Sunday, December 4, 2016
SEE COLLINS' NEW POST ON TRUMP AND THE MAFIA
"The Trump saga bears an uncanny resemblance to the TV show, The Sopranos, that ran from 1999 to 2007. Both are essentially soap operas, serial melodrama of domestic life, set on the edge of criminality, and beyond. This is a big part of their popular appeal.
"The Mafia saga is full of ironies and contradictions, as far as its public image goes. One of the slogans among intellectuals in the 1970s was “the rise of the unmeltable ethnics”-- an attack on White Anglo-Saxon Protestant domination, and a refusal of the ethnics to assimilate to it. This is part of the rhetoric that by the 1980s became known as Political Correctness, and which continues today in an expanded array of group identities that claim revenge on WASP (and male) domination. The Godfather films were the first triumph in popular culture of this anti-establishment rebellion. The irony is that The Godfather represents successful upward mobility from ethnic roots into the American upper class. In a climactic scene, Al Pacino is now the Godfather, married to a naive WASP woman, a trophy bride for the upwardly mobile."
"The Mafia saga is full of ironies and contradictions, as far as its public image goes. One of the slogans among intellectuals in the 1970s was “the rise of the unmeltable ethnics”-- an attack on White Anglo-Saxon Protestant domination, and a refusal of the ethnics to assimilate to it. This is part of the rhetoric that by the 1980s became known as Political Correctness, and which continues today in an expanded array of group identities that claim revenge on WASP (and male) domination. The Godfather films were the first triumph in popular culture of this anti-establishment rebellion. The irony is that The Godfather represents successful upward mobility from ethnic roots into the American upper class. In a climactic scene, Al Pacino is now the Godfather, married to a naive WASP woman, a trophy bride for the upwardly mobile."
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