Long Post About Saviano at Zuccotti Park today

I got to NYC about 2 hours early and decided to walk from where megabus dropped me off all the way to Zuccotti Park. Because I had never been there before, I actually walked right past it. I had seen pictures of the tents, and I had seen pictures of it post-raid, and I can just tell you it looked COMPLETELY different. It was pretty much empty, some security guards were standing around and a maintenance guy was putting up Christmas lights on the trees. There were gates around the park, kind of like the short metal ones that you’d see waiting in line for a concert, and it took me a while to figure out which side you were permitted to enter.

When my dumb ass figured it out, I went in and there weren’t very many people. It was kind of surprising. The majority of the crowd were Italians, mostly journalists. There was a flyer with a brief bio of Saviano and what he was going to talk about being circulated (I’ll type it out and post it later if anyone wants) and none of the Americans knew who he was. Before he started speaking I was talking to another American woman about him (and also Occupy Philly) and she only knew about his book and movie. I explained to her that he was kind of a questionable person to invite to OWS, considering that he’s written open letters denouncing similar protests in his own country and his absurd Zionist views. She was surprised, and her reaction made me wish I could’ve engaged more Americans or brought some flyers of my own or something haha.

When he came out to speak (with his bodyguards naturally) everyone rushed to the spot where he was speaking. The italian journalists were the first ones and they made sure to get as close as possible. Which is understandable since they flew out to the US to listen to this gavone speak for 20 minutes, but it made the mic check really ineffective since none of them repeated what he was saying. It was hard to hear him.

So like I said, he spoke for about 20 minutes. He read from a pre-written speech (which is understandable, not criticizing him for that) that talked about “the mafia” (presumably la Camorra but probably also ‘Ndrangheta, I guess he figured those names were too hard for us anglophones lol) and organized crime and its role in the financial crises. Surely there’s some validity to this. He then went on to talk about how in Italy (as in the US) it was no longer enough to get an education and go to school. He criticized the Tea Party and their ideology and their desire to “not follow any rules” or something to that effect. Pretty basic stuff.

Then he commended the crowd and the Occupy movement in the US, which I wonder if he would have done had they not invited him. He told Americans to pay attention to what’s happening to Italy because that could be our future. I thought that was kind of interesting because we have such a one dimensional view of Italy here, and in my opinion most articles written about italy in english don’t do anything but reinforce that image. So we probably should be paying more attention to what happens in Italy.. and if we did OWS probably wouldn’t have even invited him.

After he was done speaking every applauded him. The Americans started chanting “OCCUPY WALL STREET!” and the Italian journalists yelled “ROBERTOOOO! BRAVO ROBERTO!” etc (it made me think of Sophia Loren giving Roberto Benigni his Oscar haha) and then the more sardonic Italians among the crowd kind of shook their heads, laughed, and talked among themselves.

There wasn’t any kind of Q&A session which disappointed me. My hope was that someone would have brought up his dismissals of protestors in Italy, and that I would be able to grill him about Palestine (because in general, how can you talk about oppression and OCCUPATION without acknowledging that which Israel imposes upon the Palestinians?) but unfortunately the only people who asked him questions were the Italian journalists. As he was leaving they followed him like a celebrity.

In all, it was an interesting. I think he really only came because being invited inflated his ego, but his message wasn’t really anything compelling and his presence there in and of itself was problematic. It was truly a joke because he didn’t engage with ANYONE except for the Italian journalists who probably asked him bullshit questions, and because there is very little written about his shenanigans in English the Americans there just took his commentary, and the biography that OWS gave them, at face value.

I wish that they would have announced that he was coming a week or so ahead of time rather than three days, because that way there would have been enough time for people to become informed about him.

I think at this point it would be wise to:

continue to blog about Saviano in english
maybe contact OWS about possible speakers who would be more appropriate representatives of the Italian left (or Occupy Philly… coughcough)

This is just my account as an Italian-American with a very rudimentary knowledge of Italian politics (in short: I don’t know shit haha) There are people who know a lot more than I do that have written/tweeted about this so I’ll share that with all of you. I know the lovely folks at Struggles in Italy are working on some posts about Saviano.