Giorgio Gaber
Libertà Obbligatoria

“Wherever we have abandoned abortions of happiness to rot in the corners of the streets.”

The crumbs. Nothing but crumbs remain.

Where has Happiness gone? The kind that so enlivened the late seventies, the years of protest, the kind that intoxicated the streets of Naples, Milan, Rome, and all the great squares of Italy.

It has rotted, decaying until it nullifies. It lies forgotten, perhaps abused.

And so the streets, which had characterized the entire sixties generation, rightfully should be cleared of everything, of illusions and hopes, and of the most precious thing of all: dreams (as someone else would say just the following year). According to Giacomo Leopardi, dreams are the only means by which man can fleetingly savor pleasure, the only useful escape valve from the heavy daily life that enslaves us, deluding us into thinking we are “free.” Yes, because it all starts from there, or rather, from here (“I want to be free, free like a man” it was said).

The Freedom that is imposed on us, that crushes us until it makes us victims of a sense of anguish that is more oppressive than any dictatorship. Because, when you see it on your t-shirt, on your tennis shoes, on your fourteen-ounce blue jeans, the worst evil is not an enemy to fight, a visible and recognizable enemy, but something devious, slimy, that insinuates itself into our body, that tears us apart and torments us: a cancer.

“The killer inside is like an injection, you can’t stop it and it spares no one, no one escapes the deadline.”

The Freedom, like the American one, that spares nothing. It crumbles the individual and makes him sick, it eats you from within without your noticing. Death is everyday. Like Freedom, it’s within everyone’s reach. Indeed, even death is accepted, made “free” (never has the play on words been more significant) by Freedom. And it is right in everyday life that man dies.

Giorgio Gaber remains a philosopher of our times, one of the few to penetrate the darkest labyrinths of human unconscious and to analyze its weaknesses, serving our conscience on a silver platter (“Conscience is like the sexual organ: it either gives life or it pees”). And despite everything, sinking into the utmost bitterness, he manages to make everything so simple and at the same time ingenious, thanks to his sacrilegious and elegantly sarcastic vein (“The dream of Jesus” and “The dream of Marx”).

The Freedom that everyone wants to impose upon us cannot be considered such. A Freedom cannot be Obligatory. It is an abortion; it is a delirium. It is like the farmers’ shit. Man is not made to be alone, but to be “free” with his fellow humans. But we, tender and enchanted men, morons and devastated (as “The Party”, written a few years later, says), cannot gain awareness of it. We are like animals; we need hierarchies to distinguish ourselves. We need Power.

A fictitious power, but one that manages to fill our void, our inadequacy towards any type of society.

“Yes, we can, we are as free as the air. Yes, we can, we are the ones who make history. Yes, we can, freedom, freedom, freedom, obligatory freedom.”

What?! With all the freedoms you have, you also want the freedom to change? (Quote.)