"Unfortunate people who need heroes”, wrote Brecht, because that people need to be saved. The quotation (often erroneously reported) is pronounced by Galileo, in "Life of Galileo", composed between 1938 and '39. But it is probable that the German playwright was also referring to wars, with that phrase, to the exceptional and unique drama of his time (the worst years of the worst century in history), to that horror that Brecht saw and experienced with his own eyes , in the wandering years of his exile.
And yet it's good again today, that phrase, "unfortunate people who need heroes", in modern and (relatively) pacified Italy that clings furiously to its tiny papier-mâché heroes, on television and in newspapers and in the incessant tam-tam of the network (perhaps the only true parent of myths of our time), in the hope of not sinking.
So today a hero is born out of nowhere, simply for doing his duty. Simone Farina, probably mediocre footballer, honest (stricto sensu) Gubbio reserve, rose to the headlines, as they say, for turning down a significant amount of money to sell a lot and, especially, for breaking down the wall of silence, in a world, that of sport, in which this wall should not have any citizenship (but where should it have it?), but in which instead, in its usual creeping way, it seems to have become a rule of behaviour.
From then on, the escalation: the Panorama petition in his name, the call-up to the national team, the invitation to the Ballon d'Or ceremony, the Fair Play purple card, the classic moralizing article by Gianni Mura, the groups on Facebook , the headlines of the newspapers (“Simone Farina golden ball of morality” and so on) and then that word, hero, or even good hero (as if there were bad heroes), affixed to his image like the name on the shirt, a superhuman epigraph, as if the thin band with which he holds up his long, very blond hair, above his normal boyish face normal that basically always seems to be wondering "What am I doing here?", if it were nothing more than a halo.
And yet Simone Farina has already been partially forgotten (because as easily as heroes are born, in this meat grinder, so they die, or are eclipsed), supplanted by a new and fresher hero, the commander of the port authority of Livorno Gregorio De Falco.
Perhaps because his confident and authoritative voice, like an angry father reproaching his son, has entered the homes of all of us, enriching our mythopoeia of the unforgettable (for a month or so) "go aboard, damn it" addressed to Schettino, with which after all, the good De Falco managed to speak to a very intimate and secretive part of us Italians (in addition to the disgust for Schettino himself, the disgust for Schettino in me, paraphrasing Gaber, the legitimate, but not asked question: "I 'would I have done, in his place?”). De Falco has become a legend because he scolded us all, because he called us to order, because all of us, in front of his "get on board, fuck!", in our enclosure, we timidly said yes, with head.
If you type the word "hero" on Google at least 4 results, on the first page alone, are about him. Sui social networks posts and tweets of appreciation are wasted, as are groups on Facebook (ranging from the sober "Gregorio de Falco", who has over 20.000 likers, to the elegiac "Captain Gregorio De Falco. Italian pride"), while his phone call with Schettino, properly remixed, it became a successful hit on youtube.
And so it becomes natural, at this point, to wonder about the state of health of a people so in need of being saved, an "unfortunate" in search of heroes, in a nation in which a dominant order based on imperfection has always (or in any case too long) ended up systematically rewarding pettiness, making every form of "goodness" (even the most banal one, the very respectable "doing one's job well" ) something extraordinarily exceptional. Something heroic.
