Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

An Unimportant Phenomenon?

Yesterday was Debaptism Day in Italy. Here is an interview with an Italian gay couple, both of whom have debaptised themselves. Apparently, the Catholic Church would like to pretend this is an unimportant phenomenon, but it is by now transnational and – apparently – growing due not only to lack of faith but also mounting disgust at the political and ethical (?) positions of the church. Who can blame them?

We decided to de-baptize for our self-respect, our freedom, and above all, our consciences. Today, in our country, the Catholic Church is a violent and arrogant power center, at war with the aspirations to happiness of many men and women, entirely centered on the defense of its own privileges, more interested in imposing its own ideas — on same-sex couples, gender, divorce, abortion, euthanasia, assisted fertilization — than in the actual lives that people live on a daily basis. We absolutely do not want to be complicit with this, not even on a purely formal level.

Un’altra Italia è possibile!

Campagna per un’Italia veramente laica, con pari diritti per tutti i cittadini. Una sfida immensa, ma già in corso.

Prostitutes. Cocaine. Blackmail. Italy, as Usual.

Life, like a friggin box of chocolates.

Italy is like one of those Whitman’s Sampler boxes of chocolates my mother used to buy at the Safeway. Only, instead of chocolate confections, here we have political scandals. As the world chortles at the Berlusconi affair, the (now ex-) president of the Lazio Region – where Rome is gently nestled- Piero Marrazzo, has stepped down. The details are succulent and confusing: corrupt Carabinieri involved in a cocaine ring, transsexual prostitutes, blackmail, payoffs and secret films. Sex, lies and iPhone video.

Of course, Marrazzo denied everything at first. This is a kneejerk reaction and I can understand it. But, of course, he soon realized he’d better start asking for forgiveness before he lost everything. A choice quote:

“I asked [my wife’s] forgiveness, I screwed up, maybe she understood. I’m a Catholic and I can now say I’ve sinned, but a very important monsignor said: ‘One may enter the Church even through sin.'”

So here we are, in Italy, where eveything circles back to sin and absolution. Just invoke your religious belief with a tiny tear in your left eye and cite some obscure church dogma. Nothing works like preying on people’s superstition. What does it matter that he deceived not only his wife and children, but his electorate as well? Presto!

Now repeat after me: You are absolved, the cocaine was really sugar, and the prostitute was really an angel in disguise.

Hey, it really works!

As I Walked Out One Evening in Rome

Now for an attempt at phlogging. Last night I left work and crossed Piazza di Spagna. I’ve decided to carry a small camera with me in order to take photos of interesting phenomena in Rome. Remember that wonderful children’s book about the baby bird that fell out of its nest? It walked all over town looking for its mother.
DSCF0907
Are you my mother?
Most people say they don’t believe in UFOs. But I can tell you I saw this with my own eyes. I even took a photo, proof that aliens are flying right by us even in crowded piazzas.
UFO in Piazza di Spagna? It's just a glow-in-the-dark frisbee.
UFO in Piazza di Spagna? It's just a glow-in-the-dark frisbee.

 

Now for a more artistic take on urban decadence. Think Jim Jarmusch.

 

It's autumn and newspapers are falling from the trees.
It's autumn and newspapers are falling from the trees.

 

DSCF0913
Stazione Termini

 

At last I arrived at the Festival of Jewish Literature, where Benny Morris was to be interviewed. We left early and headed straight for a late dinner at Sitar.

 

Books, courtesy of Koob.
What's so sweet about exile?

In the Name of Nobodaddy, I Debaptize You!

You can unbaptize yourself if you wish.
You can unbaptize yourself if you wish.
October 25, 2009 is “La Giornata dello Sbattezzo”, or Debaptism Day, in Italy. Of course, if you are happily baptized, you are welcome to remain so. It’s your business. And so is debaptism. It’s your choice, and no one else’s.
This is extraordinary in a country where, as journalist Curzio Maltese wrote in his book Alms: The Cost of the Catholic Church in Italy (La Questua, untranslated), “we export brainpower and import saints and sorcerers.”
 

Are All New Yorkers Jewish Atheist Pornographers?

Well, Woody Allen had some fun with this meme in his latest film, Whatever Works. I’m not going to give it away, but I’ll just say that everything dissolves in the universal solvent of New York City. It’s fashionable, whenever a new Allen film comes out, to say things like, “Not his best screenplay” and then something derogatory about his latest starlet and the fact that all his movies are really the same movie, and all his male leads are really himself (all true, by the way). Of course, we’ve known this for a long time. What we never hear is that Allen’s track record for enjoyability is unmatched. So if you get nothing else from the movie than ninety minutes of unwholesome fun, shouldn’t that be worth something?

Next week a campaign will begin in NYC to promote the possibility that people can be moral without God.

The ads, which will begin appearing on posters in 12 subway stations Monday, pose the provocative question “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?”

