I Know a
Man…
P erhaps no other
country in the world
is so cramful with
works of art as Italia is.
The people of Italia refer
to their Past to live in the
Present. The nation
boasts beauty in design,
fashion, and architecture.
Its culinary prowess is
renown; its machinery
goes to all parts of the
world; and, its
manipulation of matter
gives joy to millions who
wear its jewelry, drink
from its glassworks, or
touch its wood and
marble creations. When
one ties the knot of his
silk cravat made in Como,
wraps around her wool
scarf manufactured in
Prato, fastens the laces of
his fine leather shoes
made in Varese, or strokes
her refined linen from
Lucca, the MADE IN ITALY
label is certain to bring a
sense of glee and
contentment to both the
sexes.
Italia is a hands-on
economy. Its modus
operandi is meat and
potatoes capitalism.
Invoices are still hand-
written. Candles are used
to make wax seals for the
post office. Remember
those rubber stamps?
They are now being used.
OLIVETTI’s computer
division went out of
business. Italia is
electronic only when it
has to be. Italians want to
create beautiful articles
that fetch beautiful prices.
Luxurious items. Not $50
electronic watches, but
$50,000 ones that can be
sold in one’s lifetime for
$100,000. Italian
publishers do not print
essays for literary
criticism or business
management journals;
they translate into Italian
proven, foreign best-
sellers—usually from the
United States. Italians are
conservative and cautious
in business. They are out
to serve the rich. Italian
businessmen do not want
a low price for the
masses; rather, they want
a high price for the elite.
Italians are penurious.
Even with their language.
Italian has remained
almost the same for
centuries. English has as
much as five times the
amount of vocabulary
entries in dictionaries
than Italian does. Is it
possible that Italians
gesture so much because
their language lacks the
words needed for the
expression of it?
Italia is, therefore, anti-
scientific; that is to say
“not with it.” Italia is low-
flamed on a backburner in
the very hot kitchen of
Progress. It is an
ingredient in the zuppa
internazionale that
provides flavor far more
than it replenishes the
hungry with vitamins and
proteins. Italia is anti-
scientific by its very
nature. It is a place
where works of artistic
and historical value—from
the Past—are exhibited
and sold to the Present.
The Future enters little.
Italia is where what one
has should be preserved
as long as possible. Italia
is a huge museum which
blusters about how it was.
It maintains itself showing
the Past to the Present,
and this effort has until
now reaped tremendous
economic advantage.
Italia is anti-scientific for
another reason: its
production, 90%
stemming from small
family businesses, is for
the most part quasi-art—
craftsmanship. It is not
the mass production
producer’s breeding
ground. Science and
technology do not enter
persistently into the
minds of little Italian
family businesses many of
which are quick to see
their children leave school
as soon as possible to
come to work alongside
mom and dad. University
attendance in Italia is the
lowest in the European
Union.
2
Italians have an infinitely
primitive sensitiveness
regards design,
coordination, and beauty
in things they construct
and manufacture. They
are uncommonly gifted in
fabricating objects by
hand, and their
consummate skill is
recognized for its
wonderful
transformations. But, the
Italians are no longer
artists and have not been
for a very long time; they
are astute artistic
businessmen and
businesswomen. Italia’s
capolavoro is no longer
creation; it is changing
form. (It is the Japanese
who are making real the
dreams of Leonardo da
Vinci!) Work by artisans,
skilled laborers who
connect the Past with the
Present, is good business.
GUCCI, PUCCI, PRADA and
FERRARI know this very
well. The refined
technique of linking the
before to the now relies
little on Science. The
Pavarotti’s and Eco’s must
record their C.D.’s and
publish their books not in
Milano, but in New York or
London where the Present
looks to the Future and
the technological means
to deal with the Future
exist. Italia’s anti-Science
stance, indolent in spirit,
is carrying Italia further
and further away from
Progress. Italians are
short-sighted when it
comes to Science. They
are traditionalists stooped
