Nous Non Plus – "Bunga Bunga" (2011)

Milan ou Tripoli

Vilnius ou Benghazi

Paris, Moscow on fait le bunga bunga

In the last 2 or 3 lines, we met Elvira Savino, an Italian legislator who is an outspoken supporter of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi exhibits the character flaws of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – not to mention Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner.

Silvio Berlusconi: "Call me, lovely lady!"

I could write about the scandals and controversies that have swirled around the 80-year-old Berlusconi  until the cows come home.  But I have a short attention span, and I’m guessing you do as well.  So I’ll concentrate on a few choice nuggets from the mother lode of Berlusconi-related sleaze.

When it comes to bimbo eruptions, Silvio Berlusconi makes William Jefferson Clinton look like an amateur.  Here’s how one publication characterized Il Cavaliere’s sexual misbehavior:

Cheating on his wife.

Cheating on his wife, repeatedly.

Cheating on his wife with prostitutes, repeatedly.

Cheating on his wife with underage prostitutes, repeatedly.

Filling the government and the European parliament with unqualified women he might have cheated on his wife with.

The last item on that list may require a little explanation.

In 2009, Berlusconi said that he wanted “young faces, new faces” to be his party’s standard-bearers in the elections to choose the Italian members of the European Parliament.  

It was probably no coincidence that all those “young faces, new faces” belonged to young female hotties.  

There was Angela Sozio, a former contestant on the Italian version of the “Big Brother” TV show:

Angela Sozio

Camilla Ferrante is an actress and lingerie model:

Camilla Ferrante

Barbara Matera is a former beauty pageant contestant who later became an announcer on a state-owned television station and a television/movie actress:   

More about Signorina Matera, who was the only one of the three to be elected to the European Parliament, from London’s Telegraph newspaper:

"I've never been a showgirl," said Barbara Matera, 27, a television presenter, actress and former Miss Italy contender, who was invited to meet the prime minister at his private residence in Rome on Thursday evening.

Barbara Matera

She said she hoped her entry into politics would "explode the prejudices" about women not being able to have both beauty and brains.

Her political role model was Mara Carfagna, the former topless model and game show starlet who Mr Berlusconi last year made his equal opportunities minister.

Yes, you read that correctly – Berlusconi’s cabinet included as its Minister for Equal Opportunity a woman who has posed sensa vestiti for Maxim (which had ranked her #1 on its “World’s Hottest Politicians” list) and other men’s magazines.  (Even worse, she has a law degree.)

One would expect no less from a man who once said, “It's better to like beautiful girls than to be gay.”

Mara Carfagna

One beautiful girl that Mr. Berlusconi liked a lot was Moroccan exotic dancer Karima El Mahroug, whose stage name was Ruby Rubacuori (“Ruby the Heartstealer” in Italian), who was 17 when she was arrested for theft in Milan in 2010.

Berlusconi called the chief of police from Paris and pressured him to release the Moroccan teenager.  He claimed that she was the niece of the late President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and that her arrest would cause a diplomatic incident.

But young Ruby told police that Berlusconi has paid her thousands of Euros to attend parties at his house where he and 20 young women performed an African ritual known as “bunga bunga” in the nude.

Karima El Mahroug (a/k/a Ruby Rubacuori)

No one was sure exactly what “bunga bunga” involves, but perhaps a joke that Berlusconi used to enjoy telling may provide a clue.

Here’s the joke:

A pair of Berlusconi’s political rivals are captured by a fierce African tribe, stripped of their clothing, and tied up.  The tribe’s chief tells the Italians they must choose death or bunga bunga. 

Not surprisingly, the first politician chooses bunga bunga – which turned out to be the tribe’s term for gang rape.

(“All the warriors in the village did him,” Berlusconi would say when he told the joke.)

The chief then asks the second Italian the same question.

The terrified Italian says: “I’d prefer to die.”

The chief replied, “Fine, you will die . . . right after the bunga bunga is over!”

Prosecutors charged that Berlusconi was guilty of having sex with an underage prostitute.  (At the time, the law in Italy did not prohibit sex with an adult prostitute, nor did it prohibit sex with a 17-year-old who was not a prostitute.  But having sex with a 17-year-old prostitute was illegal.)  They also alleged that Berlusconi’s twisting of the police chief’s arm in order to get Ruby released was an abuse of  his political office.

Berlusconi checks out a Miss Italia contestant

Berlusconi was eventually convicted on both charges and sentenced to seven years in prison.  He was also banned from ever holding public office again.  But an appeals court overturned his convictions.  

It turns out that the term “bunga bunga” predates the Berlusconi joke by decades.  Read the next 2 or 3 lines for another delightful “bunga bunga” tale.

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Nous Non Plus is a faux-French band based in New York City.  Its members include Céline Dijon, François Hardonne, Cal d’Hommage, and Jean-Luc Retard.

Nous Non Plus – the phrase is usually translated as “neither do we” or “neither are we” – was formed after the breakup of another faux-French band from New York City, Les Sans Culottes.  (That name is a reference to working-class French revolutionaries, who were long trousers instead of the knee breeches – or culottes – worn by male French aristocrats.)

