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.
Meloni on fire: It takes nimble thinking to transform condescension into political capital. But Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was more than up to the task. At the G-7 Summit, the American president, typically rude, said he had spoken to Meloni but only after she chased him down to “beg” that he pose for a photo with her, something he said he agreed to because he felt sorry for her. A day later, Meloni hit back hard in a widely circulated video in which she said the president had fabricated the entire incident, adding, “I, and Italy, do not beg.” Meloni, lately criticized by the center-left for her perceived deference toward Washington, was almost instantly rehabilitated. Here, for everyone to see, was a new and tougher prime minister who had vocally defended the pope from White House insults and refused any involvement in the Iran War, positions that tended to push her away from reactionary policies ahead of 2027 national elections. Though Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup, her words and tone aroused Italian nationalism--all the more so since the president persists in assailing her online.
Why the American president cannot rein in his crudeness is anyone’s guess, but in terms of Europe, it runs deeper than the matters of national popularity, energy policy, migration, and Middle East wars. A decade ago, the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy said in a New York debate that while he worried about the new president’s domestic and foreign policy, he was just as concerned about his egregious lack of style. He was right to worry. But, increasingly, European leaders are learning to fight fire with fire, which Meloni continues to do, giving her an odds-on chance of retaining her Italian leadership.
Go, Charlemagne: Though many times said and written, it’s still worth remembering that the World Cup is as much a global exercise in populism and patriotism as it is a sporting event. The essence and identity of nations, not club teams, are pitted against each other. The cup is, in effect, a referendum on all aspects of national culture. Results can instantly make countries very glad or very sad. Germany’s 7-1 thrashing of Brazil in the 2014 semifinals —
in Rio, no less — seemed to all but bury the record five titles that Pele’s country had accumulated over 60 years. An even greater seismic shock came at the 1966 cup, when a North Korean team jokingly referred to by Italian newspapers as a hodgepodge of diminutive farmhands, ousted mighty Italy. So humiliating was that loss that una Corea, “a Korea,” came to mean any major embarrassment. America, provincial by nature and fundamentally self-confident on the global stage, cannot fathom what it means when a Cape Verde, population 530,000, holds European champion Spain to a 0-0 draw. This is true David and Goliath stuff that “Go USA” America cannot fully comprehend because it has not been exposed to foreign invasion, the burdens of occupation, decades of rebuilding, mass poverty, colonialism, and what might be called general international irrelevance.
In spirit, to borrow from historian William Manchester, the World Cup can at times seem to hark back to a world lit only by fire, in which jousts and heraldic banners with crested seals mattered above all else. Please, then, don the glasses of historical context when you watch this World Cup, bearing in mind that while the United States now proudly celebrates its 250th birthday, the cumulative age of the competing countries easily surpasses a millennium. Just ask Braveheart’s tartan army.
Bitter heart: Some sons and daughters of European friends believe that I lived in a simpler, if not golden, age. Less social and political fragmentation since a global war had just been fought and the continent was busy rebuilding. No useful-but-addictive Internet. No AI. 
Far less daily pressure on parents and children alike, and as a result, a smaller chance of insecurity brought on by constant stress and anxiety. Influenced by 1950s Hollywood movies and family-oriented sitcoms, they imagined American households of that period as wholesome and uncomplicated. In some respects, I admit that such nostalgia isn’t altogether wrong. But what this fails to account for — and I speak from experience — were twice-weekly fallout shelter drills when my entire Washington, D.C., classroom was herded into the cold, dank basement under a flickering light bulb suspended by a thread. The year was 1964. It also fails to consider the extent to which my parents worried regularly about the prospect of nuclear war. At cocktail parties, men debated overkill. They were essentially counting how many tens of millions of Americans or Russians would die in a first-strike missile attack. When I tried to seek refuge in Hergé’s Tintin series, I was told I needed to behave more like an adult since my mortal future was at stake. So instead I played with my stuffed animals. All of this is to say, beware the teasing grapes of idealized nostalgia. They can be as bitter as a bitter heart.
