Cultural Criticism of Rap

 

Rap has persevered in the decades since the decline of its predecessors, the end of what used to be called Black music, in the 1980s, in conjunction with the predominance of pop music, which had been manufactured and sanitised to maximise sales. Only once the music scene became totally dominated by music which had no relation to anything outside of its bubble do we find rappers could lay claim to authenticity. The success of so-called 'Gangsta Rap' comes down to its drawing upon a certain view of the lives led by the Black American under-class. The fact that these rappers then go on to celebrate their success in a rags-to-riches narrative meshes well with the false promise of meritocracy. We now live with the worst of both worlds, where it seems no one is pushing boundaries far enough.



A Dirty Old Man.

The poet and self-described dirty old man Charles Bukowski died twenty years ago. He passed after a battle with leukaemia in which he finished his novel Pulp (1993). He gave up the ghost with a sigh of relief. He was the American equivalent of Céline. He lived his work. It was the end of the Beatniks and the Hippies when Bukowski burst onto the scene, having been crowned King of the Little Magazines, and churned an incredible bulk of poems and short stories from the 1940s onwards. It was a hard struggle, writing from the gutter, mainly for others who found themselves there too.

Other poets such as WH Auden had seen structure, order and stability (not to mention hard work!) as the vital components to the life of a writer, Charles Bukowski was the manifest opposite and revelled in it. The writing was meant to be as alive as you are, so it was meant to sweat and bleed and reek to high heaven. It's all on show. As Nietzsche put it "Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." He had little time for formal questions, and regarded the matter with scorn, as a retreat for the writer, carving out a minimalist body of work instead. He hated rules and regulations and quickly found enemies and friends. The novels were a fictionalised autobiography centred around Henry Chinaski. It is a portrayal of life in the darkest corners of American society, at times absurdly comic, inexplicable, and it all comes with an authenticity in its gritty texture as each word has to carry its own weight.

A friend of mine told me she feels like having shower after reading Bukowski's prose. As readers we follow the travails of Chinaski through dirt cheap apartments, menial work, drunken brawls, gambling, sexual escapades, and eventually to Hollywood. He opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook "It began as a mistake." And with that he reels you in to read a tale of a dozen years as a postie. He had written the book in about a month, after John Martin came to him and made an unconditional pledge. Martin promised to give Bukowski 25% of his earnings for life - it amounted to $100 at the time - every month if he quits and writes full time. Whether or not they succeeded the money would be there. It was this guarantee of a minimal income that gave him the motivation to leave the post office and start work on a novel. It was also what John Martin needed to build up Black Sparrow Books.

It was in the late 60s that Bukowski became a part of the countervailing forces of American culture and society. He had a column in the LA Free Press and Open City - with a column called 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man'. The Beat Generation was on the wane and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on the lookout for the next big thing when he came across Bukowski. It should not surprise anyone that he was not too impressed with the Hippies. After all, this is the same poet who loathed Walt Disney for creating Mickey Mouse. He shared this disdain for the Hippie with Jack Kerouac, Much like Kerouac the dirty old man would be hoovered up by the prevailing spirit of Western life. It's almost as if there was no escaping it. The Hudson driven by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957) now sits in a museum with the same dust on it. There is Jack Kerouac Alley, just as there is Bukowski Court.

In Factotum (1975) Bukowski rails further against the Protestant work ethic and instead preached the refusal to work: "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" He was an individualist who hated rules, but he offered a counter-individualism to the pretences of the 'American dream' and its false promise of paradise by hard labour. He spat on its sunny optimism and expressed antipathy towards society at large. Solitude was the alternative. It was a conservative solution in that it had no care for the problems of society, or of people more generally. The solitary alternative was a kind of isolationism, an active policy of non-intervention with the world and its social ills.

It wasn't just a literary trope as we find if we examine his life. In the days when his father called him Heinrich, the young Bukowski studied at LA City College in the late 1930s just on the onset of the War. Once it had started he had moved to New York City and would explore the East Coast. He worked whatever menial jobs he could - even irking a living in a pickle factory - and filled his spare time with typing and drinking. He was first published at the age of 24 and that same year he was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of draft evasion. Bukowski was held for seventeen days in Moyamensing Prison before going on to fail a mandatory psychological exam. He had escaped conscription. Given the militaristic culture of the US there has been some discussion on whether Bukowski harboured pro-Nazi sympathies in those days. It seems more plausible that the young Bukowski simply evaded the draft because he didn't see any worthwhile effectuality in military service. It doesn't take a Nazi to believe that.

