Max Sawicky refuses to consider whether Stanley Tookie Williams may have been innocent of the crimes that led to his execution. The logic goes he must be guilty since he founded the Crips and if innocent of those particular crimes deserved to die anyway because he founded the Crips. Max would have been right at home with the social critics at my work who anticipated the coming execution as if it were a Super Bowl game and the home team was finally going to bring home a trophy. Lines like this would have whipped them into such a frenzy that even a world-sized cup held beneath their jowls would have runneth over with drool, “This whole show to me is some kind of Bizarro parable of justice. It’s the corruption of justice by celebrity.”
That would be the same Max Sawicky who used to blog weekly on HBO’s The Sopranos yet Hollywood’s blatant glorification of gangster violence excited him then, so much so, he would be upset if someone wasn’t whacked. As Max explained it, “MaxSpeak is totally into this show, so we’re going to blog what may be its last year. It’s New Jersey, it’s a middle-aged oaf striving for the simple, base pleasures in life, it’s being put upon from all sides. We are Tony Soprano.” Before you cede Max a wide berth for tongue-in-cheek cynicism consider that he also wrote, “A recurring theme of this series is the periodic flare-up of moral reservations among mob folks. This goes to the chestnut about men of honor that started with The Godfather, if not before. Maybe it started with King Lear. I’ll have to leave that to scholars of the classics.
In real life, I’m sure that men of power can have moral conflicts.”
How is it that real men like Sawicky can have reasonable doubts whether Italian mobsters have souls but are so certain gangstas do not? Do they not also strive “for the simple, base pleasures in life” like strip clubs, “side dishes“, mansions and bling only to be “put upon from all sides”? Yet, a pedestrian fascination with yards of emotive, award-winning screenplays for one and derision and lethal injection for another! The pro-Bush blogger crowd crowed approvingly when Christopher, Tony Soprano’s nephew and enforcer, once endorsed George Bush’s above-the-law methods, a mindset that led to the organised murder of more than 100,000 Iraqis. Christopher, the heroin-addicted hit man who would beat his lover Adrianna to a pulp whenever he had a bad day, cried when his crew executed her gangland style for working with the FBI after they threatened to send her to the slammer for a few years unless she cooperated. Was that a window into the character Christopher’s soul, an example of the remorse Max and others said Williams failed to display, hence he was an irredeemable sociopath?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, Stanley Tookie Williams did repeatedly express remorse for all of the terrible things he admitted he had done in his youth. At the same time, he indicated that, time and time again, that he was not guilty of the particular crimes with which he was charged. It would have actually been easy for him to admit guilt, even though he is innocent, it would have been very easy for him to admit guilt, apologize for the purpose of guaranteeing that he might receive clemency from Governor Schwarzenegger, but he maintained his innocence until the very end.
American cinema, given the option of titillating or informing, has a long history of choosing the former. Gangsters have been depicted as bad boys with hearts since the days of prohibition and Italian thugs have been “pseudo-aristocrats” since Mario Puzo authoured The Godfather series. Thanks to HBO, the American Mafiosa are now, “everybody’s ordinary suburban (and white collar) neighbors, complete with barbecues, golf, psychotherapy and stock options. At least some sociologists criticize it as a ridiculous depiction of something that hardly even exists but millions of viewers find it entertaining.” In the name of God and family they take capitalism by the horns and shake crown jewels loose for the betterment of their people!
In Italy, films such as I Grimaldi (“The Grimaldis”) present the glossy cinematic portrayal of the homegrown version of the Mafia based on the American model, complete with lavish homes, luxury cars and attractive, well-dressed people (its use of the name of the ruling dynasty of Monaco implicitly associating mafiosi with royalty). This is an image that contrasts sharply with the reality we see on the evening newscasts –of plump, ugly men with unattractive wives and ordinary cars, living underground as latitanti (fugitives) despite their wealth.
Murray Rothbard was completely taken in by The Godfather. In this review of Goodfellas he extolled the virtuous Mafia’s anarcho-capitalist sense of justice based entirely upon The Godfather‘s portrayal of it.
The unforgettable images of mob violence juxtaposed with solemn Church rites were not meant, as left-liberals would have it, to show the hypocrisy of evil men. For these Mafiosi, as mainly Italian Catholics, are indeed deeply religious; they represent one important way in which Italian Catholics were able to cope with, and make their way in, a totally alien world dominated by WASP Puritan insistence that a whole range of products eagerly sought by consumers be outlawed.
Hence the systemic violence of Mafia life. Violence, in The Godfather films, is never engaged in for the Hell of it, or for random kicks; the point is that since the government police and courts will not enforce contracts they deem to be illegal, debts incurred in the Mafia world have to be enforced by violence, by the secular arm. But the violence simply enforces the Mafia equivalent of the law: the codes of honor and loyalty without which the whole enterprise would simply be random and pointless violence.
In many cases, especially where “syndicates” are allowed to form and are not broken-up by government terror, the various organized syndicates will mediate and arbitrate disputes, and thereby reduce violence to a minimum. Just as governments in the Lockean paradigm are supposed to be enforcers of commonly-agreed-on rules and property rights, so “organized crime,” when working properly, does the same. Except that in its state of illegality it operates in an atmosphere charged with difficulty and danger.
Herein lies the myth these are choir boys providing services withheld from the people but not profitting for profits sake to further self-interests, and never acting aggressively except to mete out frontier-style justice that liberal society is too soft to serve. There are many cases of “organised crime” working properly where it faces no resistance from the state? It stands to reason if a syndicate is able to operate without resistance from the state it is so powerless the state views it as insignificant or the syndicate has infiltrated the state, as the Mafia did in Sicily, and even there the state continues to view it as an adversary and the people have never been better off due its self-serving influence. And I suspect the reason Sawicky allows that mobsters may indeed have souls can be found in Rothbard’s wistful review, because the gospel of Mario Puzo said it was so. Empirical evidence make way for the cult of The Godfather.
Rothbard hated Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas as it was “peopled exclusively by psychotic punks, scarcely different from ordinary, unorganized street criminals” rather than the good vs. bad entrepreneur theme he so relished in The Godfather.
He then wrote:
Contrast the ways in which Godfather and GoodFellas handle a common theme: the attempt of the leading Don to keep away from traffic in drugs, and the destruction wrought by succumbing to the temptation. In Godfather, one Mafia leader of the old school clearly and eloquently rejects traffic in drugs as immoral, in contrast to other venerable goods and services, such as liquor, gambling and “loan sharking.” “Leave drugs to the animals – the niggers – they have no souls,” he admonished. (All right, I never said that the Mafiosi were racially enlightened.) Here is a powerful and dramatic theme of keeping the old Mafia moral code as against the temptation of making a great deal of money in a technologically innovative field.
But how in contrast does GoodFellas handle this conflict? Don Cicero simply orders his gang to stay out of drugs, pointing only to the stiff sentences the Feds were handing out. And whereas in Godfather, everyone knows that disobedience to the Don will bring swift retribution, Conway, Hill and the other wiseguys disobey Don Cicero and nothing happens to them. What kind of Don is that?
A fictional Don afforded three-dimensional status by clients of the vast lunatic asylum nostalgically referred to as the United States of America who claim their fellow citizens are innocent until proven guilty and entitled to be judged by a jury of their peers, but in reality, are entirely full of shit and shinola even when a life is hanging in the balance.