Beppe Grillo, elevated in the attic

From Pippo to Pippo. Beppe Grillo’s alpha and omega have a first and last name: Baudo. It was the national Pippo who rescued Giuseppe Grillo, then artistically called Giusè, from a successful anonymity, after having endured him for two hours, the only spectator in a Milanese audience of 76, and throwing him into the great mystical and fantastic body of Rai TV of the years. ’80. Today Baudo himself has some reservations about rewinding. “I understand, he would like to find himself, but look, in life you can’t go back easily.”

Yes, because the most influential Italian comedian in his forties would have gotten tired of politics once and for all and would like to make people laugh again, even on screens. You have to understand. By dint of steps to the side, from president to political leader to guarantor of the 5-star movement, the Elevato – as defined by the anti-rhetoric with respect to the mass of “attacked” followers – has practically ended up in the attic.

From there, in a dusty attic, he imagines him dusting off the portrait of Giuseppe Conte, the first armored by the agreement with the monk dem Goffredo Bettini, perhaps reading futuristic tomes about alternative energies to alternative energies or at the end of the work that you are already half exhausted almost everywhere. And since in the attics we usually get bored, to kill time you can try to troll on Ebay by placing a thousand euros of pumice stone “to grind the brain of human stupidity” or by posting things like “The plant evolves to hide from man”. on his blog, which just in 2008 the British newspaper Observer did not hesitate to point out as the ninth most powerful in the world.

The problem is that while Ebay does not fall in love and screw Elevato with a technocratic attitude (“it puts our community at risk”), by dint of hiding from its favorite boys, it happens that these in the lower kitchen of politics do good and bad weather. Take the banks, the workhorse of the square grillinis, and in particular the MPS, which in order to survive the pandemic crisis and perhaps be sold to individuals, should now be recapitalized with public money by the grillini government.

Let’s look at Mediaset, the company of the one whom the Elevato kindly called the “psychopath”, and where, according to him, “the grillini didn’t even clean the bathrooms.” Well, for the astute grillino and president of the Chamber, Roberto Fico, “Mediaset is an Italian company and as such it must be protected from foreign appetites”. And it is so “strategic” that starting from a bipartisan anti-Vivendi rule, we reached a strategic vote of the united center – and guided by the Cav – on the budget gap and an appearance of national cordiality.

Take international relations, where the empires of the Third World have been abandoned, the yellow vests faded, the attacks on the euro shelved, for example Luigi Di Maio who writes a letter to the Republic inspired by Konrad Adenauer in which he reflects “on the need for the world’s great democracies to start tackling the world’s most complex problems together. ”In short, you fly high. And speaking of blue skies, it is the defector Grillino Gianluigi Paragone who recalls that it was the current chancellor who awaited the help of the reviled Benetton to save Alitalia.

Other than yearning for the Rewind and getting back on television. There would be enough for a good V-day, for a nice and good return to the origins. And what origins. Because it must be said that the Elevato di strada, although bumpy and sometimes bumpy, has done a lot since that first lonely night at the La Bullona cabaret, from the television premiere to “According to you”, of the famous joke about Craxi, the Socialists and the Chinese, who cost him Rai’s purgatory, from Yomo yogurt commercials. Many miles compared to attempts to do normal work, as a turner, as a welder, as a jeans salesman. Everything failed, because ours was too artistic.

And as an artist, from television in the nineties he went to other stages, to theaters, where he debuted with “Good News”, written by Michele Serra, directed by someone like Giorgio Gaber. In 1991, an Abacus poll indicated him as the most famous comedian in Italy. It is with direct contact with the public that the spark is lit, in a pop reinterpretation of the leader’s epiphany celebrated by Elias Canetti in his ‘Mass and Power’. Grillo himself was amazed and told Marco Damilano about fifteen years ago, at the Espresso: “Once I was on stage, there were 10,000 people listening to me in silence, I had a flash: if now I come down and I say come with me , they all follow me here. But I said to myself: belìn, and then where am I going to end up? “

It was the early years of the second millennium and the Elevato had some doubts. Meanwhile, on stage, he smashed computer monitors. Pure Luddite fury. Terror of machines. Of control. Then comes the turning point. “I’m going to do a show with the Network,” he announced in 2004. The following year he opened the blog beppegrillo.it. Become the priest of counter-information, meet the guru. “He was joking – he says in 2016 – that is, he was saying serious and true things but joking. Then I met Casaleggio and an audience that understood, very well informed thanks to the Internet. From there it all began. But I never thought I was a leader or wanted to be. It happened. “He often returns to fate.” Basically I didn’t want to … I never thought I was the architect of a political movement, “but” it all happened almost by chance: people left my shows destroyed, but also thanking me for the things I said. So I said to myself: why don’t we try to group all these experiences together? Here the Movement was born more or less like this. “