imaginable way. Both his social conscience and sense of morality are robust. Entering the political arena, he all but denounced the Iran War and its architects. In recent months, he has visited the poor and the dispossessed in central and east Africa while doing the same on a trip to Spain’s Canary Islands, where he warned human traffickers that they risked eternal damnation, strong words from a pontiff, though in line with his late 19th-century predecessor, Leo XIII, who upheld worker rights during the Industrial Revolution. In a thoughtful encyclical that minced no words, this latter-day Leo has also warned of AI’s danger to human autonomy and spiritual dignity. It is therefore no surprise that he would turn down an official invitation to travel to the United States for its lavish Independence Day celebrations. Instead, he will use July Fourth to mingle among those this White House considers subhuman, saying mass on the stockade-filled southern Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where Italy detains stray migrants. If Pope Leo has proved one thing in his brief tenure, it is that his early American upbringing taught him the fundamentals of civics, civil society, human decency, and compassion, bulwarks of what America once stood for. And it is moving to behold.
Han Musk: It’s all well and good for galactic impresario Elon Musk to announce that his multi-trillion dollar Space X project is on the cusp of opening the door to real-life Captain Kirks and Han Solos so that man can literally go where he has never gone before. But where, pray tell, will he go? Mars is the only planet in our solar system scientists believe might support human life. Trips to Venus (too hot) or to Jupiter (composed mostly of gases) might captivate sci-fi fans but have little consequence for human beings since they cannot be inhabited. Cutting to the space chase, it is interstellar travel that is most appealing and exciting, though it is just this kind of travel that is outside Han Musk’s reach. Distant exploration will demand either the arresting of mortality, cryonic sleep, or the creation of spacecraft capable of so-called warp speed. That or the invention of quantum physics machines that bypass time as we know it and put man in two places at once, much in the spirit of “Beam me up, Scotty.” Bottom line: the newer, bigger, faster, and more versatile rockets are impressive, but to reach the sci-fi galaxies the childish and churlish Musk boasts of exploring will require not improved rocket technology but a basic rethinking of human life, a frontier no one has yet to even approach.
Defiling L’Enfant: The French architect L’Enfant devised an imposing but simple plan for the city that would be the American capital, Washington, D.C. — a city I would by good luck call home for nearly a decade. The two major seats of power, the White House and the immense Capitol building, would be connected by a wide boulevard, vaguely in sight of each other but not quite, like an intended flirtation. Memorials honoring Jefferson and Lincoln would sit slightly to the side, closer to the Potomac River. These four structures would all be neoclassical in nature, with domes and columns aplenty. At the center of it all there would be a 555-foot obelisk honoring George Washington and acting as a towering fulcrum. The cemetery where the war dead were buried was set into verdant, low-lying hills across the river, in Arlington, Virginia, gracefully low-keyed. Now this president proposes to ruin this perfect symmetry by building a triumphal arch that would lord over the cemetery and approach the Capitol dome in height. It would be his Parisian Arc de Triomphe. The idea comes as no surprise since his overweening vanity has already seen him add his name to the Kennedy Center, a squalid move thankfully undone by a local judge’s stern order. Yet the fact remains that, like a French poodle, this president must relieve himself wherever possible and thus mark his territory. If brought to fruition, the arch idea would mangle L’Enfant’s treasured blueprint. Many were the times when, by night, I would sit on the steps of the Capitol building, the Jefferson Memorial, or the Lincoln Memorial, before 9/11 made such youthful excursions impossible. Still, those lovely days in my lovely Washington remain etched powerfully onto my sense of American-ness. I can be singularly glad that my blindness will prevent me from seeing this gross real-estate developer’s imprint —and it is likely to be only one of many — on my beloved Washington.
