The honorable members, both the majority and the opposition, are all part of a single flock of parakeets. Their favorite perch is the television one, from which they endlessly repeat the usual nursery rhyme. For, or against, the prime minister of the moment.
The new figure of the typical politician is the parrot. Man or woman makes no difference, but the politician is the one who looks out of the news window every day and in twenty seconds recites a nursery rhyme whose meaning is obvious a priori: a paean to the prime minister or an attack on her. It is the only way to make his voice heard by the people. He uses the ritual formulas of the moment: for example, one that is now very popular is “families and businesses”, to say that his political party is above all concerned about them, and for some the government takes care of them, for others it kicks them. You can turn off the sound, just read in the girth who he is, which circus he belongs to, and you already know what he’s saying.
The crossing of parrots of different plumage is proof that that news program is pluralist and therefore democracy exists. But theirs is not an opinion, it is a phrase repeated mechanically just like the bird does, which mimics the sound, but does not understand its meaning and in any case it is irrelevant whether it understands it or not. It is written in the script of media pluralism. He must express a simple and predictable opinion, like a street vendor, never complex and articulated (there would also be no time, in twenty seconds) and never surprising.
A basic rule of journalism is that it is not a barking dog that makes the news but a man who bites a dog, which is the opposite of what one would expect. Well, leave all hope to those who watch the news: it will never happen that an honorable parrot or senator, male, female or trans, can surprise you and say something from the left against the left or in favor of the right, and vice versa. The parrot parrots what it was programmed and hired to do, otherwise it exits the video, it is silenced. Many politicians who once went on air suffer like beasts, frustrated parrots, for having been closed at home, hooded or stuffed; deprived of the perch from which they manifested their ornithological and ornamental presence, they experience depression from the loss of identity, cancellation and uselessness of their existence. Yet, when they went on video, they just had to parrot according to the expected formula.
The Honorable Pappagallo, still in vogue and in service, instead feels gratified by his appearance and his daily notoriety, he enters homes like a cuckoo at the appointed time; he feels important in the institutional life of the country for his performance or rather for his pre-printed gag. An obligatory ingredient, almost a password to access the news, is now the word «Meloni», to exalt or vilify it; no other use or other type of reflection is possible. Miraculous or cursed. His function as representative of the people and political exponent ends there, in that very brief and intense appearance. Then if it is a seasoned parrot, it also modulates the tone of voice, the look, the posture.
The other blackbird colleagues or repressed and blindfolded parrots are worse off than him because they are not allowed access to the television perch, they don’t even have to recite the nursery rhyme on video, and thus get noticed, strutting their feathers in the colors of their party; they only have to use a minimal part of their body, which is not the head, heart or liver, but the finger. Because they have to press on command, as if they were automatic parrots, the consent or dissent button towards the government and Parliament. This is the true meaning of digital democracy: what matters is the use of the finger, not even the whole hand, but only the index finger, as soon as it is required. You are paid, and even well, for this delicate task, of using your index finger not to give directions or even to warn or wipe your nose, but in the name of the sovereign people to press yes or no.
It would be easy to say that the parrots in question are basically the so-called peons of politics, the praetorians, water carriers rather than spokesmen. In reality, the politician in himself no longer exists except in marginal roles, he matters less and less in the territory or he matters if he is mayor, administrator, councilor of something but not as a politician. This is why it is a means of gaining visibility for the budgie to go on video and repeat its chant with the implication that the present is the best or worst government of all time. It may surprise you but I am convinced that the parrot is the prototype, the phenotype, in short the precise expression of politics in our time. Or what it was reduced to.
Politics no longer affects people’s real lives, it has no plans for the future, it has no ideas to affirm, much less ideal and civil passions, it only has to simulate for the performance at lunch and dinner time, to earn the same. Politics does not make reforms, it does not influence or decide, it has only one task: to last as long as possible, to maintain power for as long as possible, not to give up.
The fact that he doesn’t do anything concrete and important for the people is not a problem, since the opposition would have done the same thing; nothing, if not worse. The virtue of a government is only to last in power. Consequently, leaders must also, at a higher level, after consulting experts and communication wizards, be Exalted Parrots, reciting higher and slightly broader scripts.
In short, politics has been reduced to a parrot, which is no coincidence also the stage name of the urinal.
