On one of those late night political roundtables that we seem to have exported worldwide, I heard a fascinating exchange about the strange tale of the recent assault on the Italian Prime Minister. The show was entitled “Blood of the Victor” and it displayed a rather jarring image unlike any I’d seen in the US. On US television, I’d seen one image endlessly repeated: the Prime Minister walking through a crowd, something flying past the camera, very fast, and then the Prime Minister falling backward as a crush of officials moved off-screen to apprehend the suspect.
I never saw the impact, and I certainly never saw the blood.
The image on late-night Italian television was different, and under the circumstances, quite striking. There was an image Silvio Berlusconi, post-impact, his face smeared with profuse bleeding. This has inspired a number of telling and predictable jokes, about finally bloodying the Right’s nose.
The discussion centered on Berlusconi’s future, as if this shattering media image had somehow undone the man. In a certain sense, perhaps it has. People are speculating that this symbolizes the break up of the Far Right-Mass Media coalition perhaps best symbolized by Berlusconi, who owns most of the major media outlets in Italy. Others have speculated on the power of media images in today’s world, such that mafia connections cannot help, media connections cannot help, and even insuperable wealth cannot help to displace them.
In short, the man’s nose was bloodied in a very public way and that symbolizes the end, if not if his career, then at least of his veneer of invincibility. “The blood of the victor.”
There is another symbolic twist to this strange tale, and it has not yet received the attention it deserves. By all accounts, the hurled object that did the damage was a metal miniature model of the great Cathedral in Milan (home to Da Vinci’s famous “Last Supper”).
So the media mogul was undone, quite literally, by a church.
If this is not to become the inspiration for yet another Dan Brown novel, then perhaps it is worth further reflection by progressive Christians on how to lay claim to such an image, while distancing themselves from the violence. The crucial image is not the “blood of the victor,” so much as it is the howling divide between one conception of the church and a very different conception of a combined media-state, with all the corruption and abuse that entails.
