Giorgia Meloni vs. Woody Allen

While the world was debating whether Italy is right-wing hard as nougat, ultra-right, fascism or (oh, what a laugh!) center-right, I was trying to read Woody Allen's latest book.

It was difficult for me to concentrate, not so much because of the noise of columnists, talk show hosts and politicians, but because of physical discomfort as a result of trying to live in two incompatible dimensions of space-time: Woody Allen and Giorgia Meloni represent two worlds in collision , and whoever wants to live in one has to renounce the other.

You can't keep one eye on the jokes of the former and the other on the columns that analyze Meloni without suffering sweats, nausea and dizziness.

The book is titled, as a warning from the health authorities,

.

It pains me to admit that these stories are not worth much—except for one, the masterful

but even Allen's worst page has a trace of wisdom, a well-played wry note that caresses and leaves a smile.

It does not matter if it is sublime or only improvable: for those of us who have grown up with him, Woody Allen will always be our home.

His humor tastes like the mother's stews, the nights of youth, all that hodgepodge of intangibles and nostalgia that make up a homeland.

Read it while in Italy a politician triumphs that could have starred in one of his first comedies, like

, leaves an inconsolable feeling of loneliness, abandonment and defeat.

The Meloni that ride through the steppes of Europe may charge against immigrants and the bureaucratic ghosts of the Europeanist dream, but the world they are about to destroy (which they have already destroyed to a large extent) is that of Woody Allen.

The citizens of that world embrace the imperfect as the basic human condition, without aspiring to any form of perfection;

we face paradoxes with a bit of irony (and the occasional antipsychotic);

we believe in conversation as an end in itself, never expecting a conclusion, and we have no more certainty than Alvy Singer at the beginning of

: "Life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering and unhappiness, and it ends very soon."

For Meloni and his barbarian friends (also in the populist left wing, in that they are not distinguished), we are pure decadence, the remains of an abject way of life that has raised the ruins of the present.

We are, according to an old metaphor that irritated Susan Sontag, the Western disease that her carnivorous surgery comes to remove.

I hope they at least use anesthesia.

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