Are Europeans cooler than Americans? In normal times, I would say, ARE YOU KIDDING ME HAVE YOU SEEN EUROVISION??? ; however, in these times of global pandemic, I’m thinking that Europeans are way hella cooler than I ever thought they were. I was listening to Sylvia Poggioli report for NPR about the corona virus from Rome and she ended her piece by translating something she saw on a city wall, courtesy of a local graffiti artist:
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
This is high class graffiti, if you ask me. I think this is beautifully sad, and sums up our shared COVID experience, but is particularly meaningful for what we in America are going through, not because of the disease but because of, well, you-know-who turning our nation into a shithole country.
The line is from Antonio Gramsci [[January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937), an Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician who wrote on political theory, sociology and linguistics. He attempted to break from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist thought and so is considered a key neo-marxist. He died in prison, having been brutalized for over a decade by the Fascists because “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”.
Gramsci wrote the above line while in prison, in 1929.