in the what was. They are
not complicated
innovators or masterly
creators. They are
convinced that their Past
cannot be surpassed or
even equalled by any
other nation.
Let us change the word
“anti-scientific” to “non-
conformist” and look at
Italia from another angle
not thought of in terms of
annual reports, political
expediency, scientific
discoveries, or
accountants’ printouts.
Let us observe, candidly,
Italia a bit as a brake on
what some gauge an
outlandish behavior to
make everyone
correspond to current
customs, rules, and styles
—at worst, to uphold by
authoritarian means the
designs of a polity
characterized by a
monolithic unity. (Italia is
up against the giants yet
it is doing everything to
be squashed!)
The best and most skilled
members of Multinat
Statesmanship are clear
about their obsessive
drive to bring the world
into correspondence—for
the good, for the bad.
Most of us who are
alienated observers on
the World Scene, not
activists of homogeneity
(giant businesses,
worldly-thinking political
entities, think tanks,
Cyclopean financial
establishments, et cetera)
—more inclined to
authentic, “outside the
box,” immediate
considerations than to
chimerical ponderings—
are running scared. We
are distraught over
starvation,
overpopulation,
destruction of the Earth,
social injustice, crime,
3
inflation, deflation,
pollution, AIDS, broken
marriages, and so on.
The majority of us are at
the receiving end. We
simply want peace, quiet,
and security in our
political, social, and
ordinary lives. And we
know very well we do not
have what we want. We
understand that together
we are doing something
terribly wrong, yet we
want to believe that the
fault is not with us but
with those establishings
we are persuaded to
opine have failed us. This
fault-finding is a great
mistake. It is the
hatching grounds of the
very heavy-handed
appropriateness and
supposititious
democracy—both false
impressions—that at once
we admire for their
compatibility, then
despise for their
unfairness.
Non-conforming Italia
serves, in part, as a
symbol of that reaction
against the tendency to
bring into compliance
anomalously. Delightful
are the Italians. They
stuff themselves with
pasta and they sing with
joy. They bow with
reverence to the Pope’s
God and the United
States’ Ambassador, yet
never go to church or
know the name of
Washington’s
plenipotentiary. Italians
are warm, unconstrained
“free” agents. Against
the Machine, the
computer, electronics,
rationality, scheduling,
punctuality—against the
dirty “conformity” word.
They change reluctantly
and very, very, very
slowly. They are always
getting in the way of
Progress. They are extant
with an enthralling
appearance—one they
can count on to cover up
much for them.
I know a man in Prato
not far from where I
live who is himself
particularly interested in
his “image” and how it is
construed by others. And
I would like to tell you
about him.
I became acquainted with
this individual a little
more than a year ago,
and met him for the first
time in his office. The
more I came to know
about him, the more I was
struck with astonishment.
And even as I begin to tell
this story, I am tempted
to pinch myself to
convince myself that I am
not dreaming! This true
story is for me a very sad
one indeed.
The personage under
discussion is a business
consultant
(commercialista), a very
successful one at that—if
one would judge by
appearances only. He is
always answering his
cellphone. He drives an
enormous white
automobile equipped with
electronic gadgetry. His
office—with three
secretaries—is outfitted
with computers, the
Internet, email, fax
machines and other office
accruements not normally
found in Italian small
business offices. The
room adjacent to his
office is crammed with
books and economic
magazines and journals
4
mostly written in English.
There is a book he himself
wrote and published
personally but which few
people have purchased
but which he has given
hundreds of gifts of. He
represents many
companies, and he is
often so busy in his office,
he tells his secretaries to
inform certain callers that
he is out of town. He is
twenty seven years old,
uses Valium drops to calm
his nerves, and is under
doctor’s care for an ulcer.
If you look at the left arm
of his huge, expensive
desk chair, you will see
that it is worn through to
