Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Haringey: Furbo or Fesso?
In the most recent edition of the Economist, the Lexington column offers us the following by way of an introduction to a piece about the probable lowering of civic trust that will accompany a Trump presidency. Whilst I don't see any similar extremes here, I nonetheless wondered to what degree, if at all, it might apply to our local context.
At the height of Silvio Berlusconi’s power, as the billionaire brushed scandals and lawsuits aside with the ease of a crocodile gliding through duckweed, a professor at an Italian university described to Lexington how the terms furbo and fesso helped explain the then-prime minister’s survival. In those bits of Italian society from which Mr Berlusconi drew his strongest support, it is a high compliment to be deemed a furbo, or a sly, worldly wise-guy. The furbo knows how to jump queues, dodge taxes and play systems of nepotism and patronage like a Stradivarius. In contrast the fesso is the chump who waits his turn and fails to grasp how badly the system is rigged, or how much of his taxes will be stolen. The fesso might cheer a new clean-air law in his city, naively taking an announcement by the elites at face value. The furbo wonders who in the environment department may have a brother-in-law with a fat contract to supply chimney scrubbers. Mr Berlusconi’s fans saw him as the furbo to end furbi. He showed that he heard them, offering them crude appeals to wise-guy cynicism, as when he asserted that any Italians rightfully who backed his centre-left opponents were not just mistaken, but were coglioni or, to translate loosely, “dickheads”, who would be Just voting “against their own interests”.
At this reflective time of year, we might all ask ourselves which shape of hole we might best fit.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Indeed Eugene, and I trust that you, too, have always voted early and often for the cutest hoors. Ath-Bhliain faoi mhaise duit*!
*Site Admin translation: A prosperous New Year
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Permalink Reply by EMC2 on
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Athbhliain faoi shéan is faoi mhaise daoibh*. BTW have you seen this ?
*Site admin translation: Happy New Year, y'all!
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Permalink Reply by HoL Site Admin on
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Excuse the translation folks, but since we have an English only policy on the site (for obvious reasons), we need to apply it even-handedly!
Are you both fluent gaelic speakers?
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Who is We?
There needs to be more options. What if a fesso can see exactly what's going on but is powerless to stop the furbos sending in the bulldozers?
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The premise of the Economist piece is flawed: Trump will elevate civic trust; it's the media that will continue in its completely failed attempts to bring him down that will be what, if anything, lowers the trust.
Moving along to the article on Berlusconi, this Lexington (sorry I don't know who he is I stopped reading that rag over a decade ago) is again flawed in his analysis because he presumes Berlusconi is sui generis. He is not; he is/was simply mirroring Italian culture.
Having furbezza (cleverness) is the norm in a country where the HMRC equivalent shows up at your business and makes a determination as to how much in taxes still need to be paid based on e.g., the seating capacity of a your restaurant--as opposed to something even probative like how many seats are actually filled in the restaurant (this has happened to virtually everyone I know in my town in Italy).
In other words, this is not a topic that can be pursued because this Lexington has no idea what he is talking about, just thinks he can stand out from the 99.99% of Trump haters in the media by somehow comparing him to Berlusconi. Next.
The only Trump topic worth discussing is that we need to get rid of the 20th Amendment so that presidential terms don't start on 20 Jan following the November election but the day after the electors vote (which needs to be moved up to a few days after the US election) so that we don't see the hateful, petulant scorched earth policy Obama (il fesso) is now foisting on my country. In parliamentary systems the government folds on the spot like we have seen Cameron and Renzi--this is what we need back in America. We don't need another journalist trying yet again in vain to bring down Trump.
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