Friday we sailed around Capri and then across to the Bay of Salerno.  Very few boats around, and nary a one of the luxury yachts so common in those waters.  We went to a seaside restaurant, and were among a very few customers.  The owner said it was the worst season he’d seen since the 1960s.

The spring weather has been unusually unpleasant, which no doubt accounts for at least part  of the problem, but this lovely part of the world has long attracted lots of visitors regardless of the temperature.  Most of the merchants I talked to blame the Treasury Police, whose numbers have increased as the tourists’ have dropped.  The Guardia di Finanza have huge powers to snoop, and they have taken to boarding yachts and asking all manner of questions of those on board:  Do you own this?  If not, from whom did you rent it?  How much are you paying?  How are you paying?  Which credit card did you use (remember, you cannot pay in cash for anything more than a thousand euros)?  And so forth.  So when I hear European leaders carry on about stimulating “growth,” I’m not very sympathetic.  All over the continent, state organizations like the Guardia di Fiinanza are showing their citizens that the most important thing is tax collection, not freedom to create new wealth.

You hear stories every day that show how avid our governments are to get their hands on our money.  I was talking to an American friend who married an Italian about 40 years ago, stayed married, got dual citizenship, and is now being asked by the Italian government to tell all about what she owns in the U.S., and by the American government to tell all about what she owns in Italy.  We all know this is part of the scheme to get her money into the government coffers.  Two coffers in this case.

It’s discouraging to watch the states’ appetite, both because it shows their contempt for us — an old thought for the Italians, but a new one for most Americans, I believe — and because it shows how little they understand economics and human nature.  The normal human response to a state that enriches itself  unfairly and mean-spiritedly, all the while pretending to be doing the opposite, is to try to outwit it or change the nature of the state.  Our fall elections are all about changing it, and if that fails, we will see a sort of Italianization of America, complete with the creation of a black market for money, much as we’ve seen the creation of a black market for cigarettes.  Here in Italy, those markets (and similar ones for prostitution and drugs) are largely operated by the famous triad of organized crime, the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra, and the Calabrian N’Drangheta.

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There’s a big international conference on “Advances in Nutrition and Cancer” starting in Naples tomorrow, and the headline story is that Ragu, properly prepared, is a terrific cancer fighter.  And there’s another story in the local Neapolitan press announcing that people who drink lots of coffee live longer than those who don’t.

So two of the staples of the Neapolitan diet are very good for you.  Add to that the beauty of the place, the wonders of the culture, and the generally nice weather, and you should be asking yourself what in the world you’re doing wherever else you are.  We’re drinking espresso and stuffing ourselves with maccheroni and ragu.

But you’ve got to do it right.  The high concentration of cancer-fighting antioxidants comes from prolonged cooking of tomatoes, and it doesn’t work with vegetable oil.  You’ve got to use extravirgin olive oil.  And you have to take your time, as I learned when I first starting studying Neapolitan cuisine.  A friend wangled a dinner invitation for me at the home of the president of the Neapolitan Culinary Academy, a tall skinny man (go figure) who has a day job as a professor of botany at the University of Naples.  As directed, I called him up to thank him for his generosity and to ask when and where I should show up.

“Well, dinner’s at 9 o’clock,” he replied, “but you should be here by 1 or 1:30.”

“Eight hours early?  How come.”

“Because it takes seven or eight hours to make a proper ragu, and we’ll do it together.  That way perhaps you will get a proper introduction to Neapolitan cuisine.”

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Barbara and I have spent most of the last six weeks in Italy, our adopted second home.  We met in Rome in 1973, got married five months later in the big synagogue on the banks of the Tiber, lived there for several years, and have managed to get back every year for varying lengths of time.  This trip has been almost all in places most tourists don’t get to see, like rural Tuscany and Naples, and Campagna, and right now we are in Sorrento, looking across the bay at Naples and Vesuvius, which, as the vulcanologists will tell you, is overdue for its next eruption, which will devastate the whole region…so far, no sign of it this week though.

