Lombardi killed by money? Michele Serra, what cynicism

When you clearly have nothing interesting or informed to say about a topic, but you have a compulsive need to be heard because everyone is talking about it, the result is "The sky of Lombardy" by Michele Serra, on the Republic of 14 April. Since many shoot big these days, the only way to be heard is to triple the dose in all directions. The consequence is a piece based on the cowardly outrage of a martyred population and the insensitivity flaunted with bravado to the suffering of others: it is the very high price that Serra is willing to pay to attempt an intellectual provocation that he is not up to.

I confess, Serra's piece had escaped me, I read it a few days ago. Surely many have already commented on it in the meantime. I imagine that the usual suspects did it, the newspapers of the Lombard right for example. And I guess that reinforced Serra in his belief that he had written something clever and subtle. He's wrong: the piece of him is anything but smart and subtle.

But even if there weren't the atrocious insult to a suffering population, the Carognino taste of hitting those on the ground from their own living room, the cynicism exhibited and smug, typical of a certain local tradition for which an intellectual can afford everything without assuming responsibility; even if all this weren't there, Serra's piece would remain a jumble of the most trite clichés: "A hospital is not a company, health is not a commodity", "the religion of profit". There would remain a jumble of banalotte caricatures, of the same depth as the jokes about the carabinieri and of the same originality as the stories like "there's an Italian, a German and a Frenchman", but with the added a patronizing and gratuitously derogatory tone which leaves you stunned by its cultural racism: "Lilliputian Confindustria, the magutt (unskilled workers) from Bergamo such as the masters of the steelworks", "the shiny houses".

There would remain an accumulation of sentences that would like to be effective, thrown out there without a logical thread, including this one that we don't understand what gets us right with the coronavirus: "There is a terrible page of Ian McEwan, a great English writer, on how bad the sky over Lombardy is when it is bad”. There is something self-defeating about wanting to raise a writer from the homeland of gray skies to an arbiter elegantarum of the beauty of the skies, but then one realizes that any means is fine to vent one's want to insult at random; and that today for certain Italian intellectuals to quote something, anything, by McEwan is as necessary as 45 years ago it was to quote something, anything, from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.

There is not nothing constructive, nothing profound, nothing informed, nothing that takes the reader one step further. After all, why rack your brains to get information, to understand an obviously very complex phenomenon, to contribute to the debate, when everything can be reduced to a catchphrase, to a superficial and pre-established thesis: "work work work, the rest is just a hindrance, a detour from the main road”? Perhaps Serra has some evidence that people work more in Bergamo and people are less happy than in Treviso, Vercelli, Reggio Emilia, all areas less affected by the virus?

It is significant that the only specific mention of the city of Bergamo is in this inexplicable and incredibly self-centered sentence: "But already twenty years ago, taking off from Orio al Serio, the Po Valley sky was a swamp of smog, a manifest infection". Does Serra really think that his impression from a flight twenty years ago could interest us, and tell us something about what happened today? Does he really think he is the first to discover smog in the Po Valley? What does he want to suggest with that expression "manifest infection"? Did he perhaps predict then, or even just understand now, the inevitability of the Bergamo tragedy from the heights of his scientific knowledge?

I think so, because after all Lombardy is for him only an enormous rubbish dump, in a triumph of literary trappings and adolescent anti-industrialism: “Air like a landfill, water like a landfill, earth like a landfill”. Rhetoric that sounds all the more fatuous, because on the one hand the lakes, mountains, hills, art cities of Lombardy come to mind, on the other the many real lethal landfills which have been talked about for many years in Italy, and which do not appear to be located in Lombardy, but in regions that have received rivers of money from Lombardy.

Yup, Lombardy has made mistakes in managing the epidemic; many of his politicians have failed the toughest test; And the Lombard healthcare model has revealed serious flaws. And yes, the original sin probably was the refusal to close the outbreak in the Seriana Valley, which in turn was the result of an underestimation of the health risk, and perhaps even a little greed. But was the underestimation of the health risk a phenomenon only in Lombardy? When we look back, the symbol (which fortunately has not turned into a tragedy) will remain the famous laugh of Zingaretti, who is not a Lombard, on the "two cases of Coronavirus .... what are we talking about".

But let's also admit that the god of money is an exclusively Lombard obsession, and that it is the cause of the tragedy that struck Lombardy. What Serra has not understood is that the thousands of deaths among his despised magutts and the elderly in retirement homes have nothing to do with money, profit and the religion of work. I understand that an alternative narrative is much more convenient for Serra to get noticed even when he has nothing to say, to plot the plot of a somewhat predictable Greek tragedy, with nature rebelling against the hubris of profit. But the reality is much simpler: those women and men have not at all "sacrificed their lives, like a kid, on the altar of production"; simply they didn't know, no one had explained to them what they were getting into, and for weeks they carried on as if nothing had happened, exposing themselves to the infection. There is absolutely no doubt that if they had known they would have stopped. For this their tragedy is, if possible, even sadder; and for this reason Serra's arrogance and cynicism appear even more frighteningly and guiltily out of place.

°°°° The author is full professor of political economy at Bocconi University and editorialist for “La Repubblica”.