to da victor belong de spoiled

USians have no history, they have the market instead. Nothing is less interesting to today's market than yesterday's market. Continuity is not even for sale. Let the good times roulette. On TV.

In his late poem Victory, Pasolini delicately wonders what existing in the day of its composition (c. 1964) had to do with that for which Italians died savagely only 20-odd years before.

A few lines from Norman MacAfee's translation of Victory -- via Direland via wood s lot -- not in the order of their textual appearance:

little by little in the barbaric breasts
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.

==

Who has the courage to tell them
that the ideal secretly burning in their eyes
is finished, belongs to another time, that the children

of their brothers have not fought for years,
and that a cruelly new history has produced
other ideals, quietly corrupting them?. . .

===

Where have the weapons gone, peaceful
productive Italy, you who have no importance in the world?
In this servile tranquility, which justifies

yesterday’s boom, today’s bust—from the sublime
to the ridiculous—and in the most perfect solitude,
j’accuse! Not, calm down, the Government or the Latifundia

or the Monopolies—but rather their high priests,
Italy’s intellectuals, all of them,
even those who rightly call themselves

my good friends. These must have been the worst
years of their lives: for having accepted
a reality that did not exist. The result

of this conniving, of this embezzling of ideals,
is that the real reality now has no poets.