Word: barzini
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...Severgnini's book is a bit like a lawyer's defense against a long line of pessimists. Luigi Barzini, a foreign correspondent and prolific writer, in perhaps the most authoritative of Italian portraits, described a country resigned to a downward spiral in his classic book, The Italians. Barzini paints his people as peddlers of "ruses to defeat boredom and discipline, to forget disgrace and misfortune, to lull man's angst to sleep and comfort him in his solitude." Severgnini uses much finer brushstrokes in his interpretation of Italians' shortcomings, which borders on praise. In Crema, where he's still based...
Look. It is one thing for snobbish European intellectuals to take American trivia seriously. Disneyana is the favorite mirror of America -- succeeding Luigi Barzini's insufficiently satiric suggestion of baseball -- for every European thinker from Umberto Eco on down. It was Eco who in his 1975 essay "Travels in Hyperreality" gave a deep and dark and ironic account of Pirates of the Caribbean as "more real than reality." Heavy implications followed...
...crisis of faith in the future and a fading sense of national identity? An identity crisis -- in France? It sounds as unlikely as the notion of Cyrano de Bergerac fumbling his sword or groping for the mot juste. In his 1983 book The Europeans, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini, a seasoned and mordant observer of the Continental scene, cites Edmond Rostand's fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand's play as "free fighters, free lovers, free spenders, defenders of old homes...
...undercurrent of these quarrels is a yearning for a new national myth, a sense of grandeur and destiny. As author Barzini points out, it was Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, the great Romantic writer, who said of his compatriots, "They must be led by dreams." De Gaulle, after founding the Fifth Republic in 1958 and establishing a presidential form of government verging on monarchy, set France apart from NATO, apart from "the Anglo-Saxons" -- conveniently lumping in superpower America with France's ancient enemy, England -- and even, in important ways, apart from Europe...
Empire? Even when we do invade, whether it is Normandy or Panama, the first question to arise is always, When do we get out? Luigi Barzini once observed that for America interventionism is often just an expression of "impatient isolationism," wanting to get the job over with and back to, "in the words of Theodore Roosevelt (who deplored it vigorously), 'the soft and easy enjoyment of material comforts...