A few days ago, at the end of the supermarket, I listened to a small suburban conversation, which however took place in the heart of the world today and tomorrow. The cashier came back from a trip to China, I think a honeymoon. “A week ago I was on the wall,” he said to a customer around the seventies. “Another world of China, really, are ahead of one hundred years compared to us.” The customer smiles and nods, but then he says: “But let’s not forget that we are always ahead of everyone. Our history, our culture, Florence, Venice … they dream of them”. “Yes, yes,” says the cashier. “Don’t think that their cities are ugly eh. I would still prefer to stay there instead of here.”

“The values ​​of the West”

Of course it is only a small episode without statistical relevance, a friendly conversation between two good acquaintances whose thought I really don’t know anything, if not those few words listened to in the supermarket. However, of that short conversation, I was struck by the total absence of reference to the “values ​​of the West”, of which many we hear from politicians and opinion leaders. To neither, nor to those who returned to the technological advancement and the respect of the rules, nor to those who hold the pride of a story and art that produced, as if the past was the only thing that matters, seemed to import a great deal of the only true value that, in theory, should make our world “better” on the basis of what we call natural law, namely that social coexistence is ordered on the basis of democratic principles and make in civil freedoms. I have not had the opportunity to deepen the thought of the two people listened to in my neighborhood, and however they seem to illuminate me – I repeat it: without any statistical claim – the public debate of these weeks and, probably, that of the years that will come.

A divisive figure

We start from the emotional and political wave, very long, which precisely in its continuation to me seems to me largely artificial, of the murder by Charlie Kirk. Mind you: I am sure of the deep impact that that murder has had and will have in American society and politics. Charlie Kirk was very famous, loved and hated by millions and millions of Americans. His voice was heard by the people and by the White House. He was a firmly and deliberately divisive figure. Having said all this, his death at the hands of a murderer, Tyler Robinson, could only unleash a very high emotional wave in the United States of America. Equally obvious, it was the multiple exploitation, starting with that made by Donald Trump and the so -called “world sorceress”, of Kirk’s death. Less obvious seemed, however, that to exploit as “what they” that murder, were the leaders of the European right, and Italian in particular, which happened instead. Faced with an all -US political fact – for the dynamics, the protagonists, the political path of the victim, the ease with which in certain states of the Union we get weapons, and many other characterizing factors – leaves enough perplexed that a president of the Italian Council comments and cavalchi the fact for days, and days, and days. The last time today, explaining that he was killed “because he was free”, just not to lose the wheel of the ally Salvini who with Vannacci still thinks of launching a challenge to the premier, at least until the general officially becomes a problem for the League leader.

Propaganda

The propaganda approximation with which all political explanations are not surprising of this affair to a murder on which, as the days and the emergence of the internal framework of the killer, the clouds of the private obsession cultivated between the forums on the Internet and the grudges for their family of origin are not surprising. To the propaganda that distorts and bends reality, after all, we have been used to for a few centuries. Rather, on our national scene, the long appropriation of a victim of others, other latitudes, other languages, is striking. As if the nascent international organization of sovereignty was looking for common foundative myths, martyrs to be waved, even if they say little to their people, or perhaps also nothing.

To look around, however, it seems to live a time that accentuates the traits of political indifference instead. Of course, in this overall quiet and qualunquista sea, which probably welcomes many voters of the right and many voters of the left, stopped in their memberships without too much putting them in question, there is space for anger and violence to emerge, and you must always watch. But we are reasonably talking about individual phenomena, a dust that is organized suddenly, which radicalizes in an individual and obsessive form instead of political. Because all around the minorities that are indignant and mobilize, you can breathe an air of total divestment, of wide disinterest to what does not directly touch the life of the individual. It is within this time that you can see without too many obstacles, after all without too much scandal, the project of the Riviera di Gazenicato, downstream of an ethnic cleaning as meticulous as possible, by the Israeli Minister Smotrich. It is with the awareness of this ideal weakness, perhaps, that Putin testers the resistance and the nerves of the world, and the real intentions of isolationism of the American president. It is in this end of the end of the politics, as we had understood it, that liberal democracy seems to have lost its driving force, and a right that updates its words while remaining in the historical bed of victims’s nationalism, a left is opposed that no longer knows the collective and the universal, and even if it knew they would no longer know who to tell them, or what to tell.

It is perhaps for this reason, also for all this, that in the suburbs of the West, we remain suspended between the pride of a transformed millennial and the fascination for the efficiency of a regime that brutally plan every detail of life, even the most private. Because the samples of democracy, in turn, are suspended between telling each other as victims and compliant for accounts in order as any technocrats. A quiet dystopia of late summer, of which we will have already forgotten at the beginning of autumn.