Saviano is well known among the young literate and the illiterate for different reasons. At the moment there is an ad personam campaign against him, accusing him of running after fame and glory. It's a well-known routine. The illiterate buy it acritically.
Seeing as the relative majority of the young voted left, it would suggest that he is well-perceived by most youth. His book continues to be an all time best-seller in Italy.
His murder would be lived as a national- as well as an international- outrage.
Yes, they are. A few moments spent with Google will show that the literacy of American youth is deteriorating fast. No child left behind, the only real educational showpiece of the last decade, has proven a failure by every measure. People who see their future in the bottom of a french fryer pan are well aware that they are powerless, hopeless. They are--dare I say it-- Bitter.
People who cannot see or understand the web of life, the net of process that enclose, support their lives are starved for understanding, and so reduced to soundbite thought, cartoon realities where the bank robber becomes the hero, and the dead teller is just nothing-- as they are nothing.
But they are easily controlled- anarchic yet servile, worshiping power yet despising the failed law.
The similarities with the Italy described here are sometimes striking, and grow more so, as I learn. Yet the differences are enough to give me hope- for Italy. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
It may have been too rash and/or simplistic a comparison to make, but there are some similarities, I think.
For example, here is Bill Cosby talking to a men only black audience:
Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. "What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?," Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. "Do they think that black male youth won't act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?" Cosby's rhetoric on culture echoes--and amplifies--a swelling strain of black opinion: last November's Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence. This Is How We Lost to the White Man
This Is How We Lost to the White Man
Despite the title of that article, though, it is not just black American boys, but American boys of all races. Although -- and this is purely speculation -- middle-class white kids are probably far more likely to grow out of it [Eminem notwithstanding], disadvantaged kids with fewer social and economic options are more likely emulate the images and words in gangsta rap culture in their own lives.
But again, that is purely my personal impression and it may be way off. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
Yup. Should have read that article more carefully. Aside from the fact that the excerpt above was not from one of Cosby's talks but rather from his book, there is also this:
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? "The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles," wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, "are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police." Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there's still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you'd have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop's popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too--many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there's still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you'd have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop's popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too--many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
(I wonder if Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day may shed some light on this subject.)
But one senses a deep and sincere ambivalence in the author, who himself is black, as he alternates between praising Cosby and then critiquing (respectfully) what he says:
I wished, then, that my 7-year-old son could have seen Cosby there, to take in the same basic message that I endeavor to serve him every day--that manhood means more than virility and strut, that it calls for discipline and dutiful stewardship. <...> I'd take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
I'd take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
