Watching Tony
Uniquely American.

Mr. Ledeen is the holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is Tocqueville on American Character .
May 22, 2001 9:20 a.m.

side from sports, I don't watch television, and anyway we don't have HBO, so I am not a Sopranos addict. But my good wife did present me with the cassettes for the first year, and I watched them during my morning agony on the treadmill, but that's about it. I liked the first year a lot, especially the acting and the Freudian stuff, but there's a bit too much of the F word, although I appreciate that they're trying to stress the vulgarity of the people. But the entertainment value of the show, which is considerable, is eclipsed by the constant analysis from all quarters, especially by the cries of outrage from Italian-Americans who think they're being stereotyped by Hollywood.

Everyone's super-sensitive in these days of cultural brain death. You can't tell a decent ethnic joke anymore in mixed company for fear of being arrested for a hate crime. The liberals who make the rules have reserved to themselves the right to smear anyone who points out their intellectual lameness, so the members of the chattering classes are only permitted to tell tasteless jokes about conservatives. But Tony Soprano isn't a chatterer, and he smears all the usual suspects: Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Irish, Russian immigrants, and, above all, WASPs. That's one reason people love him: As Lenny Bruce once said, "We're all thinking the same thing, but I've got the mike." He lets us laugh at the jokes we want to tell, but can't. But of course, as he violates all the speech codes (along with the laws of the land), his clan gets upset at the characterization, and is demanding legal remedy.

Tony is one of them, and in one of his most hilarious moments, he lectures his children that they are all victims of American bigotry. "They think all Italians are members of the Mafia," he angrily tells his kids (who are pretty sure he's a Mafia boss himself). And yet the show itself makes it quite clear that most Italo-Americans, even those who live within spitting distance of the Badabing Club, are certainly not involved in any sort of criminal activity. Most of them are embarrassed by Tony and his fellow mobsters, but at the same time, like the rest of us, they are fascinated by them, and even admire them.

There is nothing new in this, and the specifically Italian component has misled many of the show's critics. Americans have always loved criminals, whatever their ethnic background. Our Founding Fathers were all criminals in the eyes of the British ruling class, and would have been hung if we had lost the Revolutionary War. The West was won by criminals, armed with their Colt 45s, "the gun that won the West." Jesse James and Billy the Kid were culture heroes long before Tony and Pussy and the rest, as were Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, and Al Capone and Bugsy Segal and the Corleones. It's only logical that an officially Puritanical country would produce heroes who broke the rules and indulged themselves to the maximum. And it's only logical that, as the state gets bigger and more intrusive, we would delight in the antics of men who make their own rules and live according to their own (outdated) standards. "It may be the 90s out there," Tony preaches to his freewheeling daughter, "but it's the 1950s in this house."

Meanwhile, over in the mother country, leading conservative politicians are forever smeared by accusations of mob connections. Giulio Andreotti, one of the greatest political figures of the twentieth century, had to spend years in courtrooms to clear himself of the ridiculous charge of being in league with the Mafia. And of course Silvio Berlusconi, who just won a great electoral victory, has been tarred with the same brush. It would be nice if the outraged Italo-Americans would direct at least part of their rage at the slanderous charges flowing out of Italy itself.

The Italians don't watch The Sopranos ...yet. There is some talk about a dubbed version, but the delay of three years is astonishing. Indeed, so far as I know, no leading Italian correspondent has done a major article on it, a curious bit of spiking in a country that follows American movies and television as closely as their own. It certainly can't be because of the Mafia theme, since The Godfather and Goodfellows and The Untouchables were all boffo hits in Italy. Maybe it's the name. The most famous Soprano in recent Italian history was the Fascist Prefect of Naples in the early 1940s. That Soprano collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces in 1943, and later wrote a compelling memoir about those terrible days. Every bit as compelling as the American TV show that carries his name.