Who loves you, baby?

[fpb]

Everybody agrees that Londoners showed amazing inner strength under fire two days ago, and that all the rescue services performed outstandingly. The town's performance may well be seen as a major defeat for the terrorists. So their allies in the media have swung into action. Today's edition of the Channel 4 early evening news used every moment it did not devote to crawling admiration of the terrorists' brilliant organization and remarkably successful butchery to a lengthy set of varations on horror, disgust and grisliness. We are at war, and anyone who saw this performance will be clear that they were trying to play up the enemy's power and skill and encourage their spectators to fear them. Why this sort of abject moral surrender should take place I do not know, but it seems clear that Britain's Channel 4 News should be retitled "Channel 4 - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Al Qaida".

Comments

[chthonya]

the referenda, like all Italian elections, fell on a Sunday

Why is that? I was in Italy that weekend and did a double-take when I saw the dates on the election posters - I wouldn't have expected such a Catholic country to have elections on Sundays...?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have expected such a Catholic country to have elections on Sundays...?
1) United Italy was founded by anti-clericals and Freemasons, at war - and I mean a shooting war - with the Pope, who was then King of Rome and of most of central Italy. Every stage of unification (1859, 1860, 1870) meant a loss of territory for him, until the new Italian state seized Rome itself and made it its own capital. Until the Treaty of Reconciliation of 1929, the Church refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Italian State, to the point that whenever the King visited a city, the local Bishop took care to be somewhere else. That is where the enduring (and, on the whole, healthy) anti-clerical strain in Italian life comes from. The Catholic victory in the famous elections of April 18, 1948, was no less a revolution than the rise of Fascism before it, or indeed Unity itself.
2) Italians, as I said, regard voting as a civic duty. It is a day in which the voter reconnects with the State, almost a kind of swearing again allegiance. To have it on a weekday would feel kind of flat. It needs a good, impressive, ceremonial date.
3) Commonsense dictates that to maximize the number of voters, you want them to be summoned when they are not working.
4) We are Catholic, not Welsh Presbyterian. And Catholicism is not and has never been fanatically sabbatarian. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Remember the famous Irish habit of adjourning straight from Mass to the pub? Sunday was always regarded as a suitable day not only for worhsip, but also for family life, convivial meetings - people on Sundays regularly visit each other and dine together - and entertainment; most Italian sports fixtures are on Sunday.