Pazienza blew me away when I was in junior high school, reading the story he was publishing in Cannibale. What struck me most about him was one thing: his ability to do satire that takes no prisoners. Like in war: when you catch an enemy, you take him out. It’s an ability that’s being lost today. Today people say satire should sow doubts. Bullshit. Satire is against power. And Pazienza had identified the real power: that is, the way life is organized in our cities according to the hypocritical model of the petty bourgeoisie. In Pazienza’s stories this model is razed to the ground completely, wiped out. Pazienza had a great ability to get to the real, the true, to things as they are and not as they should be. And from this attitude of his he was able to bring forth a style. Pazienza’s was a satire that took no prisoners because it struck at the roots of the malaise while managing to stay hot, shocking and communicative. Although he didn’t consider himself a satirist, Pazienza produced satire far more dangerous than what is currently produced by the various authorized satirical weeklies like Cuore.

What I liked and enjoyed most about him, instead, was his amoral splendor; Pazienza’s heroes were like the ancient Greeks, those told by Homer in his poems. They were and are outside bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is founded on a claim to ethics, but generates only irony and cynicism. Which are, after all, the childhood diseases of alienation. Conversely, Homer’s heroes, like Zanardi, Pompeo and other Pazienza characters, are tragic heroes. Their world is not ethical, but noble. Which means it is divided not between good and bad, but rather between strong and weak, beautiful and ugly, winners and losers, favored by the gods or cursed. Actions are not judged from a moral point of view. In this way exposure to the possibility of defeat is at its maximum, pity is absent, grace becomes visible and terrible. But this is the only world in which tragedy is possible. A Pazienza character like Pompeo is one of the very few tragic characters in Italian culture. That is, beyond false bourgeois morality. Pazienza was beyond it. He urged us to have integrity. And he reminded us that life has the same law as great satire: it takes no prisoners.

Satire today is very “naive”. It’s not true that it’s dead, it’s just “naive”. And that’s why it’s bound to lose. Because it still believes power is represented by politicians, whom it insists on caricaturing as if they were big puppets or marionettes. While power is becoming invisible. Power – as Paul Virilio taught us – lies in the control of speed. Pazienza had already understood this ten years ago. In his story he visualized the sadness and tragic desperation of those who have no control over speed. And he fired at will on his enemies. With amoral ferocity. And taking no prisoners.