The Les Sans Culottes breakaways wanted to use that name for their new band, but the original group’s founder was a lawyer who went to court and won an injunction preventing them from doing so.  (The musicians who replaced the ones who had left Les Sans Culottes included Kit Kat le Noir, Courtney Louvre, Francoise Hardly, Jacques Strap, Edith Pissoff, Theo Neugent, and Sid Vichyssoise.)

“Bunga Bunga” is a simple song.  Each of its ten verses names several cities, followed by on fait le bunga bunga – in other words, “In [name of city] or [name of city], we do the bunga bunga.”

The first verse of the song (which is quoted above) mentions the two biggest Libyan cities: Tripoli and Benghazi. (“Bunga Bunga” was released in 2011, the year before the infamous attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans – including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.)  I’m guessing that’s because Silvio Berlusconi was a good friend of the late Libyan strongman, Colonel Mummer Gaddafi.

Gaddafi and Berlusconi

From The Daily Beast website:

Berlusconi and Gaddafi were much more than casual acquaintances and bilateral buddies.  The two shared an intimate friendship that was evident every time they met. . . . Berlusconi and Gaddafi were like giddy schoolmates in each other's presence.  In one meeting of the Arab League, Berlusconi even kissed Gaddafi's hand, an honor that in Italy is generally reserved for the pope.  The two men shared a penchant for sexed-up, orgiastic celebrations, and the all-female security detail that Gaddafi traveled with seemed straight out of the Berlusconi playbook.

One other thing: Gaddafi may have told Berlusconi the “bunga bunga” joke

Here’s “Bunga, Bunga”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys – "Roly Poly" (1946)

Roly-poly, eatin' corn and taters

Hungry every minute of the day

Roly-poly, gnawin' on a biscuit

Long as he can chew it it's okay

I believe that parents should be allowed to raise their children as they see fit, without the government bossing them around.

On the other hand, some parents are idiots who do things that are clearly hazardous to their children’s health and well-being.

In the United States, parents sometimes find themselves at loggerheads with government officials over home-schooling and vaccinations and such things.

But when parents and the government clash in Italy, the issue always seems to be food.

Here's a recent headline from the Washington Post:

In Milan last July, a 14-month-old boy’s grandparents took him to a hospital because they were alarmed by how thin he was.  Doctors found that the boy weighed only as much as a typical three-month-old, and also had a serious calcium deficiency, which they attributed to the fact that his parents were feeding him a strict vegan diet.  A judge ordered the boy to be taken away from the parents.  

Last year, another Italian judge ordered a divorced mother who was feeding her son a macrobiotic diet to cook him meat at least once a week.  In a Solomonic twist, the boy’s father was ordered not to feed him meat more than twice on the weekends, when he had custody of him.  (It seems the father took him to McDonald’s regularly.)

In response to these and similar incidents, an Italian legislator named Elvira Savino recently introduced a bill that would make it a crime for parents to provide an inadequate diet to their children.  

Ordinarily, I would strenuously object to that kind of government overreaching.  But Elvira Savino obviously knows a lot about proper diet:

Elvira Savino

Savino is a snazzy dresser:

Here are photos of the leggy legislator hard at work.  (She is a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies. which is comparable to the U.S. House of Representatives):

Elvira Savino is known in Italy as “La Topolona” – a colloquial term that might be translated as “hot chick.”  (The literal meaning of “topolona” is “big female mouse,” which seems like an odd expression to use to describe a fabulous babe.  But referring to an attractive woman as a warm baby chicken is equally odd.)

It’s time to get this post back on track . . . after some more pictures of Elvira Savino (including one from her wedding):

If we’re talking about a serious health risk to children, I’m not going to oppose the government stepping in and dictating to parents.  But we all know that if you give a government an inch, it’s going to want a mile – and the Italian government is no exception to that rule.  To wit . . .

In January 2015, an Italian father was sentenced to nine months in jail for forcing his daughters to eat a macrobiotic diet and do strenuous exercise.  

“You’re fat, you have to do more sport: you will never achieve anything in life,” the father allegedly told them.

The girls’ mother reported the man to authorities.  (The parents had separated.)  They prosecuted the father because his words had a damaging impact on the girls.

I’m not sure whose side I’m on in this dispute – I need to know some more facts.  (For example, how much the daughters weighed.)

But I do know that for every child who is being fed a vegan diet that’s inadequate for his or her nutritional needs, there are probably ten or twenty kids whose parents are stuffing them full of junk food and setting them up for a lifetime of heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes, and self-loathing.

While I think it’s unforgivable for a father to belittle his daughters over their appearance, it’s equally unforgivable for parents to enable childhood obesity.

I’m not going to pretend that I know where to draw the line between tough love and child abuse.  

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“Roxy Poly” was released by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in 1946.

Fred Rose with business partner Roy Acuff

The song was written by legendary Nashville songwriter Fred Rose, who was one of the first three men to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame when it opened in 1961.  (Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers were the other original inductees.)

Rose’s other compositions included “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and a number of Hank Williams hits.

Here’s “Roly Poly”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: