the theologian-philosopher Ratzinger consists in the intelligent use of human reason - then modern man can only drift to insincerity and sorrow.
We miserable Berlusconians, liberals as well as rebels, who are of the Ratzinger persuasion, infamously and resoundingly lost in a mad electoral contest the battle to keep together the element of human freedom and the responsibility that goes with it, in the new political world that emerged from the crisis of the Republic in the 1990s.
Love, sex, matrimony, family and life – categories to be considered without pharisaical hypocrisy, but with a true sentiment of good humor and moral joy – were for us standards to fly as a sign of our attidude even in politics, but were essentially rejected at the polls and considered as an anachronistic crusade.
Rejected by those hypocrites who now presume to give the Prime Minister a lesson through judicial doggedness and inquisitorial siege, and to sue him for his weaknesses before every possible tribunal, including the moral tribunal of the Holy See (which has become the object of surreal calls for 'intervention' from whining holier-than-thou Catholics and hyper-secularists with Don Juan tendencies themselves).
In the name of this position – simplistic and open to criticism, but seriously argued and lived for years by its advocates without arrogance – we think that Berlusconi should explain himself in a secular confession of his human weaknesses, relating his personal character – which is famously kind and positive, happy and benevolent – to his own way of being Christian, which is simple even in its disorder; and to do so in direct words, different from the soap-opera scenario of endless lawsuits and lawyers to which circumstances and his lifestyle have constrained him.
In short, Berlusconi would do well to find the right words to express not just his anger against those who are besieging him and their often fanatic and intractable motivations, but also the condition of very human disquiet and suffering that he now lives, his awareness that he has passed certain limits in the wake of a failed marriage, his difficult battle against the temptations inherent in having his colossal wealth, and having to be encumbered with the wide-open public scrutiny of someone who is really very private by nature and by rearing.
In history, many statesmen, caught in personal episodes of crookery and/or surly and unpretty behavior, have been able to create around them an atmosphere of sincerity that invites understanding when they make apologies to the community in which they live.
I am not calling for a confessional act, as such, from the Prime Minister, but for some manifestation of personal modesty, of civic consciousness, of an intelligent acknowledgment of reality.
There are those calls to police stations that should not be made; excesses of ostentation and trituals of pleasure that could be avoided; his network of casual easygoing relationships that he should not pursue in his own homes, and that should not affect his personal life, his friends and his work.
There is no contradiction between rejecting uncivil legal procedures and a statement of truth and personal responsibility for those parts of his life that have been publicly disclosed in the indecent voyeuristic mush fed by the legal system and the media.
On the contrary, there is consistency. The better Berlusconi is someone who, despite the disproportion and asymmetry of his relationship to himself and to others, is able to recognize, with subtle self-irony and beyond the humility which he does not lack, even those vaguely crazy traits of his own character.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/01/2011 01:37]