Many years ago I was in a wedding party back in New York. It was a big Italian-American wedding and somebody told me that the pretty girl I “stood up” with was the niece of the dapper old guy who sat regally at the back of the large restaurant that held the reception. It turned out he was the don who ran gambling and some other stuff in upstate New York and had be in the infamous Appalachian meeting. Other than a tough kid I used to play baseball with and who collected gambling debts for the mob that was about as close as I knowingly got to the MAFIA.
But there have been a few times since when I found myself wishing that I had some “connections,” where I could have a “favor” done for me like Don Vito Corleone used to do favors for people. You know, have somebody roughed up or the severed head of a beloved pet turn up under their bedclothes. Mostly I have these fantasies about people who I can’t “take care of” myself because I would end up in San Quentin, but who have pissed me off in one way or another. Sure, it’s a Sicilian way of settling scores, and not exactly just way, I admit, but it can be very poetic. Admit it, isn’t there somebody you would like to see laying in their own doo-doo in a deserted parking lot at night and, leaning over him (her) is a guy with a face that has gone too may rounds and a voice like gravel pouring on a tin roof saying “[your name here] sends his [her] regards from the Bahamas.”
You with me now? OK, because I got a candidate that is perfect for just such a lesson. Are you ready for this? Sam Alito (aka San “The Un-Recuser” Scalito). That’s right, Bush’s nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. Him. Somebody’s gonna lean on Sam a little bit. (Hey, I’m not saying it’s me; I’m just making an innocent prediction.)
Why? You ask. Because he gives Italian-Americans a bad name, that’s why. Ironic, you think, that I would have people who putatively give Italian-Americans a bad rep, like Mafiosi, La Cosa Nostra “soldiers,” Lucca Brazzi types, scare the melanzane out of Sam Alito, in order to keep the reputation of Italian-Americans out of the gutter . Capisce? Listen up, we already have a bad rep because that creep, Antonin Scalia, is already on the Supreme Court. It’s bad enough that, thanks to The Godfather films and The Sopranos , we have people thinking that every other person with a surname than ends in a vowel is a Mafiosi. Now we are really being slurred if people are going to associate Italian-American with possibly two right-wing, Catholic-fascist greaseballs on the Supreme Court. [1] (BTW: what the hell happened to having some “balance” on the court? Italian-Americans are 8 percent of the American population; so should they be 2/9ths of the Supreme Court? You do the math; I nearly flunked algebra.) These guys give Italian-American’s a bad name; they countervail the good repute built by people like Robert DeNiro, Joe Dimaggio, Ann Bancroft, Francis Coppola, Rocky Marciano, Mario Cuomo, and Mother Cabrini, among others. [2]
The appearance of Sam “The Un-Recuser” Alito brings forth various emotions to this Italian-American. One would expect a certain, if subconscious ethnic pride in one of the Latini tribe to have been nominated for such a lofty post as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. One would think that someone who might well have “Justice” prefixing his name would provide some counterweight to the dualities if the Italian-American image. Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s rump what surnames there are on the Supreme Court.
I want somebody on the court with some integrity, and Scalito does not fill that bill. This is a guy who gets RCMLD (Republican Convenient Memory Lapse Disease) when he is pushed on why he didn’t recuse himself from the Vanguard company case, a company which was mentioned on nearly every page of the transcript, and in which he held stock, and which stock increased in value partly due to the ruling in which he participated. You know what a real Italian-American “goombah” would say to that? Bahfunghool!
This is a guy who tries to come across as impartial, but has an all but consistent record of siding with big government and big corporations against individual plaintiffs. I’ve got one word for a guy who sucks up to power: Bahfunghool!
This is a guy who is on record in memos he wrote when he served the Reagan administration as claiming that Roe v Wade should be overturned, but pretends to be one who respects precedent and would be open minded on the question of this important case. Sammy will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that those were personal opinions he wrote in trying to get a lawyer job, but now he is up for a different job. Sure! Bahfunghool! What this guy needs is a job as a weather vane!
This is a guy who has spent his life writing opinions that would get him judgeships and eventually to right where he is today—ready to park his flabby butt on a Supreme Court chair where nobody can touch him for the rest of his life and he can finally be, unequivocally, the fundamentalist right-wing scumbag that he always has been. Bahfunghool!
Now if that isn’t enough for you I want to draw a mental picture (or just find one of Alito) of little creep in your grade school class whose mamma used to cook his pasta al gomma , so he wouldn’t get agita in his sensitive little tummy. He’s a guy who learned how to suck up early in life, who has waited along time for power and would say and do what it took to get it. That’s our little stronzo Sammy Alito; the sort of guy who remains a member of the reactionary “Concerned Alumi of Princeton” that wanted to bar women and minorities from entrance to his hallowed alma mater (and which he also “can’t remember” being a member of). Is this is the sort of guy we should want representing the highest court in the land, much less an entire ethnic group? He wouldn’t have lasted a week in my neighborhood. Given the bad reputation he is giving Italian-Americans he should probably be careful that some goombahs don’t show up and make him “an offer that he can’t refues.” Better for him that, when the time comes, enough of the Senate will see through him and give him a rousing, “Hey Sammy, Bahfunghool!”[3]
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.10.2006)
[1] OK. You probably noticed that I used an ethnic slur that has been unkindly applied to Italian-Americans. Like rappers and Black movie actors who routinely and liberally use the “N” word in referring to their own kind, I invoke the same privilege. This is my way of saying, with deliberate rudeness, that there are people in my ethnic group for whom I have much contempt. You won’t catch me using epithets for other racial and ethnic groups except in deliberate irony, but probably not at all.
[2] You are damn right I left off Rudolph Giuliani. And no, Mother Cabrini was not the founder of Pizza Hut.
[3] It’s an Italian-American ghetto corruption of an Italian epithet that means, well, up yours!