Sight Unseen
A blind expat's musings on life, death and the Trump era
My name is Christopher Winner. I am an American citizen who has lived in Europe, predominantly Rome, for nearly half a century, and I founded The American | In Italia in 2004. I also began a column titled “Area 51,” which exists to this day. But, in 2015, I was diagnosed with glaucoma and have gradually lost my sight. The thoughts and comments you read below are snippets of my thinking in these challenging times and are dictated to co-managing editor Leigh Smith. See also my personal website.
On hantavirus: Before my diseases stalled me, I crossed the Atlantic 13 times by liner and nearly 400 times by air. My worst maladies were a few colds. But things have changed. There are more passengers, more destinations, and more clever viral strains on the loose, many now more familiar than ever owing to the vulnerabilities of the human immune system. Strains that once preyed mostly on the weak, the sick, and the poor — consider the Spanish Flu — now have greater potency and range. Matters are today even more precarious with an America that all but denies the possibilities of contagion. That said, the time has come for an international body to study and protect against the surge in viral strains. The World Health Organization alone is not enough. This body could be called the Global Disease Detection Agency and would permit scientists, physicians, microbiologists, and other experts to collaborate and share information on a regular basis so that governments around the world could keep current on evolving strains of viruses and other potential health crises. This global detective force would be subsidized by all nations, within their means. If America has no interest, at least under this government, so be it. Even without it, such a detective force is feasible — if only less was spent on war and tech companies focused their AI not on fake nudes but real viruses. If only this did not seem too much to ask in a world that at times seems more tilted toward viral fantasies than the reality of the rare and shrewd maladies waiting to strike.
Britcrack: The sweeping success of Nigel Farage’s xenophobic Reform UK Party — humiliating both Tories and ruling Labor in nationwide, local, and parliamentary elections — should surprise no one. A decade ago, Farage embarrassed the smug conservative government of David Cameron by unexpectedly driving through the so-called Brexit referendum that forced Britain out of the European Union. His campaign was a masterclass in bogeyman politics that portrayed the country as bureaucratically enslaved to Brussels. Since again taking charge of Reform UK in 2024, he has pressed the same button, this time insisting Britain was “broken,” overrun by Muslim migrants whose religion and customs were suffocating traditional British values. The mollycoddling of refugees set into motion by the Labor party had to end. Mass deportation was needed, and in this he found an unexpected ally in the American president, who also believes aliens are contaminating Britain and Europe — “civilizational erasure” is the going phrase. Suddenly, Farage’s extremist views became mainstream, pushing both Conservatives and Labor into purgatory. That Farage is an Oswald Mosley–like protofascist means nothing to those galvanized by his incessant and persuasive wakeup call. In the very near future, both Tories and Labor may find themselves in the minority, thus ending Britain’s century-old two-party system. Overtaking and filling in for Labor will be the upstart Green Party, a perfect foil for Reform UK. Coming UK governments may witness alliances between Reform UK and the Conservatives on one side of the spectrum and the Greens, Labor, and Liberal Democrats on the other. Meanwhile, Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements are growing in size and scope, suggesting even bigger fractures may lie ahead. All of this triggered by a man, Farage, who hammered home the idea that Britain was a serf and the EU the lord of the manor. Soon, Farage will be a lord in his own right and the UK will join the U.S. as reactionary citadels.
Madness: The New World Order bewilders me. The United States has blockaded Cuba, choking it, but no one cares. Cuba is meaningless. Iran blockades the Strait of Hormuz, essential to the global flow of petroleum, and all are infuriated by its reckless, monstrous Revolutionary Guard. But please, pray tell, what other leverage did Iran have? It has been preemptively attacked twice in a year by Israel and the United States. Its biggest failure has been its unwillingness to capitulate. It is now standing up for itself in the only way the West understands, turning the sanctions it has long labored under on their end. I understand that much of the world loathes Iran’s Islamic regime. But I do not understand, and in fact dislike, double standards, and Iran — which has not directly aggressed on anyone — is the victim of just such a double standard, one imposed not by the bad guy but by the good. Pure madness.
Child’s play: In 1920, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and similar puritanical organizations received a providential assist from the United States Congress in the form of a constitutional amendment barring the production and distribution of alcoholic beverages. All this did, as is often the case, was create a plethora of subversions. The Italian and Irish mobs got to work creating thousands of speakeasies, some disguised as bingo parlors or literary salons. Many built their own stills and the word moonshine became a Roaring Twenties staple. Shipping lines invented binge-drinking “Cruises to Nowhere” in which liners spent a day or two outside U.S. territorial waters. The rich traveled to Cuba while the poor drank wood alcohol and went blind. In a word, Prohibition failed, and Franklin Roosevelt repealed it in 1933, giving a literally depressed nation a chance to again drown its sorrows, this time legally. Unsurprisingly, Alcoholics Anonymous came into being two years later. All this comes to mind when I read of legislation, some already in place, to keep under-16s off addictive social media platforms. While the idea has merit, I see stills and moonshine in the offing in the form of subterranean assistance to children who feel suddenly deprived, with unscrupulous hackers and tech companies playing the role of the mob. Bottom line, the digital genie is out of the gin bottle and, much as I’d like to, I can’t imagine a single way of putting it back in.
