The mouse self-coronating looks like a fairy-tale despot. The caricature targets anyone claiming the presidency of the Republic by relying on the historical falsehood of a supposed exclusive monopoly by the left, ignoring that the office has been held over time by figures from the right, left, and center. It is a statement that anyone with a minimum of historical curiosity dismantles in a few seconds, yet it is spoken openly without causing scandal, as it addresses an electorate accustomed to never verifying or staying informed. Here lies the real tragedy: the voter who stays home is malleable at will by anyone who knows how to distract them. All it takes is an orchestrated controversy, an exaggerated news story, an enemy of the moment to point at, and no one talks anymore about tax hikes, the cost of gasoline, or the inefficiencies of a government that meanwhile sinks the country into an economic stagnation placing it last for growth in Europe. From an industrial powerhouse to a textbook case of how a historical advantage is squandered: this is what the country has become, and it got there precisely thanks to governments that have every interest in cultivating a cultureless electorate, accustomed to empty television entertainment, the direct heir to that Berlusconi model that first imported to Italy, in a reduced and impoverished version, the spectacularization already inherent in American culture. An audience kept constantly at the level of nothingness is an audience easy to manipulate. And here they succeed very well. But it is an illusion to think that the monopoly on manipulation belongs to them: anyone today can interface with the same impulsive electorate and obtain the same unconditional consent, with the same ease. The government still controls television networks, but younger people no longer watch television, they watch social media, which no established power manages to completely remote-control. It is a vortex that feeds itself from the bottom up and from the top down: from the bottom, governments increasingly inclined to cultivate the ignorance that elected them are chosen; from the top, conditions are built so that that ignorance remains, strengthens, and reproduces. There is no single culprit in this picture: there is a responsibility that circulates, rising and falling, without either extreme—neither those who command nor those who obediently drift along—ever deciding to break the circle.