Public Intellectuals

COMICON.com: WARREN ELLIS' THE MINISTRY 6: PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS:

"Umberto Eco: now there's a public intellectual. Here's a strange thing for you. Italy is about as intellectually debased as a European country can get. It supports five daily national newspapers devoted entirely to football. Its prime minister own TV stations. You whining Yanks complain about Fox News, but imagine a situation where George Bush owned CBS. That's where the Italians are. I think pretty much every English-speaking Italian I've met told me that at least one impetus to learning the language was so that they could listen to BBC news, the first unbiased news source they ever experienced. The current Italian election campaign is high comedy -- if you happen not to live there -- with Berlusconi pulling stunts that'd make Richard Nixon wriggle in his grave with envy.

And yet Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics and world-renowned author, has a regular newspaper column. And he's not unique. Eco himself had said that he's simply following a tradition of Italian intellectuals speaking in public. In a country that mad, intelligent men and women understand that part of their job is to speak to the public.

And we're not talking about mysterious pronouncements from the dusty depths of academe. Like the best fiction, this is an element of pure reportage: conscious people telling you where they think they are today and what they think it looks like."