62
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
hausted the very idea of socialism and revived a dormant liberal tradition.
So it is perhaps not surprising that the Italian political left, denied real
political participation by external and internal forces, remains somewhat
loyal to an intellectual and cultural tradition that is dying out among its
European neighbors. This is not to say that the Italian left is unchanged
since the 1970s. On the contrary, there has already been a quite signifi–
cant shift to the center. But because loyalty to the idea of
la sinistra
re–
mains such a powerful force, this centering has had to take place
surreptitiously, and without a serious confrontation either with the errors
of the past or with other, more liberal alternatives. This moderation that
dares not speak its name has a price, especially in historical truth. But
perhaps the highest is that the left remains self-absorbed and ever
susceptible to the Palio Principle.
This is certainly the impression one receives from reading the newest
and most talked about publication on the left, the satirical weekly titled
Cuore.
The history of
Cuore
is a revealing one: begun some years back as
a supplement to the old
Ul1ita,
it soon became more popular than the
paper enveloping it. Early this year it was relaunched as an independent
publication, and circulation quickly topped 150,000. And with good
reason. Every Monday the staff writers and cartoonists cull the past
week's harvest of scandals, crimes, cover-ups, and gaffes, and whips them
into a wildly hilarious
misto
published on sixteen green broad-sheet pages.
Very little of its humor can be translated without reference to often ob–
scure and ephemeral domestic events, but if one imagines a radical,
scatological, printed version of the original "Saturday Night Live" show,
one gets the general idea.
ClIore
has been compared to the British
Private Eye
and the French
Canard Ellchail1e,
and there are some superficial similarities. But while
these other satire papers have readers of every political tendency,
ClIore
has come to represent its own tendency, a party within the party of the
left.
Cltore
is subtitled "The Human Resistance Weekly" and would like
to represent itself as a simple spokesman for
fa l10rmalita
in the midst of
the dirtiest, most corrupt political system in Europe. But its own history
and its own rhetoric clearly mark it as a paper by the left and about the
left.
The question is, which left? This question was debated all last
summer, both in the pages of
ClIore
and in the popular press. The Com–
munist old guard attacks it as reactionary, correctly pointing out that
satire has traditionally been associated with the right in Italy. (Giovanni
Guareschi's burlesque postwar stories mocking the hapless Communist
Peppone are typical.) Editorialists at
Corriere della Sera
have called its
publishers "the last Stalinists" for their irreverent comments about the
