My very Italian (with Sicilian overtones) family looks at me like I am nuts when I repeat for the 100th time in all these years that I have never watched the GODFATHER movies. Not #1 or #2 or #3. Not one of them.
I am not enamored by the Mafia or Cosa Nostra or the Mano Nera or whatever name you want to attach to the crime-based syndicate. I find it offensive to me as an Italo-American and see no purpose to romanticizing their ugly role in our society or in our ethnic identity.
I have actually seen it close up in personal events that my family will never know (and could never understand how I let myself get involved) and those events deepened my hate and contempt for the ‘institution.’
You see, the mafia and similar organizations, like street gangs, operate with a damaged individual at the top who manages to make others feel either beholden to him (her) or threatened by him (or her). Those others become not only sycophantic but captive to the reality that the leader presents them. They accept his story of reality as their own and protect it as their own, protect the leader as the keeper of the reality, and attack or divert those who would be threats to the reality.
To the extent that they fail to act on what’s right and what is true and what is fair, those individuals are as bad as or I would argue, worse than, the Don. They made a choice to follow him. They made a choice to lie. They put their vanity and self-preservation ahead of the needs of the community that is America. Can I understand the corner into which they painted themselves to get to that point? Sure. Can I excuse it because I understand that dilemma? NO! No more than I could excuse a Nazi death camp gruppenfuhrer who was just “following orders” or than I could excuse Lt. Calley for shooting Vietnamese civilians at My Lai or than I could excuse the terrorists who used commercial airplanes as weapons.
I share all of that because we witnessed during the hours of January 6, 2021, events that looked much like street gang or Mafia activities or wild-eyed marauders in foreign lands. A band of people who have been fooled by their leader into thinking that their reality was under attack and that the leader was under attack took over our nation’s Capitol seeking to bring our government to its knees.
I write not so much about the actions of those specific people (although their actions caused me pain and tears in the first instance). No, I write instead about the men and women who occupy seats of power and influence in America who sold America out to the Don in the White House. They acted like the henchmen who kiss the ass of the Mafia Don because he has convinced them of his reality and denied the truth of what they were about. They are the villains of the day in my eyes. They enabled the Don to act with impunity when they refused to hear witnesses at his impeachment trial, when they let him steal money from our defenses to build his ill-gotten wall, when they didn’t insist on seeing transcripts of his secret conversations with the enemy in Moscow, when they didn’t make a whimper as he brought out tanks and helicopters to scatter peaceful citizens in Lafayette Park so that he could march through and hold up a Bible. They did that…he was the Don who knew they would not say a word because he had them by the collective testicles. He was the bully they were all afraid of and who cowered from him and his anger. Their cowardice instead of leadership cost our democracy and our national psyche dearly on January 6th.
We often wonder how could anyone let that happen to them? Surely, they knew it was wrong. Surely, they don’t believe all this. Surely, they will stand up for truth and right before it’s too late. And then we realize that NO they aren’t going to stand up and they Do believe what the Don tells them and they have stopped understand wrong and right. and they don’t care about truth any longer; they care only about the Don and keeping the Don happy and content.
These people, who have families and attend churches and have community presences, bought into the lies and fabrications and manipulations of the evil man who they followed. They knew the truth but FAILED to tell the truth out of fear that the leader would take retribution on them and their careers and futures. They sold out the country out of fear of the Don in the White House and out of cowardice. They LIED to thousands of their own followers about the truth and, in turn, whipped those followers up into a frenzy that brought them to our nation’s Capitol to do what they thought was necessary.
In the coming days, many of them will offer sanctimonious platitudes and work to distance themselves from the Don now that he is about to leave the stage he has dominated for over 4 years. Their words will ring hollow to me because I don’t believe that they will choose to not follow the next Don who scares them or who has something on them from their past or who helps them raise money for their campaigns. They will forever have the stink of this man on them. And it will take some time and extensive evidence of their own remediation and penance before I can listen to them with an unjaundiced ear. (Some, like Sen. Hawley and Cruz, need to be censured by the body in which they seek to sit and deliberate. The voters need to have their way with people like these as well. But that for another time.)
And for those who wish to interject that he didn’t do anything that other presidents haven’t done too… STOP IT! That is part of the lie. We have managed to draw equivalencies between consistent and vile retrograde behavior and episodic acts by other presidents. Remember this: the Congress voted to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about an act of fellatio. No other president in recent memory has done what this man has done. Dick Nixon would be fascinated to hear me give him some cover in that sentence. No other president has drawn more people into believing lies and misinformation than this man. Remember his administration talking to us about ‘alternative truths’? That should have been a sign to us all.
No…this man is a nightmare and a crime in slow motion, but sadly he is also reflective of a seam of ignorance in our nation and our society. A seeming willingness to ignore or scorn truth and science and to embrace the words of anyone who similarly ignores or scorns truth and science. These followers have a need to scapegoat others to make up for their own failings and fears. They have no room in their hearts or minds for others who do not look like them or pray like them or live like them. And they have had their predilections to hate and prejudice and insularity reinforced and fueled by the Don. That is part of what holds them to his orbit.
We need to be better than that. We need to not be handmaidens of a Mafia Don. We cannot aggrandize the work of this madman in the White House and we must wash his stench off of our collective clothing.
Because we are at a juncture in our history, I would be remiss to not say that I welcome the new Biden-Harris administration and I wish them well and peace. I make no bones about being a fan of both of them but I can say with honesty that I would have welcomed anyone who was not the current Don and his not-so-merry tribespeople to the White House.
And with all due deference and affection to my Italian family who I love: I won’t be watching the Godfather trilogy any time soon. I saw the syndrome play out on national television news on January 6, 2021. Thank you but no thank you.
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