Besides, the most laden prejudice in Bukowski's work is not anti-Semitism by any match. It is misogyny, not racism. If Bukowski had been a fascist it would have been obvious. He had a lot to hide, but he chose not to. He was certainly a male chauvinist. In Post Office Bukowski puts it bluntly "Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love." Misogyny is certainly a major part of Bukowski's writing. The same year that the book came out Bukowski wrote in a letter to a friend "Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." We got a glimpse into this 'living hell' in The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985) in which we can witness him verbally abusing and kicking his wife Linda off of their sofa.

We shouldn't turn a blind eye to Bukowski's misogyny even if we do take pleasure in the unexpected exuberance in his melancholic free-verse. It's charged with a life-affirming spark. Unlike the domesticated version of individuality Hank Chinaski finds more life in the bars than in the sweat and toil of the factory. This was at a time when the US was a major industrial and manufacturing hub, yet it was on its way to deindustrialisation. It's not clear where this man would fit in today. It was a different America where Chinaski roamed free. It's plausible he would have much more company in a post-industrial capitalist society. He writes "The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me." Elsewhere the dirty realist invites us to "go all the way" even at great cost to ourselves.

The Left's disarray over the Assange case.

Over the Assange case the Left has found itself once again divided, once again schismatic, sectarian and ultimately unable to articulate itself in the midst of a state-media consensus on the extradition of Assange to Sweden. The liberal commentariat has reacted with a cretinous apologetics for the government's hysterical threat to raid the Ecuadorian embassy to forcibly seize a whistleblower for allegations he isn't charged with yet. The BBC have set the agenda, the debate has been limited to just two positions: you either take the side of law and order to extradite Julian Assange to face the allegations in Sweden, or you believe that the allegations against Assange are illegitimate. It is the case that there are three main positions on the Left, but only one can be acknowledged by the mainstream media:

- It's about Justice: Assange needs to answer to these allegations given their serious nature, for the sake of a consistent commitment to transparency and accountability he should be extradited. The threat of extradition to the US has been greatly exaggerated by his supporters to justify his refusal to face these serious allegations.

- Bad Sexual Etiquette: The allegations of rape/molestation are illegitimate, possibly cooked up in order to vilify WikiLeaks and detain Assange for revealing secret information. It's purely a political matter, the allegations are a cover to extradite Assange to Sweden and then to the US. We have to stand beside Assange at this time.

- Don't underestimate the US: It isn't the definition, or even what constitutes, rape that we should be debating. The allegations are extremely serious. But it is a matter of the extradition purely. The Swedish government could question him in Britain, possibly by video link, and has the power to veto any extradition to the US that might come up. Yet the Swedish government refuses to do either. Surely then it makes sense for Assange to seek refuge in Ecuador to avoid a similar fate as Bradley Manning.
Of course the only line that the bourgeois media are interested in is that of 'bad sexual etiquette' - it was irresistable - given the hysteria WikiLeaks seems to have provoked even among liberal news outlets. And the Left has been in an almost perpetual state of crisis for a long time. There isn't much of a coherent Left left, though there never was a unified Left. It seems that this is a symptom of the decline and disarray of the Left.

Womb Wars.

Since the beginning of 2012 we have heard the usual blather about welfare 'reform' (a most dodgy word in political language) with the defenders of family values reserving a particularly cold place for single-mums. The Conservative Party have pushed for a cap housing benefit at £26,000 on commonsense grounds of "fairness". Of course, this isn't nearly enough for the gutter-press which would like to see the whole benefits system scrapped followed by the swift return of workhouses. It would hit large families hardest even if they have managed to find cheap housing outside of London. There are now pushes in Newham to boot the poor out of London altogether. Clearly the London City-State is just for the ultra-rich to swan around in limousines. The next kick was to single-mothers in a bid to make them pay for trying to get child support from their former partners.

