However, what interests us is a different facet of this second generation, which could live both inside and outside the two Marxist parties of the time, the Socialist Party and the
Communist Party, and any definition of it would end up being so vague and imprecise that I am forced to indulge in a bit of fictional license. I will construct a fictitious character I will call Roberto. Among the members of the class that he is meant to represent, there will have been 90 percent Robertos and 10 percent Robertos. Mine will be 100 percent Roberto. Perhaps among the members of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party there were not many Robertos; but Roberto inhabited more the territory outside the party, the territory of cultural activities, publishing houses, cinemas, newspapers, concerts, and it was in this very sense that he was culturally highly influential.
Roberto could have been born between 1926 and 1931. Educated along Fascist lines, his first act of rebellion (subconscious rebellion, of course) was his reading of comics (badly) translated from American. Flash Gordon against Ming was for him the first image of the fight against tyranny. The Phantom may have been a colonialist, but instead of imposing Western models on the natives of the jungle in Bengali, he tried to preserve the wise, ancient traditions of the Bandar. Mickey Mouse the journalist fighting against corrupt politicians for the survival of his newspaper was Roberto’s first lesson in the freedom of the press. In 1942 the government forbade speech bubbles and a few months later suppressed all American characters; Mickey Mouse or Topolino was replaced by Toffolino, a human, not an animal character, in order to preserve the purity of the race. Roberto began secretly collecting the pieces he had once read, a bland and painful protest.
In 1939 Ringo from Stagecoach was the idol of a generation. Ringo fought not for an ideology or a fatherland but for himself and a prostitute. He was antirhetorical and therefore antiFascist. Also anti-Fascist were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, because they were opposed to Luciano Serra the pilot, the character in the imperialist Fascist film that Vittorio Mussolini had also helped make. The human model to whom Roberto turned was an appropriate mix of Sam Spade, Ishmael, Edward G. Robinson, Chaplin, and Mandrake. I imagine that for an American, even in a period of mass nostalgia, there would be nothing that would link Jimmy Durante, the Gary Cooper of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the James Cagney of Yankee Doodle Dandy and the crew of the Pequod. But for Roberto and his friends there was a thread that united all these experiences: these were all people who were happy to live and unhappy to die, and they constituted the rhetorical counterpoint to the Fascist Superman who celebrated Sister Death and went toward his own destruction holding two grenades and with a flower in his mouth, as the Fascist song said.
Roberto and his generation also had their own music: jazz. Not just because it was avantgarde music, which they never felt was different from that of Stravinsky or Bartok, but also because it was degenerate music, produced by blacks in the brothels. Roberto became antiracist for the first time because of his love of Louis Armstrong.
With these models in mind Roberto somehow joined the partisans in 1944 at a very young age. After the war he was either a member or a fellow traveler of a left-wing party. He respected Stalin, was against the American invasion of Korea, and protested against the execution of the Rosenbergs. He left the party at the time of the Hungarian crisis. He was firmly convinced that Truman was a Fascist and that Al Capp’s Li’l Abner was a left-wing hero, a relation of the downand-outs of Tortilla Flat. He loved Eisenstein but was firmly convinced that cinematic realism was also there in Little Caesar. He adored Hammett and felt betrayed when the hard-boiled novel came under the aegis of the McCarthyite Spillane.
He thought that a northwest passage for socialism with a human face was on The Road to Zanzibar with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour. He rediscovered and popularized the epic of the New Deal, he loved Sacco, Vanzetti, and Ben Shahn, before the 1960s (when they became famous again in America) he knew the folk songs and protest ballads of the American anarchist tradition, and in the evening listened with his friends to Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Alan Lomax, Tom Jodd, and the Kingston Trio. He had been initiated into the myth of Americana, but now his bedside book was Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds.
This is why when the generation of ’68 launched its challenge, perhaps even against men like Roberto, America was already a way of life, even though none of those youngsters had read Americana. And I am not talking about jeans or chewing gum, the America that dominated Europe as the model for the consumer society: I am still talking about the myth that had emerged in the 1940s, which was somehow still operational deep down. Of course, for those young people America as a Power was the enemy, the world’s policeman, the foe to be defeated in Vietnam as much as in Latin America. But that generation’s front was by now on four sides: their enemies were capitalist America, the Soviet Union that had betrayed Lenin, the Italian Communist Party that had betrayed the revolution, and lastly, the Christian Democrat establishment. But if America was an enemy as a government and as the model for a capitalist society, there was also an attitude of rediscovery and recovery of America as a people, as a melting pot of races in revolt. They no longer had in mind the image of the Marxist American of the 1930s, the man in the Lincoln Brigades in Spain, the “premature anti-Fascist” reader of the Partisan Review. Rather, they identified a labyrinthine camp in which there was a mixture of oppositions between old and young, black and white, recent immigrants and established ethnic groups, silent majorities and vocal minorities. They did not see any substantial difference between Kennedy and Nixon, but they identified with the Berkeley campus, Angela Davis, Joan Baez, and the early Bob Dylan.
It is difficult to define the nature of their American myth: they somehow used and recycled bits of American reality, the Puertoricans, underground culture, Zen, not so much comics as Comix, and so not Felix the Cat but Fritz the Kat, not Walt Disney but Crumbs. They loved Charlie Brown, Humphrey Bogart, John Cage. I am not charting the profile of any particular political movement between 1968 and ’77. Maybe I am drawing an x-ray image, revealing something that continued to live underneath the Maoist, Leninist, or Che Guevarist surface. I know I am photographing something that was there, because this something exploded in and after 1977. The student revolt of that time resembled more a black ghetto uprising than the storming of the Winter Palace. And I suspect that the secret, clearly subconscious model for the Red Brigades was the Manson family.
I certainly cannot speak of the present generation with the same Olympian detachment with which I discussed the 1930s generation. I am trying to identify, in the confusion of the present, the model for the American image-myth. Something invented like previous ones, the product of creolization.
America is no longer a dream, since you can get there at low cost with a budget airline.
The new Roberto was perhaps a member of a Marxist-Leninist group in 1968, threw the odd Molotov cocktail at an American consulate in 1970, some cobblestones at the police in 1972, and at the window of a Communist bookshop in 1977. In 1978, after avoiding the temptation to join a terrorist group, he saved some money and flew to California, perhaps becoming an ecological revolutionary or a revolutionary ecologist. For him America has become not the image of future renewal but a place to lick his wounds and console himself after his dream was shattered (or prematurely reported dead). America is no longer an alternative ideology, it is the end of ideology. He got his visa easily, because in fact he was never enrolled in any of the parties of the genuine Left. If Pavese and Vittorini were still alive, they would not have been able to get one, because they, the authors of our American dream, would have had to reply “Yes” on the consulate form asking whether you have ever been a member of a party that wants to subvert American society. American bureaucracy is not a dream; if anything, it is a nightmare.
Is there a moral in this story of mine? None, and several. To understand the Italian attitude toward America, and in particular the attitude of anti-American Italians, you must also remember Americana and all that happened in those years, when left-wing Italians dreamed of Comrade Sam and, pointing their finger toward his image, would say: “I want you.”
Originally written as a paper for a conference held at Columbia University in January 1980 on “The Image of America in Italy and the Image of Italy in America.” The original paper was for an American audience, hence the abundance of information on several Italian figures, from Vittorio Mussolini to Vittorini.
THE POWER OF FALSEHOOD
In his Quaestio QuodlibetalisXII. 14, Saint Thomas Aquinas replies to the question “Utrum Veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem,” in
