This representative of free market thought was going around the world saying that communism (by which he meant Stalinism) was the evil empire and that capitalism, the home of commodities par excellence, was the kingdom of good. Then the evil empire collapsed and the nakedness of the kingdom of good was exposed in all its wickedness.

The translation from italian has tried to convey the sense of irony that is brillianty illuminated in the original but inevitably some of the puns and comments are difficult to render in a foreign language.

John Paul II - the Pope Who Made Himself a Commodity- Dead

As soon as it was announced tha the condition of the Pope’s health had irreversibly worsened a media frenzy took over. The event was transformed into a spectacle worthy of Barnum and Bailey’s Circum, as if nothing like it had ever happened before. Whilst he was still alive radio, television and newspaper front pages began his funeral oration and a river of rhetoric, full of banalities and commonplace clichés were poured out on believers and non-believers alike, with the aim of celebrating this greatest of men, his uniqueness and his teachings. However, it was a journalist who, for fear that the spectacle would end differently by departing from the script he had already written, could not disguise his own disapointement at the delay in the arrival of death, and overreached himself by asking an unfortunate doctor how was possible the Pope could have survived so long! Once it was certain that the death was near, the commemorative tide knew no bounds. His illness, already paraded with some ostentation for some time, assumed something like the function of the salvation of the crucifixion, and the man who was suffering was like the Christ on the cross, notwithstanding the fact that he was medically treated until the last in a way which only the privileged few in our society can be!

Then the last breath so long awaited by the media enriched the scene. His corpse, wich in the blink of an eye had become a holy relic, being that of a hero without blemish and without fear, a paladin of freedom, of peace, of social justice, the ennemy of oppression, father of all, in short a saint and as such, exposed to the adoration of the faithful swarming in from all over the place for the last goodbye. Rome, the Mecca, except that it is a Christian and therefore a superior civilisation as that other Lord’s anointed, our Silvio1, rashly stated a little while ago.

Until now death has been a special commondity, exhibited as little as possible, and always with a bit of tact. It was no more than the accompaniment to grieving, the incurable sense of loss, the anguisk provoked by it, the reminder of the transitory nature of this life. Even the gravedigger, who makes a living out of it, is looked upon with a kind of hidden disgust though no-one can escape the need of his trade.

But for Wojtila2 none of this would have made any sense. No-one before him had understood better how much the transmission of the dominant ideology was intimately connected with the mechanisms of production and consumption of commodities and, how religion could not only escape from the fact but how it could become one itself. In due course Wojtila had even turned himself into a commodity, its fetish and its high priest... a commodity of the media but commodity nonetheless. And what a commodity! It is a commodity soaked with all those “immaterial