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I love watching a good movie, and I love watching a good movie star. I’m always left in awe of their talent and skill; their ability to wholly become the characters they portray and to draw you into their character’s world. It’s a skill few have, but one that also comes with a dangerous, arrogant “side effect.”
When a movie star wholly becomes their character, they step out of the reality of this world and into a new reality that exists only on the movie screen. Sadly, when some actors step back into the reality of this world, they forget they are no longer the characters they’ve portrayed in movies. They are just an actor, albeit a good one. I value that actor’s opinion about as much as that of the random person standing in the check-out line with me at my local grocery store. There are many adoring fans in our society, however, who will lap up such opinion as if it were “holy gospel.” Sadly, we’ve seen that arrogant “side effect” rear its ugly head again.
Sharon Stone (of “Casino,” “Basic Instinct,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “Total Recall,” “The Mighty,” “Broken Flowers,” “Bobby,” “The Disaster Artist,” “Alpha Dog,” and “Lovelace” movie fame) recently opined to her Italian audience at the 2024 Torino Film Festival, “My country is in its adolescence. Adolescence is very arrogant. Adolescence thinks it knows everything. Adolescence is naive and ignorant and arrogant, and we are in our ignorant, arrogant adolescence.” I’m not certain what reality Ms. Stone was living in when she made those comments, but it’s clear she’s not in the reality we live in.
On June 21, 1788, the state of New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify our Constitution, thus making it the “law of the land” and the replacement for our Articles of Confederation. That document created the constitutional republic known as the United States of America. It created a form of government that we still live under, relatively unchanged, 236 years later.
If you look at a map of the Italian peninsula as it existed when our Constitution was approved, you will find a host of kingdoms, duchies, republics, states, counties, principalities, marquisates, bishoprics, lordships, and cities. The entire Italian peninsula was not unified as the Kingdom of Italy until 1870, when the Papal States were finally defeated and subsumed.
That monarchy lasted less than a century, ending in 1946 when the Italian citizenry voted to abolish it and form a republic. In reality, the monarchy “ended” when King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Benito Mussolini as prime minister in 1922. By 1926, Mussolini had consolidated power and became the de facto dictator of Italy. King Emmanuel’s tacit support of Mussolini and the Fascist party sealed his fate and that of the monarchy following WWII.
Anyone who follows Italian politics has probably heard the expression that Italians change their government more often than some people change their underwear. The average reign of a prime minister since the formation of the Italian Republic has been about one year and 10 months. Regional politics can be even more volatile.
During Operation Deny Flight, when we were flying Marine Corps F/A-18Ds over Bosnia-Herzegovina from Aviano Air Base, which is located in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (one of the five autonomous, self-governing regions in Italy), the average time in office for the regional president was just shy of 12 months, ranging from as short as five months to as long as a year and a half.
The political leaning of the party in power also swung widely, bouncing from Christian democratic to democratic socialist to populist conservative and back. Ironically, for six of the months that we were operating from Aviano Air Base, the ruling party was communist. We joked amongst ourselves that we had American fighter jets flying from “communist territory” to defend peace in a nation torn apart by a religious war.
Many have also heard the moniker “PIGS” used in reference to Italy. The acronym first cropped up in 1978 when it was used to identify the underperforming European countries of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. The term gained popularity again following the 2008 economic crisis when Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain (PIIGS) were blamed for slowing the eurozone’s economic recovery following the crisis by contributing to slow GDP growth, high unemployment, and high debt levels.
When one compares the political and economic history of the United States and Italy over the past two and a half centuries, it is quite clear who the adolescent is. Perhaps Sharon should simply stick to making good movies — and reading a history book or two between reading scripts.
NOTE: The author flew F/A-18Ds from Aviano Air Base from September 1994 to March 1995 and again from February 1996 to August 1996.