Glass Houses: The last time the United States faced an adamant, hard-line enemy, it dropped not one but two atom bombs to make its point and thus remains the only country ever to have developed and detonated nuclear weapon to achieve wartime ends. Such are the bitter ironies history serves up to the righteous.
Azzuri Blues: In 2018, Italy failed to win a berth in the World Cup for the first time in the competition’s nearly century-old history, and the country was understandably shocked. Had Italy not won the cup four times, played in six finals, and appeared regularly in the quarter- and semifinal rounds? For a time, this was excused as an awful glitch, a hubris check. But Italy was then excluded from the 2022 and 2026 Cup, eliminated by mini-minnows North Macedonia and Bosnia. Glitch was gone, and shame took center stage. So what’s gone wrong? The reality is that Italy’s vivaio, or farm system, has run dry. While kids between six and 16 still play in the streets and parks, some have turned to soccer esports and the like for amusement.
Raw talent is now harder to spot. Italian league clubs have made matters worse by coming to depend on mercenary talent from outside Italy. Such talent is cheaper and often better. Finally, unlike France, England, and Germany, Italy has no homegrown Black talent, cutting it out of the powerful African youth market. Few African families choose to settle in Italy, still a deeply racist nation with few faces of color in the public arena. These realities, when bookended, can make for an impoverishment of talent, with no American college-style pipeline to come to the rescue. No one brilliant manager can cure this. The failure is cultural as well as sporting. When Italy last won, in 2006 against France, the nation came to a proud standstill. But names like Zoff, Rossi, Baggio, and Maldini are gone with the wind, which means a great deal of time may pass before Italian players again hoist a World Cup trophy.
Emperor of America: The American president is the rarest of birds of prey. He detests much of the non–Anglo-Saxon world, one he has never shown much interest in understanding, but since the start of his second term, he has nonetheless intervened in half-a-dozen nations on behalf of his vision of war and peace. This makes him the most quixotic of isolationists and the first modern American leader to rule through cult of personality. He is anti-intellectual, luxurious but lacking in style, and especially adept at the art of retribution; the notion of consensus-building is, to him, alien and a deplorable sign of weakness. This in effect means the world is no longer dealing with the United States of America but instead with a thin-skinned New York real estate tycoon who happens to be president. Those who refuse to abide by boardroom orders are punished, not by the United States but by the tycoon. An America that once reflected a lofty if imperfect value system has been hijacked by an interloper who indulges personal, not national, preferences and priorities — profoundly insecure, he subsists on gut-level impulses and advice from his hand-picked coterie of insiders. Personality cult leaders have always depended on actions that call constant attention to themselves. By virtue of living and working in a rarefied society of yes-men, they are literally isolated. Consequently, nations not named America must be demeaned or threatened to acquire any real standing. Two centuries ago, a short and insecure military commander was not satisfied simply by being hailed as ruler of France. He demanded an emperor’s consecration. Behold a president who seeks the same.
Rotten to the core: I will be mercifully brief. News that members of this White House as well as American soldiers have used privileged information about foreign policy to place winning bets and play the stock market to their advantage reflects both a national addiction to online gambling and an almost cavalier attitude toward corruption that together cast a shadow not only on a mendacious president but on all who serve him. Before America’s immovable partisan divide, such allegations would have brought Congress to attention. But as it is now, the only congressional bipartisanship regards the Epstein scandal. This president has spent much of his second term posting insults to social media, with the Obamas as apes, India as a hellhole, Europe in the throes of civilizational erasure — hate upon hate, bigotry upon bigotry, vicious ignorance enough to fill all the space from sea to shining sea, and well beyond. If Americans otherwise estranged from political goings-on want a true sense of civilizational erasure, they need only crack open their windows. The stench will do the rest.
Rising sun: Douglas MacArthur will likely soon be forced to roll over in his grave, not once but several times. He is the five-star American general who, at home in Tokyo, turned postwar Japan from a nationalistic, militaristic state into a thriving democratic one that constitutionally renounced war and used technological ingenuity to rebuild, for decades a highly successful move — think Sony, think Honda, think Toyota, the list is long. Now, an aggressive new female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, seems ready to rethink Japan along the lines of America’s openly war-oriented president. She wants to liquidate Tokyo’s longstanding ban on military exports so the country can make quick cash from sophisticated-weapons sales to nations that have fallen out of favor with Washington. She also wishes to eliminate a constitutional ban on war that was largely MacArthur’s brainchild. In essence, Japan intends to fully rearm after decades of dependence on the United States. This of course will not please archrival China and means Tokyo will very likely resist any effort by Beijing to make Taiwan its own. Boiled down to its essence, Japan and China seem on a collision course that has the potential to plunge the entire Pacific Rim into incendiary chaos. MacArthur acted as he did specifically to avert any future trouble between these historic enemies. But just as the United Nations has been set aside, so has the MacArthur legacy. And for all this we have a would-be napoleonic president to thank.
