In Bertolt Brecht's comedy, 'Life of Galileo', a student of the great scientist, Andrea, tells him: «Unhappy is that country that does not generate heroes». “No”, replies Galileo, “Unhappy is that country that needs heroes”. Or, if you want to paraphrase the famous joke, as usually happens, "blessed is that country that doesn't need heroes".
Those who don't live in Italy never cease to be amazed, in their visits to the peninsula, by the long life of an Italian institution: the talk show on political topics and of various humanity. Perhaps we are so deafened by the proliferation of these noisy diatribes (accompanied, as Aldo Grasso reminded us in a beautiful comment in the Corriere della Sera of 15 September, with obedient claques), that we consider this way of discussing normal. A discussion that veers into aggression, in which the one who screams the loudest ends up being right, in which the straight lines of calm reasoning are immediately forced into crooked branches of verbal contortions, in which large and ponderous problems are reduced to slogans and formulas , in which in the end everyone remains of their opinion and only a fuss settles in the room destined to twirl again in the next episode. It is strange how in a country where voter participation is declining and betrays a growing disaffection for politics there is instead this affection for talk shows: a type of transmission that does not exist abroad or, when it does exist, is done with a very different style : less noise, less claque, more civilization. In short, the country that needs Italian-style talk shows is unhappy!