Even though it makes far more sense to cap private rents in London, at least in the short-term, as everyone knows that the rent is too damn high! Of course it isn't enough to cap rents, there needs to be serious public investment in affordable housing. And yet the Conservatives have no time for this discussion. It's just assumed that the problem is that they haven't gone far enough. But there's plenty of ink and phlegm to be wasted on calls for an end to dependency culture. There's even been time to entertain nonsense about morality legislation. We've seen Nadine Dorries, that arch-custodian of the sacred foetus, go after sex education in the wake of failure on her campaign to sledgehammer the right to choose. This is the politics of reaction at work again, it has nothing to do with any moral values. Whenever politicians talk of 'family' you should expect an attack on women to follow.

This is where class and sex converge, where feminism and leftism are conjoined at the hip. Everyone knows the word "proletariat", but not every rascal with a Marxian phrase book know that the term is derivative of the Latin for "offspring". Terry Eagleton reminds us that it referred to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. Society demanded reproduction, not production from these women. The proletariat was originally outside the workplace, not within it, just like the single-mother living on benefits. But the work these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. The average worker is a woman in the world today, as it was in the days of Marx and Engels when Britain was the workshop of the world.

As the workers' movement suffers in this time of regression, so do women. We can see this in America. The Georgia House has passed a 'foetal pain' bill that stipulates women must continue to carry to term a stillborn baby as pigs and cows do. The lot who think its proper that a women should die in back-alley abortion clinics to save a foetus have seen victories recently with 'Let woman die' bills. There are businesses spying on potential employees and judge them in accordance with their use of birth-control. This is the nation partly founded by Aaron Burr who hung a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in his office and insisted that his daughter be educated at the same standard as a man. And we expect this of women for no reward. It's not like we recognise motherhood as work, so many of us don't think the raising of children has any worth at all that we support cuts to child benefit. It's just something women do for free, like a lot of wonderful things.

We've seen people like Rick Santorum pop up, an Opus Dei Republican who believes that life begins at erection. The sort of lunatic who is opposed to abortion in cases of rape. This comes from a man with no kind of social conscience at all. He wants to legislate what consenting adults do in the bedroom. The state can intrude into that area, but not emancipate individuals from wage labour. Santorum's rotten mind fixated on the rigidity of hierarchy and the strength of authority. It is no coincidence that Santorum's politics consist of a return to theoconservative values with the state as a nanny for the rich, a bludgeon of the poor and of the foreign. It isn't coincidental, the opposition to the vital freedom, for women, over their rate of reproduction fits neatly into this platform of sadism. It's about making sin fun again for a privileged few in a way.

As noted by Peter Singer if abortion was illegal then it would be poor women who die from botched abortions in droves whereas well-off women can travel to another country in search of the treatment. Think of the number of people who travel to Switzerland in order to commit suicide. Clearly, the value of life only applies to some in the world of Nadine Dorries. The sacred foetus trumps mummy almost every time I'm afraid to say. Of course, when mummy can fly out to another country and hire a doctor to perform the procedure without a coat-hanger then a blind eye will be turned. Furthermore, as women gain greater control over their lives economically then they're less likely to get pregnant. In a society where there are greater opportunities, better education and better pay for women there will be less children born but there will be less abortions too. Primates like Mr Santorum are unable to see this, men like this have no right to claim to be "pro-life".

Male Mythology in Gonzo.

The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism (a twisted form of the unfulfilled longing) and Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human". Then there is the reckless Yeamon and the inexplicably unfuckable Sala, between them we might situate Kemp as a kind of "moderate witness" who is never as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. This is a standard lesson of literature, the passive will destroy themselves and the rebel will be destroyed by the system. It is being able to participate and pull back from the edge just in time that makes for a great story. Especially when we're talking about Gonzo journalism, the journalist is a participant in his story in the full subjective sense. With all of this mind we should look at when Paul Kemp finds himself on a beach after a night of festivities with a woman called Lorraine:

We talked for a while, drying off as best we could, and suddenly she reached over and pulled me down on top of her. “Make love to me,” she said urgently.