Naples is a doomed city, which mightily contributes to the unique creativity of its citizens, about which you’ve undoubtedly read by now in my Virgil’s Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles.  The image of people living at the foot of a great volcano can be applied to Italy in general nowadays, and indeed to Europe as a whole.  The European ecoomy is famously gasping for energy — with productive niches in Holland and Germany — and explosive forces are bubbling through the crust of the self-satisfied welfare state that’s been happily and irresponsibly taking care of Europeans’ every desire for decades.  Now that they’ve been caught spending much more than they ever had (and having most of their military needs covered by Uncle Sam), and suddenly being told to get serious, they’re blowing a lot of political steam.  Thus, the Greek riots.  Thus, the sprint to socialist fantasies in France.  Thus, the recent bombs set off at Italian welfare offices, and the kneecaping of a welfare official.

The “technicians” in charge of the Italian government nowadays started by cutting government spending and raising taxes.  I have long believed that it’s incoherent to raise taxes during a recession, and indeed the Italians are now talking about ways to stimulate “growth.”  But, rather like our own deep thinkers in Washington, the stimulation they’re talking about is all supposed to come from on high, from the state.  Which of course is the root cause of the crisis in the first place.  But the Europeans made a Faustian deal with their politicians–I’ll leave you alone if you take good care of me, and I’ll just indulge myself–and it’s hard for them to ask their failed leaders to get out of the way and let the people work their way out of the mess.

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I wonder what the Atrocities Board would say about the dreadful betrayal of freedom in China.  Only kidding.  This Orwellian institution is surely designed to deal only with old horrors;  you know, those during the dark ages of Bushitlercheney. Or even in the days of Obama’s bête blanche, Bill Clinton, about whom the flagrantly hypocritical Samantha Power raged so piously righteous some years back for his failure to save Africans from slaughter.  Now that she sits in the White House, she joins the other organizers and activists who abandon those who share our national commitment to freedom, and embrace those tyrants who are crushing it as best they can.

To this grim gallery of rogues we can properly add Hillary, whose relationship with the president will some day entertain future students of the American presidency.  What’s it like for her to get security briefings that are reportedly denied to her Bill, for example?  But there is no reason to suspect that she’s any better on the big questions than the president, for whom she lies like the proverbial rug.  On her account, we’ve been heroically supporting dissidents in Iran and Syria, for example, even though none of the victims of the bloodthirsty regimes in Tehran and Damascus has seen any help.

Which brings  us back to the blind Mr. Chen, who somehow eluded house arrest and got into the American Embassy in Beijing.  One wonders  just how that happened, and the tyrants who rule China are no doubt wondering  too.  It’s hard to imagine that the Obama  administration had much to do with Chen’s escape;  they don’t give a damn about oppressed  freedom fighters and dissidents anywhere, let alone the People’s Republic of China.  As with Iran, North Korea, and  Syria, Obama wants “good relations,” and such regimes won’t give you any if you  insist on raising awkward subjects like freedom and democracy.

To be sure,  if you play by their rules, you don’t get those good relations  anyway.  You get contempt, and, in all likelihood, war as well. Churchill  said of Chamberlain that he had to choose between war and dishonor, chose dishonor,  and got war as well.

Obama and  his fellow conspirators should  know all  this by now, because he’s played by the tyrants’ rules and he’s quite obviously  held in contempt by regimes who detest and fear the United States.  These evil men know that, regardless of the  identity or desires of a given American president, those of their own people  who want to live freely will always be inspired by the American example.  The tyrants are thankful for Obama, but not for the reasons he had assumed. He  thought they’d like him because he is basically sympathetic to their cause.  He thinks their complaints about  America’s meddling in their affairs are legitimate, and he expected to be able  to negotiate a series of deals that would rest on a shared vision of the world.

