This week I heard from three of our subscribers on what I’ll term our ethnic identity crisis.
Subscriber Robert Randazzo forwarded an online essay by a filmmaker named Richard Stecz (pronunciation optional) reflecting on perverse Italian American values. Stecz asks, “Why do Italians revel in their own depravity, as they love to do, in cinema??(sic) Italians are kind of like pigs. They wallow in their own shit.” The essay goes on to quote mafia movie dialogue and characters to paint a picture of our ethnicity as unsalvageable. “Don’t you wonder, why Italians boast so much about being so bad?…In truth, they’re mostly just a bunch of pussies. They couldn’t think themselves out of a paper bag.”
Offensive, ya think? Clearly, Stecz has nothing but disdain for Italic people, yet he correctly blames Coppola, Scorsese, Chase, and the actors they employ for projecting this undeniably negative image. Aside from the fact that Stecz doesn’t offset his opinion with any positive observations, I find his candor quite in line with what our Italic Institute has been saying about Hollywood since our founding. To go one step further, blame needs to be spread more equitably and across the Atlantic.
Last December, Mob-propagandist Franky Coppola received the Lupa Capitolina, Rome’s highest civic award from that city’s Communist mayor. In fact, Coppola and other Mafia-dependents have been the toast of Italy for decades. Seems that our Italian cousins can’t discern ‘art’ from propaganda. Our Senior Analyst Bill Dal Cerro sent off a strong protest to misguided Mayor Gualtieri, to wit: the Eternal City is now an accomplice in media defamation. If only Coppola had produced a film saga on Gualtieri’s murderous Italian Communist Party of the 1940s (an estimated 50,000 murders!) it would make the Sicilian Mafia seem like a benevolent organization. Would Mayor Gualtieri reward Coppola for that?
Also received was an email from Subscriber Dennis Middlebrooks directing us to yet another fictional Mafia series being streamed on Amazon: Gravesend. This series has been polluting TV screens in 20 different countries since 2020, a poor man’s Sopranos set in an Italian American neighborhood of Brooklyn during the 1980s – a story “written in blood,” says the promo. Mob-movie veterans Chazz Palminteri and Vincent Pastore round out a cast of goombah nobodies looking to add more nails to the Italic coffin for fun and profit. (And we mustn’t forget the anticipated Season #3 of the CBS-TV primetime series Tulsa King starring Sly (Rocky) Stallone. This ‘trailblazing’ Mob series broke into mainstream TV by substituting the word frickin’ for f—king in standard Mob dialog. Isn’t that the stuff of Emmys?)
It was almost refreshing to receive a letter from Subscriber Lena Cernigliaro concerning something other than Mafia movies. She enclosed an essay from an online provider of “alternate news” asserting that the ancient Romans and Greeks were Nordics, not Mediterraneans. This is an old theory proffered by racist northern Europeans even before Hitler. The argument was that only northern Aryans were smart enough or warlike enough to produce Western Civilization. So, the likes of Pericles, Aristotle, Caesar, and Augustus were actually foreigners in Greece and Italy. Hitler often observed that Roman busts looked nothing like the modern Italian (ironically, der Fuhrer, Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering were no Nordic hunks!). Indeed, Nero had blue eyes, and Augustus sandy hair but to perform a wholesale switcheroo on ancient history is not only far-fetched but a flight of fancy.
Clearly, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not survive genetically intact, by virtue of invasion, colonialization, and slave importation. However, Romans tended to baldness and large noses – check out many Italians today for these tell-tale signs, including me! Frescos from Pompeii show light-skinned women and dark-skinned men. Beauty standards of the day demanded pale ladies and sun-tanned men. Many a “dark” Italian today turns pale in the winter.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the media and quack historians just left us alone? -JLM
It is helpful at times like this “to consider the source” and the agenda that’s at play. As these ridiculous comments emerge, you really experience what raw prejudice is about. All the facts in the world can’t change those polluted minds but the damage becomes how it finds a way into mainstream thought, where a lot of damage can occur.
Just consider, aside from the early days of exploration, I think there are about a couple of paragraphs, at best, in American History courses that highlight the Italian American experience. I don’t think we as a community are alone in this situation but reinforces the need to network and share our collective experiences.
Recently, through my network, I was introduced to an author, Ralph Giordano, who shared with me two of a series of works he is writing: Italian Culture in America, which so far is composed of two books, Thomas Jefferson–How a founding father introduced Italian Art, Architecture, Food, Wine and Liberty to the American People. And the immigrants 1880 to 1930 From Discrimination to Assimilation. (Academic Press)….I can assure you, its a scholarly well written tone, and I can equally assure you that it won’t change one iota the prejudice of the idiots you noted. Still, the task is to confront mainstream American with the facts less the lazy idiots who somehow hold media power by their absurdities prevail.