Dear Director Feltri,
In a bar in Pordenone, last Monday, a fight broke out between two groups because of a trivial ordination: a boy asked for a Negroni, and from the next table, occupied by a group of foreigners, accusations of racism started.
Yes, he understood well: the cocktail would be racist. I believe we have come to pure madness. What do you think about it?
Giacomo Morace
Dear Giacomo,
I think that not only did we get to madness, but that we are really drunk, and not of Negroni, unfortunately, but of “Woke” culture distilled to toxic doses. We live in a society that is no longer indignant for ignorance, but for nouns. We have gone from alcoholic prohibition to linguistic prohibition: you can be violent, hypocritical, cialtrone, but woe to say a word that vaguely remember a controversial etymology. And so it happens that ordering a Negroni triggers a diplomatic crisis, as if Count Camillo Negroni, a Florentine nobleman of the late nineteenth century, was a trafficker of human beings with a colored skin instead of a refined drinker. It is yet another demonstration that we no longer read the stories, we use them as a pretext. Racism, today, is sought in the labels of liqueurs, not in the intentions of those who speak. The word Negro, who for decades has been used neutrally in newspapers, novels, songs and films, suddenly became radioactive and incendiary, as if it had caused only centuries of overpowering. Yet, if we were intellectually honest, we would admit that it is not the word that is racist, but the intention of those who use it. Otherwise we should raze whole lists of the telephone: via the surnames “Negri”, via the plates of the streets, via the labels of the wines, via the poet Negri, or rather, only if male and white, because if he were a woman he would be rightly protected by progressive rhetoric. But let’s go back to the Pordenone bar. A boy orders a Negroni.
The bartender pays Gin, Vermut and Campari. The next table is offended and indignant.
And here I allow myself to ask a very simple question: if three fingers of cocktails are enough to trigger the racism alarm, will it not be that we have all become barrels of touchiness without intelligence? And do you know what the worst aspect is? That these scenes do not make you laugh at all: they are scary. Because they certify the decline of a world that has lost the sense of words, distorting them, and replaced it with the paranoia of the politically correct.
By now we live in a state of permanent semantic alert. Talking is dangerous, writing is suspicious, even ordering to drink is risky.
The
Negroni is no longer a cocktail. It is an act of cultural war. However, I, dear Giacomo, will continue to drink it. And I will do it without guilt, in the face of those who confused anti -racism with historical illiteracy.
To health.