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Tuesday night we went to a concert at San Carlo Opera House in Naples, the miracle built in six months for King Charles III, and recently restored to elegance.  I’d been in San Carlo before, but had never heard music played live, and Riccardo Muti—a native son of Naples—gave it a real workout with Shostakovich’s intense 5^th Symphony, conducting his Chicago Symphony Orchestra, now on a grand tour that has taken them to Moscow, St Petersburg and Rome.

There is a sweetness to the music that I don’t believe I’ve heard before, and indeed Muti had told his musicians that playing San Carlo would be something very special for them.  According to the local newspaper, they were very impressed, not only with the hall, but also with the audience.  When the orchestra was playing, I could not see anyone talking or whispering, we were all totally captured by the power and quality of the music.

All of which took me back to one of my favorite little films, “The Orchestra Rehearsal,” that Fellini made for Italian TV in his later years.  It’s about a rebellious orchestra that rises up against its German conductor, and undertakes to conduct itself.  The tyrannical conductor is driven out, but the orchestra quickly disintegrates into conflict and chaos.  They need the discipline of the conductor to perform well, and he comes back and counts out the time for them…in German.

It was Fellini’s contemptuous reply to the “revolutionaries” of the sixties and seventies, and I’ve always believed—as he did—that true creativity requires a context of firm rules and discipline.  It’s no accident, for example, that so many top jazz musicians—the art form that demands constant improvisation—are also exceptional classical musicians.  Their mastery of the disciplined, written music of the masters helps them improvise when they’ve only got chords and tempo to work with.

So here’s the thing with Muti:  he is certainly the conductor, and there are times when he imposes total control on the orchestra (especially during transitions to different tempos).  But there are also times when he drops or folds his hands, and just lets them play.  Isn’t that terrific?  What a gesture of confidence and esteem! I had the feeling that he was thoroughly enjoying the performance, and I’m sure that his musicians were delighted to give him the pleasure.

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We’re in Italy, where the new government — headed by the distinguished economist Mario Monti — has three big initiatives: make it easier to fire workers, raise taxes on everyone, and limit the amount of money that can be paid in cash.

The first one was demolished by trade union opposition, and to tell you the truth it wasn’t much of an initiative in the first place, since even “legal” firings would have required the employer to pay a chunky severance, running up to two years’ full salary.  I found myself wondering if I could get myself fired on that basis.  Anyway, it’s dead.  Some variation may resurface in a while, but for the moment, it’s dead.

Raising taxes (which goes hand in hand with cuts in some government spending), on the other hand, is seemingly very popular.  Maybe it’s a Catholic thing (we’ve sinned, and now we have to pay for it), but I rather suspect it’s a conditioned reflex from the old days.  In those happier times, nobody ever protested higher taxes, because they had no intention of paying them anyway.  So their attitude was “look at that!  Another tax to evade, another deal to make with the tax collectors.”  Back when I was reporting from Rome for The New Republic, I once calculated that the marginal tax rate was over 120%.  I went on to describe a few of the myriad stratagems the Italians had devised to beat the system (triple and quadruple sets of books, elaborate overcharges to cover currency export, and lots of cash moving around, just to take three examples).

The turning point in the retail world came with the arrival of computers and credit cards.  Once sales were entered in the computers (yours or Visa’s, it was all the same), the merchants were screwed, because there was no avoiding the taxes, especially the VAT.  You had to take a real risk, doing deals in cash and not ringing them up at all.  Sometimes you got caught (the tax men sometimes paid rewards for informers).

Ditto for the big businesses, who got nailed by bank reporting.  In the old days, there were banks (famously in Switzerland and the Channel Islands and the Caymans) that wouldn’t tell anyone, even a government official, what you were worth.  But that slowly changed, and now that the horribly truthful numbers are flushed out of the computers every evening, it’s hard to beat the system.

