Italy's Fertility Day Gives Birth to Brilliance

After years of proffering their unique brand of slap-stick humor (reaching its zenith with Johnny Stecchino, Alberto Sordi and I'd say, La Messa è Finita) it took an inane piece of legislative propaganda to make an entire nation find its sarcastic funny bone. Italy's Fertility Day may not have created the bump it was aiming for, but it certainly made for a nice bump in Twitter stocks. 
Here's the best of the bunch - delineating the best uses for a woman out there -- after which I'll break down the whole insipid debacle bit by bit:

Basically, Italy's Minister of Health (headed by a woman whose closest brush with laws and healthcare was in reading the Patient Bill of Rights once in a doctor's waiting room), decided that - instead of working with her buddy over at the Ministry for the Economy to improve work conditions and markets -- they would just give women a job to do: make and raise children. 

So, Fertility Day was planned. Italians scratched their heads on the terminology used for this piece of fascist propaganda, wondering if this meant that Brexit hadn't pulled out fast enough. For everyone else who figured fertility was close to fertilità, they either went out and watered their plants, or tuned into Pope Francis to see why he issued the statement- in English.

Women soon took umbrage at the idea that they were being asked to basically, lie back and think of Italia. Infertile women, single women who would like to adopt but can't, couples wishing to use surrogates (and can't) and all the other categories of ladies-in-waiting were irate...and not only because of the hormone imbalances as they shot themselves up hoping this time they'd fall pregnant.

Italy has cut 15% in education spending. There aren't enough day cares to meet even a fraction of the demand. And wage stagnation (steady since 1992) has eaten into incomes, with many couples struggling to make ends meet; and those are the ones with two jobs. Women's work is extremely low-paid, and the only fringe benefits are for the boss.

Women who strive to get through college (over 60% of the degrees, though our Minister isn't one of them) find themselves shut out of the job market due to plain and simple discrimination, or baseless fears that in the country with the lowest birthrate on earth, they'll be putting buns in the oven one right after the other. Like China, the single child home is a feature of the Italian landscape.
Men were not considered part of the solution, although my book illustrator, Gianfalco, offered up a pretty good one himself.

click on photo for full post redirect

The commentary was endless...and most of it was sheer brilliance. Except for the (men) naysayers who chose to rant on women who spoke truth to the power of the ill-informed.

So, after backtracking on their misconceived missive, they next double downed to issue  a pamphlet on the topic of substance abuse. 

Again, the Twitterverse was on fire: Showing sparkling white good families having fun in the sun, compared with the bad things that might happen if you surround yourself with dark people of course doing dark drugs.

It appears our Minister has let go of her communications specialist at this point.
And with that newfound Italian wit of days of yore, Italians offer a terrific turn of phrase which admirably sums up the entire fiasco:  

The mamma of imbeciles is always pregnant.