Why hygiene’s getting sillier, languages easier, Easyjet harder, debt deeper, and repression sadder

The plan to one day leave the entire world’s population utterly confused about how to dispose of human waste and keep up personal hygiene levels has moved into a new gear in Italy. They now have – fully installed in most airports and service stations – WCs that flush while you are seated on them, taps that respond only to waving at the beam from a yard away, plugholes worked from beneath the basin, and cisterns that flush long on the short push but not at all on the long push.

As always, however, the shower-control manufacturers are way out in front when crossing obfuscation with obscurity. This morning I encountered one that made a Rubik’s cube seem like something any high IQ adult could solve within seconds. On the left was a heat control with blue and red dots next to each other. It wouldn’t work until the shower was turned on: for myself, I always test the temperature using my hands under real water in real time, but clearly some folks just guess about a likely future. However, creating the necessary flow was a puzzle up there with the eternal blood and stone dilemma.

If I turned the flow tap towards me, water cascaded into the bath. If I turned it away from me, it went off. It was only at a point 74.913% away from me that it turned the shower on. This was like trying to find Luxemburg on medium wave in the 1950s, but was a cinch compared to the heat control, which wouldn’t turn at all because it was based on push and pull.

Compared to the average shower, Italian is a relatively easy language to master. It obeys a small number of easy-to-remember rules involving ‘i’ and ‘o’ (carti de credito) the replacement of one vowel with two, usually ‘i’ and ‘a’ (famiglia, Italia) and the use of ‘zione’ for almost anything ending ‘ion’. Thus one very rapidly picks up denominazione and stazione, but hopefully not the masturbazione habits of Silvio Berlusconi. However, things will get complicated if Italy ever lurches to the Right, as it would then become a nazi nazione. They solved this last time around by incorporating the Latin fascisti, so perhaps next time they could merge with Greece’s Golden Dawn to create Chrysi Fascisti. On the other hand, they could just vote for the Full Mario Monti Nazione and have done with it.

In truth, after just twelve hours back here again I am more certain than ever the Italians will prove to be the thorn that pricks the EC soft-soap bubble. I base this sweeping prediction entirely on their unique concept of the family or – as we say in these parts – la famiglia. All southern European countries I know have this feature (cynicism aside, I find it claustrophobic and yet massively reassuring for the future – as I do Jewish families) but the Italians seem to me to take it a stage further. The downsides are endless feuds and gangsterism, but the upside above all is a fundamental belief in the maxim, “When it gets to the stage where the State screws the family, screw the State”. They may be prone to putting the strong man before the ordinary man, but mamma mia, nothing comes before the family.

Sadly, like all ‘developed’ nations now, urban Italy has its fair share of the bling-covered and insufferably rude obesities wobbling around chucking McDo wrappers everywhere. But Italian skills in, and presentation of, food leave most cultures standing. Put la famiglia together with al fresco nosh around a large garden table, and you have the ultimate in warmth. No doubt Al Capone too enjoyed al dente spaghetti al fresco, but every culture is a curate’s egg in the end.

The bollocks ever-present in economic culture demonstrates merely that most of it now is a scrambled, rotten egg. When you pay extra to reserve a seat and check in online with Easyjet, the strong impression given is that while others will endure the normal chaos associated with air travel, you by contrast will breeze past every queue, throw your bags nonchalantly in the direction of a staff member proffering fresh rose-petals, and swan airside, there to enjoy incredible bargains and priority boarding. In fact, because everyone checks in online these days – and every airport indulges terrorist thugs via an insistence on craven security measures – checking in, sitting in the boarding area, getting stuck in an airless embarkation tunnel, and then mastering human origami in order to occupy the plane’s cabin, is as tediously obscene as it always was. There is only one way to make air travel tolerable: go First Class – and even then, it can go wrong. But as most of us can’t afford to do that, it much behoves Easyjet to cut out the spin, otherwise I shall be forced to start referring to them as Sleazyjet.

There is, however, no way we’ll be able to cut out the spin-cancer that started in the body politic and now extends to everything uttered as a rational for anything in commercial, financial, economic and married life. All an humble blogger can do is point up the pathetic continuity of it all.

What I mean is this: when the banks run out of money with which they normally prop up rotten governments, the governments soon run out of money desperately trying to refill the lenders’ foolishly emptied vaults. So stronger governments in hock to the insolvent banks then turn their attention to raping Sovereigns in order to help the lenders (who will inevitably need to bail them out one day) get some money back that way.

And when there are no more opportunities to do that, they approve the banking policy of stealing the customers’ money by calling it a tax or levy. And when there’s none of that left, they go to the insurance providers and steal the private pension pots. And on the off chance that this too will run out, they move on to levying the possessions of the better-off taxpayer: big homes, second homes, flash cars, posh watches….you name it, they’ll steal it.

All of the above (and yes, it would’ve been hard-Left fantasy even five years ago) are now being run up flagpoles, tested for public response, and quietly discussed at secret AwayDays. To repeat yet again:

Pauperisation + wage dilution + high taxation + currency inflation = total slump. Until one day, total slump = sovereign insolvency = default. But still the Victim Debtors profess to believe in their guilt.

Perhaps, therefore, an old adage should now be rephrased thus:

‘Those whom the Gods wish to default, they first make sad’