But there’s always a way, and the easiest way is to use real cash money instead of American Express.  That puts you outside the tax man’s little black box, and of course everybody knows it (because everybody who can manage it, does it).  So the Monti government is banning all cash transactions over a thousand euros.  Over in Spain, where “austerity” is also the word of the day, the government wants to cap cash transactions at 2500 euros (the official exchange rate is something a bit north of $1.30 per euro.  Yeah, it’s expensive over here).  Both Latin countries are acting on the assumption that their citizens are trying to cheat their governments.

That is, the governments assume that the people — virtually all the people — are corrupt.  Which brings us to the sermon of the day.

In the old days, whenever it rained, the people would say “Piove.  Governo ladro.”  It’s raining, the government’s a thief.  The folk wisdom had it right:  the government was trying to steal the people’s money, and so unpleasant things happened.  When the state’s greed becomes excessive, the people will always find ways to steal their money back.  And there’s always a way.  Down at our level, for example, you can buy a 2,000 euro item with cash by paying smaller amounts several times.  Otherwise you have to pay taxes, and the seller has to pay taxes, all of which are relentlessly rising, and if you don’t beat the system, you’re going under.

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Irving Louis Horowitz died a few weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to honor him as he deserves.  He was a force of nature, and you got it all from him, right in your face.  Passionate affection, unbreakable loyalty, great intellectual brilliance, surprising physical strength and dexterity, lots of good humor.  Or else you got derision and contempt, unrestrained criticism—well, you got that always, which was most welcome to me–and, in his younger years, direct confrontation of the sort he knew from the streets.

He never did things by halves.  And if you were going to be his friend, you couldn’t get away with half measures.  It was all or nothing.  So when he left us—after his umpteenth heart attack and emergency surgery—it was a tremendous blow.  One of the basic drivers of our lives has been removed.

His contributions to our understanding of the world are legion, from Renaissance philosophy to Cuban Communism, from totalitarianism to a brilliant discussion of C. Wright Mills, and seemingly countless and invariably significant issues.

I always told him that he wasn’t a sociologist at all, but rather an historian, one of the best.  Few so well understood the passionate irrationality of the modern world as Irving did, and his great work on “radicalism and the revolt against reason” will last a very long time.  He well understood the menace of myth in politics, and dreaded its consequences in our age of mass movements and totalitarians who perfected mob rule.  Those same insights were brought to bear on Castro’s Cuba, on the celebrated but wrong-headed work of C. Wright Mills, and on the often controversial and internally contradictory writings of Hannah Arendt, after whom Irving’s chair at Rutgers was named.

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Well, one smart scientist is 90% sure, and who am I to argue with him?  But as the Gershwins once memorably put it, who calls that livin’?  The Martian “life” is…bacteria.  And pretty tiny bacteria at that.

It’s a start, I suppose.  But it’s sure not what Ray Bradbury had in mind.  Not at all.  My generation (pre-Boomers) was quite certain that we’d get to most of the planets, and Mars had a place of special honor and sex appeal.  Space travel was taken for granted–OF COURSE we were going to do it.  Only dullards thought otherwise.

So the “news” about Mars is a double disappointment.  First, Martian life is microscopic, which is extremely disappointing (the existence of life on the Red Planet is simply an article of faith for us, so we’re not impressed to find that the scientists have caught up with us).  And second, we never got to go romp around there ourselves.  Which is serious bad news.

I once heard Bradbury lecture to a group of businessmen, maybe a thousand or so, in his home town, Los Angeles.  He didn’t like traveling, and was intensely afraid of flying, and if I remember rightly he didn’t drive himself, he took taxis, which in L.A. is like proclaiming yourself an alien.  In that talk–one of the most dramatic I have ever heard–he gave us moral uplift.  And linked it to Mars.  Listen up.

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You never heard of Luigi “Gigi” Grassi, but he was a great man, a dear friend, and an indispensable guide for me, and I must honor and mourn him here.  I dedicated my study of Neapolitan creativity to him and his daughter, Tiziana, the artists who have managed the legendary “Doll Hospital” in the heart of Naples.  Tiziana called a couple of hours ago, with the sad news that Gigi has passed away.

