Behind the speaker’s podium in the American Congress there is a neo-classical stone wall with four marble pillars supporting a pediment on top of which there is an ornate golden clock. Pure kitsch, it goes without saying. “In God We Trust,” says the inscription in the middle of the pediment. Just underneath it hangs the American flag. To each side of the flag there are ornate golden fasces—bundles of rods containing an ax with a projecting blade, which used to be carried in front of magistrates in ancient Rome. And the very symbol of Mussolini’s fascism inaugurated nearly a century ago. The amazing thing is that I have somehow missed the ominous fasces for all these years. Until I watched Barack Obama’s first address to the joint houses of Congress a short while ago, that is. Photographs of the event flooded the world since. Either the fasces struck me for the first time as incompatible with the new and valiant president, or… Or what?