A.J. Soprano jr. versus George Bush jr.
I’ve come to the whole Sopranos phenomenon very late in the game. For years I’ve heard about this amazing show on HBO that I have been missing out on. I’d call friends on Sunday nights, seeing if they want to go out for a drink or play some dice, only to get: “Sorry dude, The Sopranos are on tonight.”
Curious but not altogether enthusiastic, I went to Netflix and buried the first season of The Sopranos DVD deep in the queue. Well, the disks started showing up and I devoured them with a pace not seen since the missus rented DVD’s from that other hit HBO show, the one about girls who buy shoes. On a good night I can get through like three episodes before my language becomes really foul and I start talking about people in the third person and plotting my next score. It’s sad – I know, but I am a living testament to the the axiom that ‘you are what you watch’. Ever since Rambo: First Blood, when for four days after watching the movie, I moved around my house flat on my belly crawling on my elbows plotting ambushes on enemy pets, I was a television hero worshiper.
I watched a few episodes of The Sopranos last night after watching George Bush’s Oval Office orgy of lies and ill-mandated war perversion talk. His insatiable appetite for blood is nothing I want any part of. Anyhoo, I was struck by how much little Anthony Soprano and his relationship to his father, is so much like our hanging chad president and his father. If you change the names and the context it’s oddly similar. Try it out on this passage from The Sopranos web site:
“If A.J. were capable of following in his father’s footsteps, his difficulties might not be a problem – after all, Tony was no scholar. But Tony has always been tough, resourceful and post-doctorate-level street smart; A.J. isn’t. He’s basically a sweet kid, of average intelligence, who’s trying to cope with the fact his dad kills people.”
Cool huh? Basically A.J. Soprano Jr., like George Bush Jr. is a sad anti-social kid who doesn’t know how to play with any of his friends in any appropriate and adjusted manner. In each episode he seems to isolate himself more and more with only his violent Nintendo games as his tool of communication.
This excerpt form Alexander Cockburn’s piece on Counterpunch today seems to be tapping into the same juvenile thinking vibe of our child-soporano-president who has little patience for an adult understanding of international realities and the grown-up consequences of his actions,
“There is something scary about the guy, (not Saddam, our commander in chief). We really do have one fanatical fellow sitting there in the Oval Office. You can sniff the anger stewing around in his psyche. Talk about slow cooking! Bush has been on a slow boil since childhood, probably since Pop was off gallivanting around Mexican oil towns and he listened to Mom seething in a hot kitchen in Midland, defiantly letting her hair go white.”
More on this theory as I get into the second season of DVD’s.