"What is the right, what is the left", sang, mockingly, italian singer-songwriter, playwright, actor, cabaret artist, guitarist and theater director Giorgio Gaber in 1994.
The song focuses on the contrast between a long series of clichés - at times even improbable, ironic, or paradoxical - attributable, by stereotype, to one ideology or another. It is Gaber himself who specifies how the differences in substance between the two parts, going beyond mere appearance or folkloristic aspects, appear to have become difficult to identify.
"Com'è dolce naufragar in questo mar"
Nowadays, the question appears even more tangled. In the midst of postmodern chaos, completely adrift in the shipwreck of every cornerstone, we happen to witness scenes and scenarios that are, to say the least, unusual.
The Woke culture, the cancel culture, on the one hand, have redefined the concept of the left, a radical, authoritarian, violent, intolerant, post-feminist and post-human left, while the institutional left, fully integrated, attached to the armchairs, seems to have completely abandoned the anti-capitalist struggle.
On the other, an unseemly populist right that calls itself nationalist, sovereignist, traditionalist, ultra-capitalist, God forbid, led by techno-plutocrats, but, at the same time, incredibly liberal, in favor of pornography and prostitution - see the past of the new American president - anti-prohibitionist (?), even promoter of freedom of speech and against censorship.
In the meantime, as the natural disaster grows, neo colonialism come to power...
Dear Gaber, your verses need to be updated: "the new left is the new right and the new right is the new left".
Am I dreaming or am I awake?
We're living in a motherfucking, chemically imbalaced, upside-down world.
Confusion is the new religion.
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