[BretLudwig]

((As a veteran word-maker-upper, I'd have went for "de-Italianization"
myself. Bret.))


"NYT: Italy lagging lamentably on de-Italianification
Wouldn't the whole world be better off if Italy weren't so damn Italian? I
mean, what has Italian culture ever contributed to anything? When will the
Italians get with the program and adopt the Universal Globoculture? The
New York Times wants to know!

Italy Gives Cultural Diversity a Lukewarm Embrace

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial.

Ponder that for a moment.

Italian culture certainly isnt diverse now. It subsists on an
all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian
television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for
improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and
Italian pop music. Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a
spaghetti-with-ragú diet now that an intercultural city program to serve
one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new
center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the
nutritional value of falafel and curry.


Italian children in Italy eat Italian food? The horror, the horror ...

And isn't it about time they tore down the Florence Cathedral and put up a
Frank Gehry building made out of sheet metal? How come there's not a Hello
Kitty logo anywhere on Michelangelo's "David"? Shouldn't La Scala dump
Verdi and stage a tribute to the Spice Girls?

All across Europe attitudes are stiffening toward immigration, nowhere
more so than here. €¦

Rome, an ancient magnet for foreigners, is naturally more integrated
than most Italian cities and, unlike most of the country, it has taken at
least a few steps in recent years to come to terms with its multicultural
reality, among them instituting a public library program to reach
immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign
cultures. The question now is whether such efforts will continue.

€œWe always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is
our present and future,€� said Franco Pittau, an official of Caritas, a
Roman Catholic social service and development association that, among
other things, monitors immigration here.

Franca Eckert Coen echoed that remark. An Italian Jew in an
overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with
Jewish art, she was in charge of multicultural policy under the former
mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ms. Coen recalled a year when Chinese
celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

€œThe newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,€� she
said. €œSo we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese
culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade
each year.€�

€œIt was the same with the Sikhs,€� she added. €œWe had a public
event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for
immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example,
had someone play Polish music at the museum.€�

€œLittle things,€� she called them. €œThey can overcome big fears.
I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture
is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to
bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a
positive.€�

Do you ever get the impression that Kevin MacDonald has secretly bought a
controlling interest in the New York Times and is rewriting its articles
to make them prove his theories correct?"

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/n...behind-on.html

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