Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [159]
As a rightist who would himself have benefited from the more relaxed procedures of the past, the former councilor was not willing to put himself out to achieve this goal; he disliked the nominally leftist mayor and his policies, longed for the older modalities of power and complicity, and saw the ordinances themselves as a case of over-regulation and as an attack on the local custom of dining in the open air in warm weather. But he had the honesty to offer this view of the violator's relative immunity from punishment: "He profits because there's general ignorance." "Ignorance" in this sense means not only a lack of formal knowledge but also the generic absence of respect for correct procedure.
Younger people generally have that knowledge and are therefore better equipped to fight the harassment of bribe-seeking officials. They know their rights, and they can insist on them while also allowing the latter to condescend to their youth (but also themselves acting the role of children who rebel against stern parents). This is what a young woman did when she realized what the city police officers' frequent visitations to her health food store must mean. She was able to talk back in an impressively legal language, although her educated speech may have backfired in the sense that it induced a correspondingly intense legalism on the part of the officers.
She also displayed all the self-confident casuistry that (as she pointed out) marks the rebellious phase of a child's adolescent school career. As she saw it, the officers' response was precisely that of parents who see that their child has not yet reached full maturity-and that her stance worked to get her what she wanted as a result. She also accused the police of interfering with the development of new forms of commerce. There was some validity to this charge; when the Bersani rules were introduced, simplifying the criteria for obtaining shop licenses and thereby undercutting the malicious pedantry of venal officials, those who knew just how much the regulations had changed could quickly turn the tables on their erstwhile tormentors.
The engagement of police officers in local social relations also provides channels through which extortion can be resisted. Having a friend in the service is, however, a back channel that recalls the older styles of civility. A well-established framer who kept insisting that there was no bribery in the area-and that such matters were in any case not for artisans but for merchants, given that the two groups have "different ways of reasoning"was once pressured for a bribe by a city policeman through the usual tactic of writing a citation for some supposed traffic violation. He managed to get the matter settled by going to another policeman, who happened to be a friend of his. No bribery was involved, insisted the framer; he just made one or two picture frames for the second policeman.
My sense is that he did not want to admit to an outsider that such disgraceful acts marred the fine self-presentation of Monti. He almost certainly did not view his actions as complicit, however, since, as an older man, he was accustomed to thinking of tokens of appreciation as the normal means of keeping social relations intact. Similarly, a merchant of the old school, rather than invoking civic values, called on his friendship with some carabinieri to keep the vigili at bay; relying on the growing hostility between the two forces, he was able to maintain his reputation as a man of local social savoir