Marco Travaglio
Lo Stato Montificio

2012, year of crisis, recession, quadruple backward twists, earthquakes and seismologists, unemployment, desolation, trials and multicolored robes, societal collapse and bombardment of civil values. 2012, year of the technocrats, that questionable group of pseudo jack-of-all-trades, the royal saviors of the lost Homeland, who have descended to the modest republican table of Palazzo Chigi directly from their respective entrepreneurial fiefdoms: the pontiff Monti, the vestal of Labor and Equal Opportunities, Miss Fornero with easy tears and poor dialectics, but also the various Clini, Cancellieri, Balduzzi, the crème de la crème of the best industriousness of Italy who artistically set up a nice gathering in the halls of power for a healthy holiday among decrees, revisions, amendments, and various legislatings. Therefore, it is difficult to forget a year so dense with events and happenings, embarrassments and falls from grace, of little men, dancers, bullies, mini ministers, and puppets, especially when considering that the predicted retroverse big bang by the Maya will not manifest and will not wipe away all this simmering muck.

Bidding farewell to the departing year is a ritual that has been repeated for ages, and despite the storm of recent months, this 2012 will be no exception. Hence, along with the discount store champagne and the recycled panettone, pops up the dear, good Marco Travaglio, perhaps the only national exegete capable of validly telling us the waters in which we are navigating and on which highways of the impending cataclysm our GPS will lead us. Irreverent, politically incorrect, unfettered by ties, constraints, and intrigues, a worthy heir to what was the God of our native journalism, calm in movement and unleashed on paper, Travaglio embodies the figure of the quintessential disruptor, the troublemaker, the annoying mosquito that infiltrates the pavilions of awkwardness magically transformed into deputies and ministers, yet still churns out columns of biting satire worth a Nobel for publishing, totally unlike the vulgar clowneries similar to Bagaglino produced by illustrious colleagues. Reading his editorials is at the same time a delight and a simple summary exercise to comprehend the creaky carousel of politics: CaiNani, wheeler-dealers, scammers, suspects, ex-convicts, convicts, slanderers, forgers, tried individuals, and mafiosi - all (or almost all) roaming free through parliamentary halls, banks, and big enterprises - ignite the daily headlines, attempting to elicit hearty laughter from the reader instead of bitter tears.

The Monti-factory State assembles the best of Travaglio's editorials published in Fatto Quotidiano between April and December, a tasty organic and orderly collage of what the Empire of the technocrats has granted Italy, besides the IMU, the suffocating fiscal pressure, and the dominion of speculators over the economic life of an almost collapsed country. Among the many, the tug-of-war of the parties, the enlightening rise of Grillo and the due consequences on the chessboard of the frightened white collars, yet another blow to the judiciary delivered no less by the President of the Republic, the shower of decrees save-ILVA and save-Sallusti (but not save-all), alliances and fake alliances, intrigues, friendships, politically-moneyed engagements and, how could anyone forget, the cartoonish and clumsy comic book adventures of B., the traditional Travaglio target that nevertheless does not reduce the pieces into chains of clichés and cans of "already heard".

Farewell to 2012 will probably be a rather insipid "see you again" to the twelve similar months anticipated patiently, and hence, bubbles, candied fruits, Maracaibo, and fireworks will serve little to inaugurate the new and chase away the old in the annals of history. Goodbye laughs and smiles? Not really: the naturally irreverent, the former crybabies determined to change their mood, as well as the serious and grumpy only on grand occasions will manage to sketch half-moon expressions on the odd pages of Travaglio, the intelligent "jester" who figured out how to make the master laugh without being his servant.