Puglia is innocent. The ongoing legal proceedings do not touch the essence of what is elsewhere defined as the most beautiful region in Italy. In the sense that the illegal drifts of politics do not derive from anthropology. The landscape, the traditions, the people are immune. If anything, the problems arise from the centers of decision-making power that are far from the brightness of the place, from the streets scented with gastronomic specialties, from the incomparable panoramas of the spur and heel of Italy.
Indeed, paradoxically, but not too much, it is precisely a derailed development, in every sector, which distorts the natural vocations of the territory and acts as a chaotic attractor of bad business. The local economy, once founded on agriculture, is lost in the streams of European contributions, cumbersome incentives which, even when functional, deform the typical Apulian ethnographic physiognomy. Professions become extinct, replaced by the rambling language of “strategies” and “objectives”. The laborers are replaced by non-EU citizens, while the gangmasters remain the same, without new technologies having made the rural panorama evolve in the meantime. Generations of young people pass from the antechambers of the honorable members to obtain the “permanent position” to queues in Kafkaesque orientation agencies, in which those with the most original idea can hope to access funds. As if development could be attributed to creativity and not to an organic and rooted design, which is urgent given the degradation.
This South as a post-industrial parody of the West was taking shape before globalization manifested itself in its fullest symptoms. This was already seen in the 1960s, in which the ruling class did not bother to support well-being with effective elements of growth and progress. Only the vote count was of interest. Even neglecting the transfer of the flight to the north, given that at the beginning the residence was not changed and we returned down for the elections. When the southern communities consolidated in the Po Valley metropolises, perhaps consensus went to the opposition organized in the factories, but it was a small thing in consociational democracy.
The economic return of a senseless model has contributed to ethical disruption even before environmental disruption. The mass automobile has downgraded rail transport, flooding the Peninsula with periodic exoduses set by the holiday calendar for business purposes. Second homes, the result of savings, have ruined the coasts. The Mediterranean summer has become an obsessive season of chaos and noise. Emigrants returning for holidays came to slip on the tree-lined streets of Apulia’s cities and towns, before deviating directly onto the coast, from the 1980s onwards.
Now, however, their children do not have the same opportunities. The peripheral neighborhoods built to accommodate them in the northern metropolises are contested by the new poor, becoming hotbeds of racism and violence. Those who remain can no longer emigrate, because the factories are no longer labor-intensive, but rather automated. Or worse, they prefer not to leave, accustomed to a life of smartphones, pubs and discos with weekly pocket money, as long as their parents last.
Globalization is also the contagion on a planetary scale of the execrable characteristics of civil coexistence. The most advanced communities do not transmit their identity, also because they have within them ranks of intellectuals still caught up in the myth of the noble savage, never satisfied with the indigenous abundance of tribal typologies and behaviors.
So, for the region it is no longer just a question of freeing itself from the umpteenth wave of investigations by the judiciary, but rather of opposing the risk of assimilating the pursuit of politics to private profit in an irreversible manner, given that thanks to globalization a world appears entirely south of itself.
From this point of view, Puglia, as well as being innocent, is a victim.
Tags: obsession profit virus politics Puglia victim
