So I’m reading “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas,” Gal Beckerman’s excellent new book on the modest roots of massive sea changes, and the butterfly effect-like flutter of a parlor game forms in my head. I make leaps of logic that, though overly tidy, are compelling.
For instance, if Filippo Marinetti, the ringleader of the Futurist activists in early 20th century Italy — a guy who resembled “a silent movie villain about to tie a woman to the railroad tracks” — had not written war-hungry, scorched-earth manifestos, if his ideas had not influenced Benito Mussolini, there might not have been the momentum for fascism in Italy. This means, leaping ahead, there might not be that Roman column near Soldier Field, gifted to Chicago by Mussolini, to honor Italo Balbo’s transatlantic flight during, its plaque insists, “the 11th year of the Fascist Era.”
Or who knows? Marinetti or not, there might still be a Balbo Monument.
