He was a thirty-year-old Maranza / with a face you’d want to slap and the same old moustache, just to turn a famous song on its head. It had seemed like a revolution, as it always does, but instead it was yet another caricature of the new leader of the revolution. A disappointment. Disappointment on X for the well-known former editorial director, a very presentable left-winger: ‘The pied piper of the youngsters has been caught’. He may not be the terrorist the prosecutors claim him to be (after all, this is largely a right-wing obsession: for Panorama he is “the leader and ideologue of the Maranza”), but the outcome remains the same. So the underage protesters “can stay at home: someone will come round to collect their documents”. They’d hoped he’d be a spark, but instead he was a pied piper. Until next time, comrades. Over the course of a single weekend, Il Fatto shifted from a battle-cry headline, “D-Day of the Riots”, to “The youngsters disappoint those who dreamt of war”. Disappoint? Perhaps they disappoint Giannini’s peers, who had argued for “the Saturday of the unknown generation”.
Setting aside Maurizio Acerbo, the Hamas ‘psalmist’ who, drawing on the imagery of Lenin’s mummy, says: ‘Slam the monster onto the front page’, and Avs, ‘we are all Youssef Siher’, and those who write ‘the researcher turned into the culprit of it all’, the intervention was made just as the debate was gaining momentum. However, there is also the restrained disappointment of Concita De Gregorio, who had hoped for something more from the ‘best of the young generation’ – not violence, of course, but ‘I fear that imprisoning minors won’t be enough. They don’t have much to lose; they’ve already lost it all’.
There is a whole generation – or rather, two generations by now – constantly waiting for that new spark, for new young people ready to shout ‘Ce n’est qu’un début’. And every time, disappointment. Again in La Repubblica, relegated to the culture section, Francesco Merlo made a bitterly amusing comment on the Diogenes of revolutions that can never be found: “We find and lose ‘the young person’ who grows ever younger and makes us forget the previous young people we had chosen to represent ‘the young’”. He draws up a brief, plausible list of them. Merlo jokes about it: “It’s high time we admitted that young people don’t exist; they’re a marketing invention.” But in reality, no – there are also those who have taken it all seriously, who always take every supposed uprising on the horizon seriously. And for many on the left, it would even be better if there were a bit of violence; you never forget your old DNA.
In an editorial entitled ‘The summer season: scuffles, looting, barricades and fires’, editor Andrea Fabozzi had downplayed the events in France as mere ‘scuffles’ (the town hall in Limonge was burnt down, but it was just a scuffle). In *Rivista Studio*, which began as a niche publication for reformist intellectuals, a leading *Il Manifesto* columnist such as Bruno Montesano quipped: “It would seem that the severity of the looting and clashes over the weekend is slightly less than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and slightly greater than that of 11 September”. Nothing has happened, neither here nor in France. But “repression to halt the decline is therefore the solution sought by the right and the conservatives masquerading as liberals”.
There is a left that is genuinely lamenting yet another revolution that has been postponed yet again. After all, what are a few smashed shop windows and a few burnt-out rubbish bins, really? There is always a Marco Grimaldi who, speaking of the three minors arrested in Turin with Molotov cocktails, manages to say ‘they didn’t want to hurt anyone’, with an obvious sigh of nostalgia. After the legendary ’68, our grandparents waited for the Pantera, then the Onda Anomala, then the social forums and Porto Alegre; then, in an increasingly insubstantial abyss of the grotesque, there were those who pinned their hopes on the Sardines and then on Greta’s tearful Friday protesters: ‘They’ve stolen our future’ – a cause that has now lost some of its appeal, much like the Green Deal. Now it seemed to be the right moment: an uprising of teenagers with no one even directing them. And it’s likely they’ll be back; but for the moment, it felt as though we’d found the new Che Guevara, when in fact it was just a thirty-year-old from Maranza, with a face that looked like it needed a slap and the same old moustache.