The Maradona dilemma: Only on the rarest of occasions does fan passion for a club player interfere with World Cup nationalism. But the dilemma unfolded before my very eyes and ears when host nation Italy was pitted against Argentina in the 1990 semifinal by chance set in Naples. At the time, Diego Armando Maradona was the Naples club team’s hero and savior. He had guided Napoli to an Italian league title and dwelled in the realm of the superstitious city’s saints. So when Italy took on interloper Argentina in a stadium that would later be named for Maradona, fans were muted, unable to decide whether to cheer their favored son or their favorite nation — an atmosphere unlike any I’ve ever witnessed. Argentina defeated Italy only to lose to West Germany in the title game played in Rome. And after the cup, Maradona returned to perform his magic for Napoli. What about this year? My intuition tells me Argentina will not repeat. Lionel Messi, who caught lightning in a bottle in 2022, won’t do it again. So who then? Look to Spain and France, classy sides both. Or to England, desperate to repeat 1966. Africa Cup finalists Senegal and Morocco are both tough, but lack seasoning. Croatia has been consistently fierce for a decade. Also in my mix are co-host Mexico, Germany, and Portugal, as well as upstarts Switzerland and Norway. Too many are the outliers to count, the group-stage scramble perhaps the cup’s most engaging phase. At least unlike 1990, there will be no Maradona dilemma. So let the madness begin.
Foolish FIFA: FIFA has failed to do what it could and should have done a year ago, when both Israel and the United States were already on war footing in Iran — relocate Iran’s World Cup matches to Canada and Mexico. Instead, hoping to placate an American president’s belligerent prejudices, it awarded him its inaugural Peace Prize, a red-card error in judgment since his one and only goal was the Nobel Peace Prize. It should, therefore, surprise no one that Iran will have to fly from its provisional base in Mexico to play matches in Los Angeles and Seattle, to then be herded onto a same-day flight back to Mexico with ICE and police everywhere. A simple understanding of geopolitics could have prevented most of this, but FIFA preferred the illusion that old-school American fair play would prevail over reactionary politics. Would moving Iran’s games to Mexico or Canada have been inconvenient and caused some degree of havoc? Without doubt. But better inconvenience than the fiasco now afoot.
Imprisoned lions: For decades, I have lived only blocks from the Rome Zoo, here euphemistically referred to as the Bioparco. I strolled its grounds a few times when I could still see, usually in the company of visitors who wanted to take a peek at the animals. But those days are long gone and now the zoo’s existence comes to mind at hourly intervals when a booming recorded female voice announces in both Italian and English that it is forbidden to feed the animals. But after the zoo closes in early evening, the tone changes. This is when I hear the roar of Bengal tigers, Serengeti lions, Siberian bears, and Indian elephants, a raw but sincere music I once found quaint. What could these caged animals be thinking, week after week, year after year? Only now, as a blind man, have I begun to understand. Their sounds are not casual. Each night they tell the world that they are locked in, imprisoned, deprived as I am deprived of a vital aspect of life, their autonomy, to roam and see the world outside their furnished prison. Like me, they desperately want something back. Like me, they will never attain it, so that every day by twilight they express their mournful regret just as, next-door to them, I more quietly mull over my own shut-in sadness.
Mr. Pete: These are strange days for the men and women of NATO, their eyes trained east toward Russia while also aware they’ve essentially been orphaned by Uncle Sam, their longtime benefactor. They are like the Yankees come to play a game they know but suddenly confronted with a lack of bats, balls, bases, and, worst of all, umpires. Where then to turn for everything from scarce jet fuel to combat advice, since even the European Union emits confusing signals? NATO’s surreal situation reminds me of a neighbor of ours, Mr. Pete, who in 1960 had a giant hole dug in his backyard into which a submarine was lowered, or so we boys thought — I was seven. But it was in fact a fallout shelter with cots, canned food, and a water cooler. We were allowed to play in the sub and even got sugar cookie treats from Mrs. Pete. In exchange we had to listen to him tell us about the “Russkies” and that in the end there would be no alliances and we’d have to fend for ourselves. All his bluster took on urgency two years later when Moscow delivered nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. Cold War life going forward borrowed pages from the thick 1986 Tom Clancy novel, Red Storm Rising, in which Islamic extremists seize a vital Russian pipeline, thus forcing the Soviet Union to invade oil-rich Persian Gulf countries and triggering a massive conventional war in Europe. Though a very smart military writer with a superb mind for fiction, not even the likes of Clancy, were he still alive, could imagine Uncle Sam turning away from Europe. But he has, leaving NATO unsettled and, at times, directionless.