I laughed and leaned down to bite her on the breast. She began to groan and jerk me around by the hair, and after a few minutes of this I lifted her onto the clothes so we wouldn’t get full of sand. The smell of her body excited me tremendously and I got a savage grip on her buttocks, pounding her up and down. Suddenly she began to howl: at first I thought I was hurting her, then I realised she was having some sort of extreme orgasm. She had several of them, howling each time, before I felt the slow bursting of my own.

We lay there for several hours, going at it again when we felt rested. All in all I don’t think we said fifty words. She seemed to want nothing but the clutch and howl of the orgasm, the rolling grip of two bodies in the sand.

Paul Kemp promised to call Lorraine - the lie we all know so well - and never does, as far as we know, whereas Kemp later returns to the US where Chenault waits for him. She had left Yeamon for Paul soon after she reappeared after the incident at the carnival, in which she was almost certainly gang-raped at a party - a trauma never fully explored or resolved in the book, it just happened. After turning up at Kemp's place Chenault asks Paul Kemp to get in the shower with her and then comes a flash of impure Gonzo "I heard a gong somewhere in the back of my brain, and then a melodramatic voice saying, 'And this concludes The Adventures of Paul Kemp, the Drunken Journalist. He read the signs and saw it coming, but he was too much of a lecher to step out of the way.' Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault." It is clear that our hero did not go celibate between the chapters, but the sex scene with Chenault is significant in its difference to the earlier tryst on the beach.

I felt totally defeated. For a while I paced around the apartment, barely hearing her happy chatter, then I gave up entirely and went over to the bed and took off my clothes. I fell on her with such a violence that her smile quickly disappeared and it became a desperate business.

She kicked her feet in the air and shrieked and arched her back and she was still trying when I exploded inside her and collapsed with exhaustion. Finally she gave up and locked her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck, and started to cry.

I leaned on my elbows and looked down at her 'What's wrong?' I asked.

She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. 'I can't,' she sobbed. 'I get so close, but I can't.'

We might reach for the term 'courtly love' to denote the way in which Chenault was pursued by Paul Kemp simply because she was forbidden to him as Yeamon's girlfriend. It began on the plane over to Puerto Rico where he was desperate to see to it that she could sit next to him and ended up getting into a fight with an elderly man over his seat. Keep in mind that the perpetuation of the 'courtly love' structure hints at the ongoing attempts of man to compensate for his reduction of women to mere vehicles for his fantasy.In turn woman comes to inhabit this fantasy as her 'femininity' and she is deprived of her particularity as a woman. As the pursuit moved beyond 'loving' her (for lack of a better phrase) for something in her more than herself - as an object - to seeing her as a subject of lack. If we continue along this Žižekian line we find that this leads us to the conclusion that sexual difference retains the Real which cannot be symbolised and lovers are fated to settle for a relationship that is a "non-relationship".

Then again we might be tempted here to accept the conclusion that the point of the tryst on the beach with the "dark skinned" Lorraine was to stand as the exotic Other with a certain authenticity in contrast to the anemic and inhibited whiteness of Chenault. A racism turned on its' head where Lorraine was an exotic and wild lay on a beach by comparison with Chenault. So the only point of Lorraine was to point us towards Chenault's deficiency, once she has served her purpose on the beach she can disappear. It is only after Kemp beds Chenault that the narrative can reach a conclusion - the return to home - so we might designate Puerto Rico as a vanishing mediator on it's own. But then what might we read into Chenault's disappearance as she heads onwards to New York? A rendezvous in the Big Apple remains a genuine possibility for Paul with Chenault. It is never fully resolved what happened at the carnival, through Paul's eyes it is as if Chenault was "asking for it" in the standard misogynist contours of rape as in some way the fault of the woman.

As Žižek has pointed out there is a sense in which the excessive desire of female fantasy and male fantasy fails in a bid to overcome such an excess. It poses a threat to male identity and the woman has to be erased as it were. One way to escape from the excessive Real encountered in fantasy is to 'make love', not to reenact the fantasy but to escape from it. Perhaps this is the reason that Chenault has to 'disappear' from the narrative in order for it to be able to reach any conclusion. What might that say about her appearance in the narrative as a whole? Effectively she was only present as her desire for phallic enjoyment. In the note she leaves for him to find Chenault writes "I can't stand it anymore. My plane leaves at six. You love me. We are soul-mates. We will drink rum and dance naked. Come see me in New York. I will have a few surprises for you." This is the only space which opens up for Chenault's subjectivity, yet she can only express what we already know and expect of her. There is no active part to play and in actuality woman "therefore does not exist" in the Lacanian formula.

