THE CHARLATAN STATE
251
Today it is no longer necessary to explain that the Southerner became
n outlaw by necessity not by choice; nor yet by reason of his Semitic
(Berber) ancestry, as the Italian Jew Lombroso charged against the Sicil–
ans-which did not prevent him later from becoming converted to spirit–
alism by Eusapia Palladino, the notorious Neapolitan medium. (Italy's
riminal anthropology was anti-Sicilian, like that of Harvard's Hooton,
before it became anti-Jew.)
Nor that the unpleasantness of Naples is not due to the people of
really a different sort of race from the northern Italian."
1
•
A black poppy grows in Naples, which is no ordinary industrial city.
he Lottery gives her the character of a proletarian's Monte Carlo. She
as much in common with such cities as Bucharest, an international whore–
ouse disguised as a city, or Reno, the American divorce-mill. The arti–
ciality of the vitality displayed by these places is a distortion of the
ocial and economic forces operating in an ideal 'Marxian city. They are
oly lands, geographical equivalents of holidays-Lourdes, Niagara Falls,
witzerland, Hollywood--each giving to its inhabitants a mentality in
hich the class instinct, especially of the proletariat, is blunted; like that
f
men living perpetually on Christmas Day.
Pythagoreanism, with its mystico-mathematical devotion to Number,
as "originally a political and social movement in the Greek cities of
outhern Italy."
2
What relations may exist between the numbers racket
d Pythagoras (or between the Southerner's preoccupation with dreams
nd Freud) is not for me to say. But to the Neapolitan, Fascism is only
nother form of the Lottery. Before Mussolini the worker spent his miser–
hie wages on lottery tickets; later he gave up his meager portion of lib–
rty in the hope of winning back full social and economic freedom. As in
II lotteries run by the government the returns were very small indeed.
Consider the fate of the Neapolitan priests, whose chief function in
ciety was not the dispensing of penances and indulgences but of numbers
or the lottery. The Church, a place in which the coins of Caesar were
changed for the coins of God, found itself on the verge of spiritual
nkruptcy. The pre-fascists had of course succeeded in nationalizing
ambling and prostitution, but it remained for Mussolini with his ethereal–
ed
political economy to raise this form of socialism to a spiritual plane.
e priesthood has been all but put under civil service. The Pope (who
ceived strictly monetary compensation for his expropriated spiritual
roperties) represents a banking standard as outmoded in the celestial
orld as the gold standard in the material.
II
Duce pinch-hits for La
adonna on the new coins of Heaven-brass for gold. True, St. Jan-
