On 8 September, in the realm of ‘Italian-style woke’, whilst we were still debating whether it existed

Born in the cotton wool of East Coast campuses, ‘woke’ is dying in Volturara Appula. It is buried by a long letter to La Repubblica from Conte, who is picking up on the latest American trend: ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’ have done some good things, but enough is enough – let’s get back to the economy. We tremble immediately: better ‘woke’ than the Superbonus. Better a string of asterisks than a ‘fight against inequality’ – which here means the levitation of the state, receipt lotteries, and armies of ‘navigators’. But the ‘change of orders, comrades’ is clear and peremptory. It is 8 September for ‘woke’: and just as in Tutti a casa, with Sordi failing to grasp the new orders properly, the confusion is immense. How, for instance, should one deal with Schlein, who was put there precisely on the euphoric wave of pronouns at the bottom of the email? How can this be explained to a grassroots base still grappling with misgendering?

Indeed, there are those who are jubilant (Renzi), those demanding explanations, and those asking for help, just as after the Bolognina turning point. Even on Radio 3, I heard bewildered listeners asking the presenter, “Could you please explain what “woke” means, in simple terms?”. And now who’s going to tell them that the catchphrase of the American debate is ‘Woke 1 was crazy’ – meaning there’s a Woke 2, perhaps even a 3, a whole saga where you have to catch up on the old seasons in a frenzied binge-watch of theories and methods? When in doubt, the bulk of the PD remains unfazed – ‘woke’? We’ve never been ‘wokists’ here. It is difficult to blame them, watching the videos of the ‘young Democrats’ – the vanguard, the PD of tomorrow – celebrating Fidel Castro’s centenary with tears in their eyes.

If only the problem here were ‘woke’: we’d swap places in a heartbeat. But it’s the usual Italian disconnect: the much-maligned ‘woke’ is on the wane whilst here we were still debating whether it even existed, as if in the mid-1950s Togliatti had declared ‘enough with rock ’n’ roll’ whilst we were in the midst of the Claudio Villa era and few people had even heard of Elvis. It had only just become a cult phenomenon; we’d finally learnt to pronounce it properly – no longer ‘uòke’ but ‘wok’, thanks to that phonetic coincidence with the Chinese wok used for noodles and vegetables, now a familiar sight even in ‘sovereignist’ kitchens – and yet it’s already a thing of the past.

Images flash by like in an old film: Myrta Merlino kneeling in the studio for George Floyd, Enrico Letta ordering the entire national football team to kneel, Laura Boldrini in the Chamber of Deputies saying “I can’t breathe because I’m a woman…”. Nothing, however, embodies the life cycle of Italian ‘woke’ culture better than the parable of the schwa (do you remember?): an American trend, militant euphoria, identity politics, Valditara’s circular. A full circle. The finest epitaph I read was on the wall of a toilet in the Faculty of Arts: ‘We lasted less than the schwa’. A love letter, I suppose. Written, however, by someone who’d already got the whole picture – straight to the point, well ahead of Conte’s verbose letter. Meanwhile, new scenarios are opening up: will we be able to go back to saying ‘faggot’, ‘nigger’, ‘fatso’? If a real stunner walks past, can we comment out loud, ‘look at that’, ‘blimey’, ‘wow’? Will I find pajata on the menu at the restaurant again? Because, judging by the comments circulating at the moment, the Italian version of ‘woke’ seems, above all, to be a matter of etiquette, good manners, and a system update of the old Political Correctness, originally imported in the form of Veltroni-style ‘do-goodism’. Then, as things have piled up, just about everything has ended up in the mix: the statues of Columbus being torn down and that of Montanelli merely daubed; ‘sensitivity readers’ threatening to rewrite Totò, the blackface performances on Tale e Quale Show, the Black Little Mermaid, the ‘drag’ Olympics in Paris. And so on and so forth, to the point where the entire spectrum of civil rights is now mistaken for ‘woke’ – so that, here in Italy, giving up on ‘woke’ seems like giving up on rights. Far less popular, by contrast, is the strictly academic interpretation, which is actually the crux of the matter: those Foucaults, Saids, Judith Butlers and other descendants of Marx, Adorno and Fanon who keep the departments in check with their barrage of critical theory, decolonisation of the gaze, and the fight against the evil little white Western man. But it’s understandable: in the country with the fewest university graduates in Europe, that sort of doctoral seminar stuff arrives even more muddled than when it first emerges. What use is it to us? Better to squabble over gender reassignment at the age of three, over the ‘intersectionality of struggles’ – which also applies to squatting, surrogacy and patriarchy. After all, three-quarters of this nonsense was already rife in the ‘faction-ridden’ left of our 1970s: nothing new, just a revival within a very bigoted, sex-phobic, puritanical framework – courtesy of old ladies in knitted jumpers who pride themselves on being anti-colonialists.

In the letter, Conte recounts how a ‘dear friend from Boston’, visiting Rome, spotted a bronze statuette on the shelf in his study – ‘a female nude with Boterian features’, he said – and, in a serious tone, admonished him: he shouldn’t keep it on display, as it is offensive to women. Conte was left ‘bewildered’. He hadn’t expected this “from a refined intellectual”. And he draws a solemn conclusion: “It was the first time I’d experienced the excesses of ‘woke’ first-hand”. This is Verdone at his very best. The Manuel Fantoni who has never left Trastevere but explains to Sergio Benvenuti that ‘America is a strange country, full of contradictions…’ – second-hand knowledge, trotted out with a serious and solemn expression. It has always been the ‘People’s Lawyer’s’ signature move. ‘Ocasio Conte Cortez’ could well be just the leader we need for the broad coalition.