the “bone” from his
nervous hand rubbings.
And he has told me,
kidding of course, at least
three times—Freudian-
slipping all the way—the
following: “If I don’t go
crazy, I’ll go to jail!”
(Kidding, of course.)
Naturally, he dresses to
kill. Elegance is all
around him.
If you enter his office, you
will be immediately
impressed with an
inordinate amount of
framed pieces of paper
which—with the exception
of one oil painting of his
beautiful, childless wife—
are dedications to him for
some honor or other, for
some diploma from one
university or other, for
some seminar or other he
has attended. Although
he never went to
university in his own
country, he has
testaments to his
scholarly savoir faire from
many institutions that
seem at first to be
reputable and of a high
quality. All of these
certificates are, as might
be expected, framed in
very elegant, costly
wooden borders which
enclose them. You would
be fixed deeply.
Get ready to pinch
yourself…
Two of these diplomas are
from a school in California
where this character
studied for less than two
months. The diplomas
state clearly that the man
studied successfully and
fulfilled regularly the
requirements for not only
a Master’s degree in
Economics, but even a
Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Economics.
Under these two encased
parchments is another
boxed declaration—a bit
smaller—written on false
United States’
Department of State
stationery attesting to the
facts that the two degrees
are in buona fede, and
signed not “by…for…” but
forged for the United
States’ Secretary of State
his very self!
Get ready to pinch
yourself…
If we lean towards
another wall in the room,
two more sheepskins will
be seen. These are from
a university in
Switzerland, and they
proclaim that this twenty-
sevenish some one has
studied for not only the
Master of Business
Administration, but still—
hold on!—another Doctor
of Philosophy in
Economics! (To date:
M.A.. Ph.D., M.B.A., Ph.D.!)
Are you counting with
me?
5
Get ready to pinch
yourself…
One of the truths of the
matter here is that this
somebody, to qualify for
his Swiss Ph.D.,
purchased a photocopied
micro-filmed Ph.D. thesis
—of a student recently
“doctored” at a very
famous United States’
business school—from a
company in Ann Arbor,
Michigan and well-known
throughout the degree-
getting world, had that
thesis translated, and
then submitted it in order
to receive his Helvetian
documents conferring
honor and privilege.
Get ready to pinch
yourself…
The most recent foray by
this man hungry in his
extravagant quest for
recognition of his
adroitness in business
relations, has been the
enrollment in an
expensive “by post”
course, with video
cassettes and brilliantly-
designed study guides, for
yet another M.B.A. (M.A.,
Ph.D., M.B.A., Ph.D.,
M.B.A.!!!) granted by an
English school which I was
informed—by an Oxford
professor—is perhaps the
most respectable of its
kind and which is much-
touted throughout Europe.
And with all of these pegs,
our fox wants to return to
a famous business
university in his own
country to—you guessed
it!—TEACH!
Get ready to pinch Karl Marx
yourself…
* * *
While he reads some
Written by:
English, especially
economic terminology, he Anthony St. John
cannot—I swear!— Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
communicate in English, Italia
and if you call to speak to
him in English, one of his 3 April 1997
secretaries will tell you
immediately he is out of
town! Call again? Still
out of town.

Our heavily-degreed
perpetual student ever on
the march to nail another
“HONOR” to his wall to
impress his clients, has
larceny at heart. If he is
to be a purloiner, he is
going to be the best of
sharks. His determination
and verve would move
you. If it is everybody’s
business to steal, he will
do it better. He is an
artist. He does what he
does because he loves its
labor for its own sake.
(Cannot we, at least,
admire him for this?) And
the joy he affords his dear
mother and father—as he
sits next to them at Mass
every Sunday morning in
his parish’s almost empty
church—cannot be
computed in Earthly
terms.

If you ask him if he thinks

what he is doing is
“eccentric,” he will
respond with a boyish grin
—his baby face shining,
his blue eyes twinkling:
“Everybody’s doing it!”

“If you give them

(the capitalists)
enough rope,
they will hang
themselves.”