The Sopranos of SimCIty

Nobody’s Opinion; “The more intelligence one has the more people one finds original. Commonplace people see no difference between men” ---Blaise Pascal

Like many people in America, I always try to watch the Sopranos. Archie Bunker has been reinvented into a very lovable mobster named Tony Soprano. Like Archie, Tony has many of what the Hollywood elite would call; “prejudices” and the rest of us would call normal behavior and emotions.

Having grown up with “All in the Family” I was very shocked years later to hear that the producer of the show, Norman Lear, was such a flaming liberal. “Meathead,” Rob Reiner, has stayed in character all this time. He’s still a meathead, just fatter.

I loved Archie and thought he was the whole show. And even though the producers and writers tried desperately to play up his stupidity, we all knew many of our fathers were like Archie (as was Rob Reiner’s father) and that he was just looking at things from his generation’s viewpoint. We did not judge him for that.

Norman Lear and Rob Reiner are now in their old age and what you would call extreme activists in the democratic left of the party. Not that that makes them bad. But not only did they not get out of the sixties ideology, while the rest of us moved on, but they have gone so far as to publicly ostracized the Archie Bunkers of the world, because they thought all of us stupid people out in TV land missed the lessons they were trying to teach us. Somehow the lovable Archie Bunker morphed into Attila the Hun. We are Bush loving, gay bashing, prejudiced, and ignorant cowboys.

“All In the Family” was used to try to get all the Archie Bunkers in the world to accept the questions of diversity---racism, gays, anti-war messages, feminism… all the sixties ideologies that the left wanted to drill into us. Archie Bunker was their platform.

Much to their horror, we remembered Archie most of all for being a good family man, who loved his wife and daughter with complete devotion and worked hard to provide for their comforts. And mostly, Archie out of the love for his own family accepted his daughter’s Meathead, (and took care of him) and the black neighbors, and the gays, and all the nuts and bolts of society because Archie was the American man. He wasn’t mean, he was just Archie. He was an American who believed in himself, right or wrong, and crazy as it seems, we understood it. But the producers didn’t.

As Americans, no matter what diversity or affirmative action program gets stuffed down our throats by the SimCity gods of control; we try to accept it, because tolerance was part of our forefather’s creed.

The SimCity gods know we are good hearted people, despite how they portray us.

And that is what everyone loves about Tony Soprano. Like Archie, he is a family man. He loves and sticks by his family. He provides them with a good life. Like all of us he struggles to understand life, and does what he knows.

Still, because Tony Soprano is a crook, something tells me twenty years from now, the writers will not be downgrading his image because the difference between Archie and Tony is that Archie was a poor man who worked hard and was honest. Tony Soprano is a rich man who got that way by being a mobster, and we have many crooks now in the higher echelons who want to be accepted and not criminalized for any present and future crimes they might happen to commit.

If the lovable Tony Soprano can be forgiven… then their culture stays intact.

We are reminded on the program how Tony Soprano is no different than many rich CEOs who steals millions, or rich politicians who do the same. This message is not good. It’s ok to steal, kill, and rob, because to those in power, the end justifies the means.

The logic being... it’s all for the good of the people. We are Tony Soprano’s children.

“The Sopranos” like “All in the Family” touches on the current topics of today’s society. In the last episode we had Tony’s daughter lament about how terribly the Arabs are being unjustly jailed by Bush’s grab for unconstitutional power. The other subplot involves the discovery of a devoted mob captain being gay.

Tony decided to accept his homosexuality because the man makes him money. One wonders if he would accept the fact if the man wasn’t making him money. But that isn’t presented.

TV programs and movies for decades have been trying to rewire our thinking. We had the Mel Gibson-Danny Glover routine for years-- and now we will get blasted with hundreds of Brokeback Mountains themes.(and polygamy for the Muslims) They started pairing up black men with white girls on TV, and now, you see many white girls married to black men. We even get the white boy rescues Spanish girl theme.

You get the feeling they want us all to merge…and become the very same color. The men, who play SimCity by programming our lives, and wanting all cultures to mate into one color, do not do this themselves. They marry into their own culture, and will continue to do so because it sustains their position at the top. They’ve read the very well researched report of “The Bell Curve” even though they will not admit it.

Meathead, somewhere in his old age went into the---“I’ve got to save the very small children of America since I found out that their little brains are being formed between one and three and millions of people are damaging all those little brains and we’ve got to get to these children, get them in daycare where they can be protected and nurtured by people who know how to do it right, because the parents are ruining them” phase.

To Meathead it’s called compassion. To everyone else it’s called state planning. SimCity is now being implemented with pre-kindergarten programs all over the country.

So, if they can’t change our attitudes with TV sitcoms, then they can only change our natural genetic proclivities by getting to our children before the age of three.

The SimCity Sopranos at the top now have Seseme Street for babies under six months.

My advice? Let the babies watch Archie Bunker.