Pope v. President: There has lately been tension between the American president and the American pope, Leo XIV, who at the moment is traveling in Africa, which along with Asia and the Americas, now represents the Catholic church’s most fertile terrain. It is a church that, since the papacy of John Paul II, has largely turned away from Europe and North America, preferring to address the hundreds of millions of faithful in the developing world. John Paul was a legendary presence who enjoyed mingling with the poor and the dispossessed. He felt at home in African countries and, away from St. Peter’s, argued vigorously for the right to freedom from oppression, from any hindrance to worship freely, and from systems of government disdainful of individual dignity. Leo is doing no more than following in his footsteps, albeit more carefully, which is why his spat with the White House occupant has drawn less mainstream attention in Rome than in Washington. My friends who once covered the Vatican — as did I briefly — all say the same thing. That the Chicago-born Leo is shocked by this president’s gratuitous vulgarity and indifference to basic morality, whether by making war, reveling in deportations, or stripping charities and aid agencies of vital American support. My friend Paolo, who knew Leo as a cardinal, says the pontiff finds the American president shameful, as did his predecessor, Pope Francis, in his final years. The churchman and the billionaire exchange what might be called verbal glares, because, simply put, they dislike each other, and since the American president (who has portrayed himself as Jesus on social media) demands veneration, there is not nor can there be true common ground. One is a disciple of dignity, the other has no notion of what the word means. Adds Paolo, now 85, “Leo believes the president worships but one, himself,” and, absent humility, there can be no respect. Enough said.
Dirty words: In the year 2000, when I was living in Prague, a woman I came to know introduced me to her grandfather, a pie-faced man well into his 80s who told me that during the Nazi occupation he had reluctantly served in the city’s law courts. This experience had marred his life, and he was now glad, he said, to be in the presence of a “good” American, as it was our efforts that slayed Nazism and later helped eliminate Communist rule. In flawless English, he recollected his law clerk days in 1941. Daily, dozens of citizens, mostly Jews, were summarily tried and convicted. Sometimes the offenses were absurd, perhaps walking down a certain street that was barred to Jews or trying to rescue a pet cat that had jumped on the fender of a military truck. Most all were given immediate death sentences and hanged in gallows located in the building’s courtyard. Others were guillotined in an abandoned tannery nearby. He remembered repeatedly having to pen the words “exterminated,” “eliminated,” and “extinguished” in his legal ledger. Those days left him so vacant in spirit that he spent many postwar years ambling through the local countryside and collecting grasshoppers whose delicate frames he preserved in cataloged jars. Now, nearly a century after those bleak Occupation days, it is the Jews of Israel and the “good” Americans who speak of extermination, since the hard-line leaders of Iran are portrayed as ugly specimens who very literally should not exist. Astonishingly enough, since both men were brought up in the immediate post-war, neither the American president nor his Israeli counterpart seem cognizant of the Nazi-era diction they apply almost daily. The Nazis rationalized their Prague law courts by saying they sought to re-order a contaminated city. Unwittingly, perhaps, America and Israel are providing similar rationalizations. As my friend’s grandfather said, “May God have mercy on me for those times.” That same God is now being asked to extend His mercy. There is no telling if He will.
Orbán’s end: For sixteen years, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was the European Union’s most accomplished chameleon. His expedient shifts from right to center and back to right — his true home — caused havoc in the EU. He vetoed budgets and forged a friendship with Vladimir Putin when no other states would touch him. He then morphed into an apologist for the Ukraine war. Until recently, his constituency admired him as a shrewd nationalist. All that has now ended with a landslide election defeat in which his party effectively lost control of the country to a younger, center-right candidate named Péter Magyar. Orbán’s mystique had been fading, true, but few expected this slaughter. The why is simple enough. The far right that used to serve Orbán so well suddenly became home to a troubling, Big-Stick American president as well as the dwelling place of the Israeli prime minister, a man Orbán severed ties with the International Criminal Court to host. Putin was one thing, but Orbán was now in league with a new and surprising duo of devils, neither one a political admirer of the EU, and this is to put it mildly. Hungary was also grappling with its own economic problems as well as allegations of widespread corruption. Enough was enough, and Orbán was gone in a day, American endorsements made useless since this United States more resembles the old Kremlin than anything traditionally American. What next? Probably closer ties with Brussels and a distancing from both the us and Israeli leadership. Orbán, a masterful Sisyphus, was a marvel at pushing even the most improbable rocks up steep inclines, only to step aside when they began to roll back toward him. Finally, he was not able to get out of the way.