Letters to the Editor
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Gangstas
An earlier LW hit the nail on the proverbial head. Notice how "white" gangsta culture gets endlessly analyzed, parsed, examined and rationalized? And notice how "black" gangsta culture-exemplified by Hip Hop-is dismissed as crude, primitive garbage hardly worth a passing thought?
This really is one of the most amazingly blatant double standards currently going, and it seems equally prevalent on both the right and the left.
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We who?
Why do bad writers insist on writing these articles about what "we" think and "we" love. Try being honest and just write an article about what YOU think. Don't try to artificially and dishonestly try to lend weight to your beliefs by acting as if everyone everywhere thinks exactly the same as you. It's insulting.
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I really don’t accept the premise of this article
Havrilesky creates a vision sure to warm the hearts of the average Salon reader.
America is a little stressed these days, a little anxious. On the surface, everything is fine. Under our devoutly Christian leader, we are all highly moral. We have right and God on our side as we fight the evildoers.
Are we really to believe that anyone who reads Salon accepts that vision, or in their lifetime ever had? “Our devoutly Christian leader” is a phrase that only comes to mind for most people here when the subject is Jimmy Carter. And no one much bought that when he was in office. Those are the sentiments of, not even WWII, but WWII era propaganda and popular entertainment.
Except that, well, we've been feeling kind of weird. And, to tell the truth, we have a few skeletons in our closet.
This implies people are working their way towards a realization of what the world, or let’s be specific, Bush and the Republicans, have done. I think long before The Sopranos started, Salon readers knew how they felt about both. Hell, before 9-11 they already knew how they felt about both.
Somebody whacked some of our crew, and we were scared, so we whacked Iraq. Just like Tony ordered the hit on Adriana. Steps were taken, as Sil would say. Except it turned out there were some unexpected consequences. We basically killed an entire country, and a whole lot of Americans, and people are dying all the time. And what are we doing? Nothing. We're going to the Bada Bing. We're having dinner at Artie's. Same old same old. Everything's fine. It's just fine.
Does anyone here have their heads in the sand this way? Does anyone in America? Even people who support the war and the president, don’t think everything is fine, just fine. They realize the complications and the disasters that this war involves, they know that America itself is a country that that contains criminals and liars as well as people who embrace (and often struggle with) a moral life. Havirlesky's depiction is a cheesy simplification of the national identity, and to foist it off on The Sopranos is, I think, patently ludicrous.
A letter writer made the very good point in another column that he or she was not a saint and could not constantly pay attention to the atrocities of war. Paying attention to the news is important, but it can't be the focal point of our 24 hours each day. We need fluff, but that's only a small part of it. We need good times. We need hope and a belief in something (that something is not celebrity gossip). And I think that is what people who support the world, as well as those who don't, are turning towards when they turn away from the body count in Iraq, or the various other tragedies that go on in the world.
And that's very, very far away from the psyche of Tony Soprano.
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This is the real world?
Sure, the characters experience all of the quotidian problems that everybody does. They worry about their marriages, their kids, their hairlines, their landscaping and their mental health. Not many seem too concerned about their waistlines, though. But to characterize them as regular schmoes just like the rest of us is ludicrous.
These people inhabit their own self contained world and have no clue how everbody else lives. Not one character has experienced the tedium of getting up every day, spending a day at work worrying about the boss and job security before coming home to deal with life's challenges. Well, AJ did have a fling at Blockbuster Video and a stint at a pizza parlor but, very predictably, those jobs weren't suitable for his talents and temperament.
Never having been on a can cause one to miss out on some valuable experiences. Like learning how to manage money. When Johnny Sacks was arrested the forensic accountants went to work and set his net worth at $5.5 million. Certainly not bad, but a CEO of a medium size company (to which which it would not be unreasonable to compare Johnny's operations) would do much better. Tony's idea of saving is to wrap his cash in freezer bags and stash it with the bird seed.
Since everybody lives in a cash economy, they do have one advantage over us: they don't worry much about taxes. And they lack those wallets full of max'd out credit cards. But in the end they are stuck and have nowhere to go. Whatever the fate of Tony, Paulie, Phil, Carmela, etc. in the final episode, going straight is not in the cards. They all lack the basic skills to carry on a normal existence. Only Meadow has a real shot.
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The Sopranos is the Perfect Show For These Corporatist Times
America doesn't want to like Tony, but it does. Yeah, he's a bad guy; he's an uneducated malapropism-spouting stupe, but he's a guy we wouldn't mind sharing a beer with or shootin the breeze with on an airplane.
He's very resolute when it comes to making decisions. Especially decisions about who should get whacked. Once he's made up his mind, that's that. He's a decider. He demands loyalty from his crew. And loyalty is what he gets --- or else. He has no qualms about throwing somebody else under a bus -- even a relative -- to save himself. He has no sense of shame as he derides the morals of degenerate gamblers and drug addicts even as he is murdering others.
Tony has his own business, like most Americans would like to have their own businesses. He is the big boss. Most Americans want to be the boss. Tony has a lot of money, a big house, a nice pool, fancy cars. Most Americans aren't jealous of Tony for what he has. Instead, they'd like to have what he has too. It doesn't matter that a guy like Tony would step on the average guy like a bug if he needed to. We don't mind. We'd like to be someone who can just step on someobody else, too.
We admire Tony Soprano and the power and money he has. Americans would like to be him. Americans will let Tony Soprano and George Bush and Dick Cheney and Halliburton do what they've been doing for years ---- trampling on people, ruining lives, taking lives, taking the money, fucking the good-looking whores, keeping the wife in line, laughing at the people they've fooled and ruined or killed ---- because Americans want to be those guys. They don't despise those guys or that behavior at all. They do nothing to try and stop the Cheneys and the Halliburtons and the Enrons and the Blackwaters and the Sopranos, because Americans entertain the idea that someday they -- or their kid-- can actually become one of those guys.