The Obscenity of Berlusconi.

"I am absolutely sure to be the most democratic man to ever become Prime Minister in Italy." - Silvio Berlusconi

The long awaited and final downfall of il Cavaliere may come in the form of a conviction for paying an underage girl for sex, as well as other charges of fraud, it is clear that these allegations are just the tip of the ice-berg with this man. For Berlusconi it is all an elaborate conspiracy cooked up by communists, just like the months of legal battles over corruption allegations, constitutional crises, political infighting and a lot of sex scandals - which have become an obsession for the media. These scandals and crises left Berlusconi hanging in power by a thread. Back in February women demonstrated against Berlusconi, who personifies the rampant sexism and misogyny which is endemic in Italian society. The sexual excesses of Berlusconi have been widely documented and chewed up by the media, though we ought to remember that, as Noam Chomsky once said, "When the press focuses on the sex lives of politicians, reach for your pocket and see who's pulling out your wallet."


The glorious accomplishments of Berlusconi style authoritarianism include a stagnant economy, one of the world's highest levels of public debt and 30% youth unemployment. He has seen to it that the state will sanction the murder of illegal immigrants, the boats they use to travel over to Italy can be sunk. As for those people who dare to try and climb aboard fishing boats can be beaten without any serious chance of prosecution. Berlusconi has also been keen to introduce legislation to raise the prison sentences for illegal immigrants to a third higher than for an Italian. With the state of emergency implemented in 2008, thousands of soldiers were deployed to "combat" illegal immigration, organised crime and sexual deviancy... Oh the irony! Berlusconi was eager to speak to the hysterical fears of Italians with a populist line of delivery on policy which was supported by the mass-media that he dominates. At it's weirdest and most disturbing moment Italy saw Jewish-Italians voting for neo-fascists on the basis of Berlusconi's support for Israel.

The populist campaign Berlusconi has launched against the judiciary, who were heroes after Tangentopoli in the early 1990s and to whom Berlusconi is partly indebted in that sense. Since then he has consistently portrayed the judges as agents of the radical Left and has succeeded in doing so, the judiciary has been left widely discredited. In 2009 it seemed as though the separation of powers had been seriously undermined by Berlusconi in this way. Through the mass-media which he dominates directly and indirectly, a new commonsense supplanted old values and ideas. There was a common belief that there was no alternative to Berlusconi, which has some ring of truth to it as the Italian Left has yet to recover from the collapse in the early 90s. Then there is the notion that he embodies the country and that the Party of Freedom is the people of Italy. Meanwhile, the Italian state has become a shadow of Big Business as Berlusconi hurled himself into politics to defend his empire from the Left.

"The real Italian anomaly is not Silvio Berlusconi but communist prosecutors and communist judges in Milan who have attacked him again and again since he entered politics." - Silvio Berlusconi

Keep in mind that Berlusconi first came to power in May 1994 in the shadow of Tangentopoli - the biggest bribery scandal in post-war Italian history - which led to the collapse of the major political parties in a quagmire of corruption charges. As Forza Italia was founded in the midst of the crisis prosecutors found that Berlusconi had made a payment of 23 billion lire, the equivalent of more than £10m, to Bettino Craxi. It was the single largest bribe ever paid to an Italian politician. Berlusconi was convicted in that case but the conviction was quashed because of the statute of limitations. The Socialist Party which was led by Craxi collapsed and the former Prime Minister fled to Tunisia rather than face a prosecution. In retrospect, the current Prime Minister of Italy has made Richard Nixon look polished and not just clean in morals. The lurch to the Right in the midst of political turmoil in the 1990s might be matched by a lurch to the Left after Berlusconi finally falls.




