Everyone Italian in America

HALLELUJAH BOARDWALK EMPIRE IS NOT THE SOPRANOS

BOARDWALK EMPIRE'S UNSAVORY CAST OF CHARACTERS REPRESENT ALL GROUPS

Sunday evening the World changed. Let’s hope forever.

YES I am being somewhat theatrical but isn’t that what good writing is all about. And just maybe it has changed in an important way. Read on.

Progress can come in many forms. In unexpected places Even convoluted. Still progress is progress.

Who would have expected that HBO would be the place where we see clear indication that stereotyping of Italian Americans may finally have reached its zenith and beginning its permanent decline. Even if the extreme “purists” don’t see it.

HBO’s new big budget pull out all the stops likely blockbuster and probable award winning series “Boardwalk Empire” furnishes the proof.

It will likewise be a prime example of what so many of us have argued not that there are not and have not been Italian American criminals but that it is the same in every racial and ethnic group.

Even more to the core is this. There is NO logic to the insulting belief that has predominated in Hollywood and all the other places films and tv series are now made that viewers want to see Italian American degenerates over all other kind of Low Life.

WRONG. The public sadly buys whatever the media machine decides to sell it. There is no inherent “lust” for Italian American criminality among Americans. What Americans want is so called entertainment that involves bad guys, guns, murder, bloodshed, betrayal and violence of all sorts.

Nobody – except hard core bigots - prefers it to be Italian but of course that the Big Guns in Hollywood have decided is what they want to sell for whatever demented bigoted even unconscious or just ignorant views motivate them to demean Italians.

So what does the new series Boardwalk Empire do so well.

It upsets that apple cart in devastating fashion.

Boardwalk Empire which focuses on Atlantic City in the age of Prohibition is made up of a wide ranging collection of criminal punks all the way up and down the food chain and they are of every ethnic and racial persuasion. A veritable United Nations of Bad Guys. Are there Italian characters absolutely but who cares they literally get lost in this bad smelling barrel.

They are lost among the Irish, Jewish, Black and other assorted criminal degenerates that are at the heart of Boardwalk Empire. Were there Italian American criminals involved in bootlegging yes there were. Properly so they are presented here as just one part of the much larger menagerie of Prohibition profiteers. And their crimes.

Even more the leading villain the character Enoch “Nucky” Thompson is decidedly not Italian he is clearly an Irish American gangster who rules over this den of thieves cut throats, bootleggers and assorted scum of the Earth.

Adding more to the “transformational" nature ( if I am not getting too theatrical and unrealistically excited ) this NON-Italian gangster spectacular features an Italian American producer and director the famous Martin Scorsese – who seems to have found the light himself in the past being part of the problem ….

….. and get this an Italian American actor Steve Buscemi playing the lead as an IRISH bad guy and even more it appears HBO is pushing this NON- Italian gangster series with every bit as much gusty as it previously did the shameful sopranos. And this the early reviews by the main street media if anything even more enthusiastic than for their previous craving for the sopranos.

If I may interpret all this we have a splashy expensive colorful even dazzling new series based on mobsters that has deep Italian involvement in positive ways but is decidedly NOT an all Italian gangster series.

Maybe the world did change Sunday night.

Especially if we make it so. Seeing progress in our unrelenting efforts by some of us in the Italian American community to attack and unmask the bigotry and stereotyping of so much of gangster entertainment in the past. And up until now.

So what is the message ?

That we glory in series such as Boardwalk Empire. That we remain unrelenting in our vigilance. That we NOT ever elect as Chair of the Conference of Major Italian American Organizations an individual who proclaims her LOVE for the sopranos. And so undermine our progress and give the bigots a “good” (sic) reason to go back to stereotyping Italian Americans at HBO and all over the place.

We have made too much progress to allow the jerks in the Italian American community to hold sway who revel in having themselves stereotyped and demeaned or who are just too stupid to even comprehend the problem and the terrible price our Italian American community pays for this abuse.

As the ONLY group identity in America it is still OK to mock and demean as “entertainment” and as a means for “legitimate” companies to profit at our expense.

Boardwalk Empire.

Watch it . Savor it. Praise it.

Let it be the future of gangster entertainment.

NEVER AGAIN mocking our Italian American community WITH GARBAGE LIKE THE SOPRANOS. But it is still up to us to make it so.

This war is not over yet.