Franco Battiato
Patriots

THE REVIEW

Young Patriot's Prayer.

To be recited late at night, in an absolutely expressionless tone, in front of the television, at the lowest volume, during the final credits of the broadcasts.

"Oh Great Guide who supports us in our solitary cause:
- Find any way to make me bear my people, who make the same horn noise both when they marry and when they go to the stadium.
- May I become increasingly disgusted by the grating sound of bells recorded on disc, and make my priest grow ever fatter, the one who turns his back to God during mass at the most sacred moment.
- Please the scientists and help them send a cousin of theirs to the moon, the only place in the galaxy darker than this Earth.
- Make me forget the poets of my childhood but especially theirs, since they have never grown up.
- Protect me from stereo blenders and Russian dancers who continue to trample the West (since in the East they don't know what to do with them).
- Grant me a single erection that doesn't depend on the smell of garbage and help me not to have a child because otherwise "one day all of this will be theirs".
- In return, make me travel a lot, perhaps by train rather than with my imagination, and let me not only encounter level crossings but also some level advancements.
- Bless the hairdressers and let the university professors disappear in peace, because styled hair is better than styled minds.
In any case, to improve things, I propose with your luminous help to declare war on the most formidable adversary I have ever discovered and who even now is listening to me with that smug expression which it maintains all day, even in the morning when it spies on me from the bathroom mirror."

(Francesco Messina, back cover of "Patriots", Franco Battiato, 1980)