It appears that the regime that he has been constructing all these years may not last until 2013. The conflict within the government over major issues like the intervention in Libya. Even Gianfranco Fini has abandoned il Cavaliere to found a new party of his own after he helped to secure the five-point programme of the incumbent administration back in September. It is seems quite strange in retrospect that it looked as though Berlusconi would no doubt serve a full 5 year term in 2009. It should also be noted that there is still a need for a Gramsci or a Togliatti, just as there was in 2009. There has been a resurgence in support for opposition parties in local elections which has further undermined Berlusconi's position. There is also a growing youth movement to force him from office on the streets, it looks as though the government might finally crumble. But there is still a serious need for a viable alternative to Berlusconi, which is the only reason he has been able to hold on this long. 

The lack of formidable opposition to Berlusconi has been made evident over the years by his unsettling ability to constantly reinvent his political platform and relaunch himself. Even when Romano Prodi won the General Election of 2006 by a small majority Berlusconi could resort to the game that he was "robbed", the insinuation of vote-rigging and the refusal to concede victory. Then the legal wranglings, which constrained the ability of the opposition to gain a majority in the Senate, he had personally crafted contributed to the crisis which led to Prodi's downfall in 2008. Remember this is the same fellow who claims to be the target of intense scrutiny from a left-wing elite which has exercised a campaign against him through the judiciary and the media. The line that there is a conspiracy against him is constantly used even though he dominates the media in Italy. After Avvenire questioned the moral fibre of the Prime Minister il Giornale, which is run by his brother Paolo Berlusconi, vilified the editor of Avvenire as a closet homosexual who had harassed the wife of his lover.

"I always win, I'm cursed to win." - Silvio Berlusconi

The man is no underdog, which is clear as Silvio Berlusconi is the only Prime Minister in the history of the Italian Republic to rule for a 5 years. He has had unprecedented influence on the country's culture in the last 30 years and has dominated the political discourse for over 15 years. Two years ago he commanded the biggest majority in Italian political history. He has garnered the hospitality of such political leaders as Vladimir Putin, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Tony Blair. To each of whom he has "donated" at least nine watches. He has used the money he has accumulated over the years to purchase splendid homes at home and abroad, including one in the Bahamas. The paranoia of elites is befitting of an aging reactionary, similar to Richard Nixon in that sense, who sees a sinister network of enemies unfolding before his very eyes. Though it is also a convenient way to explain away the flaws of policy, fall in approval ratings and mass-demonstrations in the streets.

The result of a referendum has undermined legislation Berlusconi introduced in favour of nuclear power, the privatisation of water and trial immunity for cabinet ministers. In spite of il Cavaliere's call for a boycott of the referendum 57% of the electorate turned out and 95% of them voted against Berlusconi in effect. So it looks like Silvio Berlusconi might actually face trial for the liaison with an underage prostitute Karima El Mahroug, whom he saved from a prison cell with the pull of a few strings. Then there is the case in which David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, was sentenced to four and a half years in jail by a Milan court for taking a bribe. In spite of the fact that the conviction was annulled on appeal, because of the statute of limitations, magistrates in Milan are bent on prosecuting Berlusconi for bribing Mills. Two other cases pending concern alleged tax evasion by Berlusconi and his son Pier Silvio, as well as the sale and purchase of rights to American TV shows by Berlusconi's companies.

In spite of all this the man has managed to win the last vote of confidence by just 24 votes, with a great deal of help from Lega Nord in spite of the frustrations with the coalition. The coalition government he leads is about to initiate the first series of cuts which will amount to $57 billion by 2014. Of course, a crackdown on tax evasion would be out of line even though that is the only way to reduce taxes in the long term. Clearly it would seem that the resistance to austerity measures in Italy has the same problem as the anti-cuts activists in Britain. The mass-media has no room for the alternatives to spending cuts, which is bad news for the Left in Italy and elsewhere. With an approval rating of 29% it would seem that Silvio Berlusconi is doomed, it might be that the Italian people do not require a viable alternative to shunt Berlusconi out of office. But it remains unclear what would come from that in regards to real change, even if Berlusconi is left to die in jail, another political vacuum could follow as seen in the early 90s and the damage done will reverberate in Italy for a long time.