Predictably, not all New Yorkers are enthusiastic about such a campaign. But, President Obama noted in his inaugural speech, America is a country in which non-believers are citizens, too.

 A small step for humanism, a huge leap for humankind.

The Real Enemies of Faith? Humanists!

The UAAR posted this rebuttal on its website, from Il Tempo:

The real enemies (of faith) are individualism, hedonism, indiscriminate thirst for profit, consumer slavery, lack of goodwill and weakened soldarity. “Secularism” in our time reinforces and energizes these countervalues, which proliferate among the young. Here the enemy makes its nest: not in the synagogue or the mosque.

Funny, in the Book of Revelation the Synagogue of Satan was the real enemy of faith. Now Satan is a humanist?

Religion Should Be Abolished from the Public Sphere

A frightening new law was recently proposed in Italy: in addition to the already fatuous “religion hour” in Italian public schools (and you thought “one nation under God” was bad) – which is really an hour in which students are obliged to listen to a handpicked Vatican mouthpiece mouth off (paid for by the State, naturally) –  there has been a recent proposal to add Islam to the “choice” (I am quotating here – see sidebar) of religions that are taught. The reason is worth quoting: to avoid abandoning little Muslims “to the ghettos of the madrassas and integralist Islamic schools” (Corriere della Sera). Brilliant! So let’s bring integralist Koranic teachings into the public schools, where they can wage their eternal battle for children’s minds with the Catholic Church itself. Let’s let our children be the little soldiers in State-funded religious warfare. Otherwise – and here, I feel, is the real reason behind the proposal – they might become kamikazes.

For an alternative to the teaching of the Catholic religion (IRC), the UAAR (Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics) has proposed a program to abolish this propagandistic aberration from Italian public education.

Think about it: shouldn’t every single child have the right to personalized religious teaching in the classroom? The son of Wiccans, the daughter of Hidus, the twins born to Red-Letter Christians should all have the same right that is granted to the children of Catholics in this country. It would be chaos, as you can imagine. Muslims may yet get that taste of equality, but only because integration is so poor and Islamic schooling has the unfortunate tendency to churn out suicidal religious fanatics (and they have growing numbers). This really has nothing to do with integration or equality.

Religion should simply be abolished from the public sphere. You have a home. You have a church, mosque, synagogue. Use them to teach religion, and leave the public schools to teach science, math, history and perhaps even the history of religions. That would be a fair and necessary innovation. Anything else is bigotry.

God Wants You to Be Rich, Fucked Up and Misunderstood

Here’s the weird item of the week: “America’s Rabbi,” Shmuley Boteach, has a new book out: The Michael Jackson Tapes. It turns out–for those of us who weren’t following either of their careers too closely–that Boteach was Michael Jackson’s “close spiritual guide.” I actually held the book in my hands and opened it today.  The subject matter varied from Michael’s days as a Jehovah’s Witness to his hopes that children get to play in heaven. We even get Jacko on Hitler and his boundless love for the Jewish people (ok so I didn’t open the book at random, exactly).

Remember, this is a man who surrounded himself with mannequins.

The Muhammad of Midtown

The indefatigable Taxi Gourmet recently reviewed Muhammad Rahman’s Kwik Meal #1, midtown Manhattan’s most viral food cart. I should know, as I used to go there back in the day when it was still an upstart, and before there were even two of them, and word was just beginning to spread across the borough. It still has the best falafel sandwich I’ve ever tasted, bar none. Then again, after six years in Rome, that’s not such a difficult accolade to aquire. 

Taxi tells the tale, as it was told by me:

It was actually a poem by Taxi Gourmet reader Marc Alan Di Martino that moved me to consummate my curiosity about Kwik Meal’s food:

“I was a regular at Muhammad Rahman’s Kwik Meal #1 cart, as were we all at the Gotham [Book Mart]…And one day Mr. Rahman — who was aware that I wrote poetry — asked me to write him something that would make people stop and eat. I declined. He insisted. I wrote, and he paid me in falafel sandwiches.”

I wrote about this here. It was Macy Halford at the New Yorker who “discovered” my little couplets and wrote them up in the New Yorker’s Book Bench column. Midtown is a great place to get noticed, even if you’re not a naked cowboy.

Here’s the poem, a stab at heroic light verse:

Of pleasures gastronomical I sing
Incomparable treasures; everything
Cooked to perfection by the expert hands
Striving to meet the customers’ demands.
A sweet aroma scents the afternoon
Air like some harbinger of happy June
When people hunger for the tastiest
Sandwich in Midtown: they have the best.

The really great part of the story, and the reason I had to get in touch with Ms. Halford, was that the poem (admittedly no great shakes) was attributed to a certain Thane Dimatims. Such blunders often inspire innovations, and in this case it became the stuff of poetry,or rather a long narrative poem which will be published to great acclaim a century or so after I am dead. “As it was, so it will be”, said the pope. Or was it Pope?

Next time you’re in midtown, tell Muhammad I sent you.