Letter to Michele Serra on D’Alema and Forattini
23 November 1999
Dear Michele Serra, I don’t agree with you. I write it to you in il Foglio although I know of it not assiduous reader (I’ll give you a call), to try to scatter the cards of the usual factionalism. I write that I do not agree with you at a newspaper that I like and that I almost never agree with you; but this time it would be, because you defended from a usual enemy of this newspaper one with which this newspaper generally agrees. A mess, but stirring up the mess as you did, seems to me the only smart thing to do not to be in a corner or in the other.
So, I don’t agree with you writing D'Alema to withdraw the Forattini lawsuit. I do not believe that satire should live“of forced and distorted”to the point of exposing false, but not paradoxical, things. The vision of satire as mocking the powerful, David against Goliath, is surpassed by time. The freedom to weigh and damage Forattini seems rather great, as is the one you have that write more low in a single newspaper and less read. In every newspaper the bitter and bitter counter-responses of journalists to the letters of correction and denial show who always has the last word and the sharp knife and the handle.
And if satire is yes“arbitrary as are opinions”, how opinions must then be based on true facts. If you wrote an editorial exposing your thought that I’m a thief and a crook, I wouldn’t sue you, but is that fair? One thing is the opinion, one thing is the fact on which it is expressed. One thing is that Forattini think D'Alema unfair, one thing is that he says to think it because D'Alema rigged the Mitrokhin dossier. So much so that to prove paradoxical, and therefore manifestly false, the thesis of Forattini you are forced to say that D’Alema could not have manipulated the cards“of his own hand”Confirming that it is plausible that someone might have done it: an inference that can enter the hearts of forattini readers gently.
It seems to me instead that an argument can be valid that you have not used, that if D'Alema is in the place where he is, you must also catch the falsities and the lies of satire and give him opinion. But if in place of that D'Alema there had been any insult, or you rigging the accounts of the Unit to pocket the subscription money, would you have found it bearable? Is it not right that people should be able to react to the disproportionate force created by a newspaper article, a cartoon? The lawsuit is a tool that incactivates, and the demand for billions can, in some cases, be an additional cowardice, but the hands itch.
D’Alema, and everyone else in this country, does well to react, as it can and as it can, to the falsities that newspapers write (and do), and that from that moment on hundreds of thousands of people make their own. If there is a satire that does not deserve complaint and is effective much more than the insults beautiful and good (denying it would mean denying the daily work of staino, vincino, vauro, giannelli, bucchi, Altan and also forattini) It means that there may be a limit, that there is no free zone for any lie and offense. Ciao.
