Nole like Cacciari and Agamben? A really curious media case
Novak Djokovic it is the most recent villain of the biosecurity story that the Italian media have been delivering to the country for two years. The Serbian tennis player, beyond the errors and omissions in the documentation presented to enter Australia, has thus become the black sheep, the arrogant character to blame and to expose to the public hatred of social media, the privileged rich man who does not want to submit to the rules that for two years have been fatiguing the lives of hundreds of millions of people: in short, the scapegoat on which to download the collective frustration, so that those who have introduced those rules and who insist on carrying them out are exempted, despite many principles and many assumptions (starting from the guarantee of immunity guaranteed by the vaccine) have been denied in recent months.
But there are those who have decided that this story, weakened by its many inconsistencies, should not be the subject of rational reflection and analysis, but increasingly supported by a emotional adhesion, which finds its strength in compacting public opinion against those, ordinary citizens or great intellectuals or athletes of world rank, who question if not the foundations of this story, certainly the consequences, often illogical, unscientific and authoritarian, that have been developing in these two years.
So also Djokovic, a character anything but denier, which donated one million euros in spring 2020 toTreviglio hospital to cope with the emergency and who simply believes that a vaccine that gives partial and time-limited immunity is useless if not harmful to a young and super-cared body like his own, found himself undergoing the treatment already administered indiscriminately so much to deniers with the eighth grade as a Giorgio Agamben e Massimo Cacciari.
The position of the various newspapers on Novak Djokovic
He started on Corriere della Sera: “There is a strange magic surrounding it Novak Djokovic”, The opening words of the first article of the quarrel appeared on January 6 signed by Andrea Sereni, according to which this wacky young Serbian who lives in a “magic circle” must necessarily have some wheels out of place. Sereni starts by highlighting the unimaginable adoration that parents have for their child, the most successful tennis player in history; and it is surprising that a journalist who lives in a country of mammon and overprotective parents is so disconcerted. After telling about the exits, even broken down, of a father who owes everything to his son and who did everything for him, including incomprehensible debts and sacrifices in Italy, in the years when Belgrade lived on salaries of 3 German marks a month and the day after collection that salary was waste paper, the ineffable Sereni does not fail to dedicate a passage to Djokovic’s wife, graduated from the very rational Bocconi but who would have posted a video on Covid-19 and 5G subsequently deleted (and therefore, disowned and not verifiable).
The closing of the piece would like to highlight once again the strangeness of the character: think that Djokovic, instead of waking up frustrated and pissed off, drinking a coffee in a hurry and going out of breath to go to work like all normal Italians, is “a particular man” because “Her daily routine begins with a salute to the rising sun, a session of hugs, singing and yoga. With a relationship of connection with the plant world, like a fig tree with which he said he had an intimate relationship: «I like to climb it and feel in contact with it». Words that would make the professor happy Stefano Mancuso, who, less than a month ago, declared, precisely in the Corriere which presented him “among the greatest botanical scholars” “Plants are intelligent, I address them with love phrases”. But so be it. This time at the first Italian newspaper this inspiration from Djokovic towards the vegetable world is also useful in order to present the Serbian champion as a little less than a displaced one.
In itself, Sereni’s article could have been an occasional piece, an exercise in the style of the classic editor to confirm the old anecdote in which the editor-in-chief asks the young journalist to write a piece on Saint Francis of Assisi and the ambitious young man replies: “For or against?”. But the insistence and level of signatures with which the Courier service returned to the subject indicates something planned. In short, it is about building the pariah of the day, the original to be laughed at, the deviant to blame, the superstitious to re-educate, the unconscious to criticize, the ignorant to point out, the bad example to be neutralized, but also the reckless who jeopardizes public health, the arrogant who believes himself above common sense, the privileged one against whom to unleash ordinary people and thus earn the newspaper a lot of like aside of a few telematic haters with the neuromotor system concentrated in their thumb.
And instead, in an escalation that indicates a clear editorial choice, on January 9 another assault columnist (to the non-conformists) of the Courier service, Aldo Cazzullo, who writes that “the ferocity of the Serbian draws from the same dark well from which they come unscientific follies, the balls to the line judge, the logs no-Vax“And the mention of the Slavic identity and the low blow could not be missing because” behind the pride of the Serbian homeland, of the Slavic belonging, of the irreducibility of the free hitter, there is one of the many crafty ones who bring the tax residence to Monte Carlo to avoid paying taxes ”of course, like the Italians Berrettini, Sinner, Musetti, the Austrian Zverev, the Russian Medvedev, the Greek Tsitsipras.
Faced with such operations, it is difficult to deny that one exists media direction aimed at denigrating those who question the management of the pandemic emergency, the effectiveness of the measures adopted, the abuses that many governments are implementing in the eternal dialectic between the will of control by the powers and requests for freedom of individuals. In the face of such violent and orchestrated attacks, one might think of some unbearable character of an all too successful character. In reverse, the attacks on Djokovic have instead grown in an abnormal manner compared to the story, extending the criticism to the Serbian people and their inextricable nationalism. And so, following the Courier service and confirming what seems to the writer a coordinated address, January 8th arrived Michele Serra, the aedo of the left more conformist than reformist, than on Republic defines Djokovic’s vicissitudes in Australia as “painful adventure”, “an involuntary parody of Slavic nationalism“(And did it seem to you?) And closes by stating that it is” foolishness (…) this “patriotic” outcry in a piece of land in which, due to the Small Countries, nationalisms (all) and the warlike use of religion , an atrocious ethnic war took place just thirty years ago. Nothing ever teaches anyone anything, how sad”.
And so the one-way memory of the cross-massacres between Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks to spread a veil of infamy on a successful young Serbian. Now, what does a sportsman who is certainly very close to his country and engaged in countless initiatives of solidarity and international aid have to do with the infamous Zeljko Raznatovic, detto Arkan, the executioner of the war in Bosnia enriched himself by depleting the Muslim families and coal deposits of Serbia? Ask a Massimo Nava, former correspondent from the Balkans at war, who in the comment “Covid, Djokovic the ricordi in Arkan” of 9 January brings into play the Serbian war criminal, killed in 2000, when Djokovic was 13 years old. Nava blames Djokovic objective nationalist sympathies and to Serbian political leaders for siding with their fellow citizen: Nava’s logic actually required Serbian politicians to invite Australian judges to lock up sine die Djokovic, the most beloved man in their country, in the center for asylum seekers where he is now deprived of his liberty. Now let’s imagine that he was in a similar situation Berrettini, who for reaching the final in Winbledon (lost against Djokovic) was hailed as a national hero by Mattarella: doubts about the protests the Italian political world would advance, starting from Salvini e Meloni, to request the immediate release of the Roman tennis player residing in Montecarlo?
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