Miscellanea - Rubrica d'attualita`

The time has come to topple a tyrant. He is vile. He is villainous. And he grows stronger with each passing season, spewing venom, spreading hatred and perpetuating stereotypes of mass defamation. His minions have even managed to cause controversy over the Columbus Day Parade.

Clearly, Tony Soprano & Co. must be destroyed - in the court of public opinion. Like their Roman forebears, Italian-Americans must draw a line in the sand if they are to rescue a heritage that has been hijacked by the likes of David Chase, creator of "The Sopranos."

As self-loathing Italian-Americans go, Chase has parlayed his lifelong Oedipal angst into the most blatantly anti-Italian program in the history of television. Along the way, he has attracted an army of accomplices and enablers.

In addition to the usual media suspects, Chase has enlisted some heavy-duty political muscle to peddle his Mafia melodrama. Rudy Giuliani, Bob Torricelli, Al D'Amato and Andrew Cuomo have all done their bits to promote Chase's Big Lie. The latest to join this shameful club is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The question is why? Why have so many journalists, politicos and educators embraced such a repellent, hurtful stereotype - particularly one they would find reprehensible if applied to Jews, Asians or Hispanics? Are the scions of Italy a race of the damned? When Italians are cut, do they not bleed? Or is it simply a case of schadenfreude gone wild?

Aided and abetted by "The Sopranos," Italophobia is rapidly becoming the defining intolerance of the new millennium. Everyone wants a piece of the action - from the literati to the glitterati to the lumpen proletariat - because they have come to believe that Italo-Americans are indeed the lowest of the lowbrow. Now people can channel their inner Archie Bunker without fear of reproach.

Whereas it would be mean-spirited (and well-nigh impossible) for HBO to green light a series about a brood of New Jersey Arab-Americans with connections to al-Qaida and the bin Laden construction company, any manifestation of anti-Italian bigotry can be widely marketed as a "Sopranos" spin-off. Dr. Glen Gabbard, a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is an obsessive-compulsive Sopranomaniac. He has penned a book titled "The Psychology of the Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America's Favorite Gangster Family."

After the horror of 9/11, President George W. Bush rallied the nation with a stirring call to arms. Yet he also appealed to the better angels of our nature. He urged Americans to reject expressions of anti-Arab or anti-Islamic intolerance. But, in demolishing one stereotype,the president reinforced another. "Al-Qaida is to terrorism," the commander in chief thundered, "what the Mafia is to crime."

According to the FBI, out of a population of approximately 14.7 million, only 1,150 Italian Americans - a minuscule .00782 percent - are criminals. Yet a study of ethnic awareness reveals that nearly 3 in 4 Americans believe that a surname ending in a vowel indicates a mob association.

Reviled by the elite, pilloried in the media, Italo-Americans have no recourse but hot pre-emption. With anti-Italian bigotry abounding, the goal is not to seek compromises with HBO, Tinseltown or corporate sponsors. The goal is the eradication of evil at its source. In the war against anti-Italian intolerance, there is no room for containment, nosubstitute for victory. During the 20th century, Ferdinand Pecora, Fiorello LaGuardia and John Sirica waged a tireless battle against the know-nothings and bad guys of their day.

We must once again cross the Rubicon of our indignation. For we are Caesar's heirs, not the spawn of Tony Soprano. Indeed, ours is the culture that brought the fruits of civilization to a vast multi-ethnic empire stretching from Scotland to the Sudan. The Pax Romana, capitalism and the Renaissance occurred on Italy's watch. The scientific method, jurisprudence, architecture and three-fourths of the world's art would not exist without that fine Italian hand. One Italian scientist unleashed the power of the atom. Another discovered alien worlds with an ordinary spyglass. And two gentlemen of Calabria, Renato Dulbecco and Michele Carbone, have blazed new trails in the war on cancer. The former won the 1975 Nobel Prize in physiology-medicine for his research into cancer replication; the latter has established himself as one of the world's foremost pathologists in the struggle against mesothelioma. Riccardo Giacconi, the first director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (Hubble Telescope) and a favorite son of Genoa, has been named a 2002 Nobel Prize laureate in physics.

In the fight against "The Sopranos," Italo-Americans must wage an all-out, across-the-board assault on the malefactors of mass defamation. Boycotts, community meetings and protest marches alone will not suffice. To reclaim their heritage, the scions of Italy must wage a vigorous and unrelenting campaign against these pernicious evildoers.