Almost forced by the needs of Destiny, this is the genesis of the political leader Grillo. The one that, between the serious and the funny, anticipates the Parmalat scandal, ends up in the New York Times and among the European figures for 2005 according to Time. In 2007, he spoke at Telecom’s shareholders’ meeting on behalf of small shareholders, and spoke with the European Parliament about new technologies and those sentenced to Montecitorio. His comic-political vision seems unstoppable. A mixture of victimhood and utopianism. From right to left, it makes you curious and suspicious at the same time. For Maurizio Crippa, del Foglio, it is a comedy with “a single register, the suspicion that the rest of the world is in the world to deceive him: a gloomy point of view, ultimately cloying”. For Curzio Maltese, della Repubblica, “the turning point as a preacher is even more embarrassing. He has also queued to sell plots ”. The late Edmondo Berselli underscores its inevitability. “It was the detonator of a mixture that has become explosive: in which the frustrations of insecurity, the impoverishment caused by the pressure of new consumption, unsustainable for the reduced income bases, the rage at the waste and the privileges of the ‘caste’, dissatisfaction with a form of representation that does not respond to the aspirations of citizens ”.

The effects of the explosive mixture can be seen in the Vaffanculo-Day, September 2007, a telluric event at the same time in several squares of the country, the epicenter in Bologna, declared objective: a popular law against those convicted in Parliament. Tens of thousands pissed off at corrupt politicians, but not (yet) a party. As the organizer reiterates to the 19th century chronicler Ferruccio Sansa after eating a “good steak”: rather “a virus that has begun to spread and will not stop”. We know how it will turn out. The virus of democracy from below, of the parliament that opens like a tuna can, one is worth one, will become the Movement, flanked by new newspapers such as the Fatto newspaper, “our newspaper”, the Elevato will claim. The virus will pass to the government 11 years later. Following the rejection of Grillo’s attempt to run for the Democratic Party primaries in 2008, the release of civic lists to administrative offices; after the Tsunami Tour and the mythological swimming crossing of the Strait of Messina, the affirmation of the 2013 policies; after the taking of Rome and Turin.

We inexorably arrived at March 2018: the Movement launched by chance by the accountant Grillo, the son of an industrialist (“He risked his money”), won the elections. He had foreseen it months before, “we will go to the government, it will be natural”, giving Avvenire even a bit of serious analysis. “The massacre of money, property and sovereignty carried out by the banks was preceded by the massacre of values ​​that took place in Italy, in the era of Berlusconi. We must always keep this in mind … “. The man that biographer Andrea Scanzi describes as” a health food maniac, a detergent killer and a nerve-racking checker of grocery receipts “is now The guarantor. It is a matter of understanding if and with whom the hell Di Maio and company will decide to ally to form the government. The Elevato-Garante publishes an interview with Repubblica in which in more serious times it would have been said that it announces a phase change : “The era of vaffa is over, but the era of trouble will not begin.” Once success has arrived, there is the fear of distortion, which Grillo tries to exorcise: “You will not witness a genetic mutation of the movement.” again: “We are a bit DC, a bit of the right, a bit of the left. We can adapt to anything. As long as our ideas are affirmed.” However, as a good artist, with upright antennas, he has already smelled the air and is defined as “a prostitute in a city without sidewalks ”.

In short, he does not know where to locate himself, he no longer knows if he is the spiritual father of the movement, which in the meantime has also lost its founding guru, the alter ego Gianroberto Casaleggio. And the disorientation takes shape a few months later, the following autumn, after the first months of Conte’s first government, with the Lega di Matteo Salvini. Kermesse of 5 stars of the Circus Maximus, Luigi Di Maio, in charge of the deputy prime minister, presents him as the “father of us all”. But his father is not in the game, who he would like to be governor, and with his white hand, a symbol of the conspiracy, he insults his ally Salvini and arrives to attack President Mattarella. Shaming everyone, including the Count. It is the moment of consciousness. The comedian is funny, but the politics are elsewhere. The detachment of the iceberg has begun, the ecologist Grillo would say, who in the last 5 Estates General (“in full DC style”, notes Filippo Ceccarelli) simply sends a video message in which he generically invites to vote, while in the Palazzo if we are not talking about problems, government reorganizations.

It is probably no longer the time for the Vaffa, who, thanks to the new virus, will end up in the basement along with the strongman, as the sociologist De Rita claims. We will see if Domenico De Masi, another sociologist slightly closer to 5, is right, according to whom the Movement (which in the meantime loses consensus) will end up being left-wing and anti-populist. It could be the true legacy of Elevato, rejected by the Democratic Party, marked by resentment and hate-love for the center-left family. “I cannot leave the Movement, it is as if a jazz musician decided to leave jazz,” he declared a while ago, wishing he wanted to regain his freedom. Even on television. The problem is that the Movement has abandoned it. That is why it is necessary to remember what he himself suggested from Piazza Maggiore to politicians impressed by the success of Vaffa’s day: “If I were them, I would get up from my chair… (…) You know those goodbyes at sunset in the fog, as seen in the movies. And then it would never appear again. ” Here, a bit like ending up in the attic.