Have a look at this gorgeous video of the Hospital (Ospedale delle Bambole) and you’ll get a first inkling of the magic he created, the beauty with which he surrounded himself, and the love he brought to his work.  You can spot him, in a purple shirt, at 1:45, and there’s a black and white photo of Tiziana carefully tucked away in the background at 2:14.  If you want more, and I hope you do, you’ll find many videos if you Google “Luigi Grassi Ospedale delle Bambole.”

The Ospedale was founded by Luigi’s grandfather–also Luigi–in 1800.  Grandpa was a set designer for a famous puppet theater in town, and he repaired some of the injured puppets, leaving them outside his shop to dry.  One day a woman passed by and said “wow, it looks like a doll hospital,” and that was that.

The Ospedale is located on one of Naples’ most famous streets, known as “Spaccanapoli” (shatter Naples) because it runs in an absolutely straight line (the Romans did it, natch) through the center of town.  It’s a couple of blocks from the street where the locals create and sell creche figures at Christmastime, everything from the participants in the Nativity to contemporary politicians, a true artisans’ quarter, with baroque palaces and churches mixed in.  And Gigi was one of the most beloved characters.

When I first started going there, somebody took me to the Ospedale because she said it was both wonderful and unique, and that it was a fine window into the Neapolitan spirit.  It proved more than that, for all kinds of customers showed up there, from poor people hoping to have their children’s dolls repaired or cured (some rubber dolls got “infected” by something that turned their skin black), to very wealthy customers from the city’s aristocracy or the business elite.  In all likelihood there were members or even leaders of crime families, but they were never identified as such.  The clientele was a microcosm of the city, in which rich and poor have long lived in the same buildings, and work and play very close to each other.

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It’s a tribute to the collapse of modern education that so many people, from pundits and professors to movie stars and policy makers, continue to repeat stereotypes and slogans that are demonstrably false and, in all likelihood, dangerous to our national health.  Yet the advocates of these false and dangerous myths are widely praised as the Best and the Brightest among us.  We should recall David Halberstam’s book of that title, which exposed the B & Bs as the foolish architects of the Vietnam debacle.

I’m going to talk about three current myths, which suck up an amazing amount of airtime, ink, and bandwith.  There are many others, but these should get us going on a serious discussion.

1.  The Syrian Peace Negotiations

The B & Bs generate new “peace” plans by the day, but there is no hope of a peaceful end to the Syrian slaughter.  Too much murder and torture has been unleashed by the Assad regime, too many people have been killed and maimed, to expect the Syrians to reason together.  That moment is gone.

Historians used to know that “peace” usually comes after one side defeats the other in war, and the winners impose terms on the losers.  That is what successful “peace conferences” are about, and the terms imposed on the losers define the “peace.”

So if you want peace in Syria, pick a side and help it win the war.   You may whine — as the Obama administration often does — that we have incomplete information and can’t see through to the “endgame.”  That’s usually the case, especially when you’ve got a bloated and failed intelligence community, as we do.  But once we engage, the situation changes (when America moves, the whole world changes), and intelligence improves.  Dithering won’t help, nor will calls for “peace talks” before one side has won.

Forget about the UN and the NGOs.  Above all, forget about “leading from behind.”  Remember Yoda:  “Not try.  Do.”

2.  The Iranian Nuclear Negotiations

We’ve all seen Iranians herded into the streets of their cities, led by beturbaned men in chants of “Death to America!”  What do you think they mean?  The war they have waged against us since 1979 proves that they mean just that.

So why should they give up the ultimate weapon?  They think it will make them invulnerable to American (and Israeli) military power.  They do not believe that either the American or the Israeli government will take effective action to prevent Tehran from building a nuclear arsenal.  They are not impressed with chest-pounding or bellicose rhetoric from Washington or Jerusalem.  They are, rather, convinced by the American retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the cuts in the military budget.

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