Of Mario Bozzi Trails
Source: Mario Bozzi Trails
We know a lot about chic radicalism and not only from the evergreen book that is the basis of this effective definition (“Radical Chic” by Tom Wolfe), synthesis of the Mundanes' falling in love (rich bourgeois) for their enemies (Black Panthers, trade union activists, third worldists, etc.). Fruit of the age of inconsistency and banality – to use Christopher Lasch's image (“The culture of narcissism”) – the radical chic ended up warming themselves in the light of their idols, being assimilated. “The elite is me”: Bernard-Henri Lévy is embodied on the cover of the glossy rotogravure, while the radical chic vulgate rages on the mass media, in television lounges, on the front pages of newspapers, a sign of reassuring conformism and quiet living.
But the others ? What do we know about no-radical chic? ? Ugly, dirty and bad – according to the current popular belief. Obviously uncultured, intolerant, fearful of differences... In reality - upon closer inspection - the no-radical chic embody an idea, certainly "other", but complex world, with which the dominant culture (and the information media associated with it) sooner or later they will have to start doing the math.
The no-radical chic reject quiet conformism and current approval. They don't know what to do with old ideologies, using popular common sense as a yardstick, that ability to judge reality with balance and reasonableness, understanding the practical needs, of which we had – for decades – lost track. The no-radical chic are proud of their individuality, but they repudiate bourgeois individualism, neo ideology of a man and a woman "freed" from traditional ties (family members, community, national, religious) and increasingly prisoners of contemporary frustrations/depressions.
The radical chic vulgate has replaced the "dead God" with desires and consumption, reproduced endlessly, putting aside the authentic questions about the meaning of existence, on the strength of the "limit", on the "reasons" of the Sacred. The no-radical chic understand the mass media emotion over Notre Dame in flames, but even more, they look with dismay at the empty churches (or worse transformed into discos). The no-radical chic are not thrilled by vintage bubbles and lobster, preferring Lambrusco and ravioli. They are worried about contemporary language filled with useless anglicisms, claiming their belonging to the Peninsula of a thousand dialects. They oppose the spread with daily work. Forced to live in a physically peripheral and anonymous reality, they love their land, the concrete one, marked on the horizon by towers and bell towers. They listen to the Nordic Greta and wonder: the reviled Middle Ages had not already understood everything ?
The no-radical chic don't know what to do with "grey" areas. They seek and cultivate yes yes no no, unhealthy plant for those who are eternally used to mediating and granting everything, in the sign of infinite progressivism. They look to today by appealing to some immortal principles: the sense of Faith in a God and in a Doctrine, that have informed Western civilization; the Homeland as a sense of belonging to a community, house of the Fathers, soul and spiritual destiny; the family as a bet and legacy, present and future together, flesh and Spirit.
In the sense of relativism-ideology it is the mending of meaning that "agitates" the no-radical chic: the Beautiful, the Good, il Giusto are the real challenges on the path to a new cultural recomposition, social and political. It is much more than a Project and a Program. It's an expectation, the one that the radical chic have given up on, satisfied in their elitism without people, the one a people looks up to, perhaps unconsciously, waiting for a new elite that will make this expectation clear and concrete.