If you pluck an apple from the tree it could be sour, but it’s unlikely to be rotten. Rotten apples have the tendency to fall to the ground, not to stay on the branch. If however, you take an apple out of the basket it’s more likely that it’ll be rotten. And if the apples have been in the basket for a long time, it’s almost certain that they will be rotten. If a good apple is placed in a basket with worms in it, then it will go rotten. It’s a matter of time. In Italy, only those that are blackmailable, that can go rotten, are tolerated in the basket.
Within a rotten system, with apples that are more than seventy years old with politicians who have had a career lasting more than 30 years, with administrators appointed by the Power, only rotten apples can exist. There is no difference between the one that steals and the one that acts as lookout. Between the one that puts forward a law and the one that signs it. They are both accomplices. This rule is not valid only for politics, it’s true within in any respectable organization. Hospitals, big companies, municipalized companies, universities, public bodies. The green apple is not tolerated. It’s a risk that is not worth it. The system stands on “omertà” and complicity. The one who does not respect the omertà and the complicity doesn’t have a good career and when, usually by chance, he arrives in a commanding position, he doesn’t stay long. The system liberates itself of him by hook or by crook. That can happen for a pain-in-the-neck-magistrate or any old town councillor who starts questioning a regulatory plan that favours building speculation.
Anyone who has spent a long time in the “Palace” or even in the “Last Condominium of Power”, is subject to corruption. It can even be true for the one who denounces the System and who has lived for the System and in the System. Do the worm-eaten voices of one like Fini or like Montezemolo arrive with a deplorable delay or in perfect time early enough to keep the Basket intact? The integrity of the Basket is the main objective of those who prosper inside.
Change, if there is a change, can only come with the substitution of the whole political and managerial class of the Country , all beneath any suspicion. More or less blackmailable. “An idea that doesn’t find a place to sit down, is capable of causing the revolution” said Leo Longanesi. The problem is that the seats are all occupied and the food has gone off. The revolution is obligatory. The new generations who are not yet corrupt, must take over the command. The alternative is to go rotten all together.