MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–GOVERNMENT.

MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–GOVERNMENT. When I wrote yesterday about the pervasiveness of unofficial government by gangs, there was an echo in my mind of a passage from the great Murray Kempton. (Kids, Murray Kempton was a proud journalist and a brilliant writer. It is hard to use short quotes to convey his cynical, ironic, affectionate stance toward events, but I will try.) The echo in my mind was of Kempton claiming that Mussolini was the most influential political figure of the twentieth century and that one could confirm this by going down a list of countries at the United Nations. When I read that, I thought: Of course! So many governments combine thuggery and grandiosity. I have happily spent time just now in the archives of The New York Review of Books looking for the quote (The archives are a wonderful bargain, especially if you are a subscriber). I was unable to find the quote, but in “A Genius of Journalism”, from the October, 1982 issue, I found: “Our century has come up with too few improvements in the way it manages to govern, but it has marvelously advanced, while coarsening, the techniques for controlling the governed; and Mussolini is to this dreadful science what the Wright Brothers were to aviation and Colonel Tom Parker to rock-and-roll.” As an aside, I also found this quote about Mussolini’s influence in architecture: “Any day’s passage through Rockefeller Center suffices to convince us that Mussolini’s aesthetic taste is our century’s dominant one.”