GODFATHER

One of the projects I have had recently is to read more novels set in New York City. Last week I picked up a dogeared copy of Mario Puzo's GODFATHER. I had seen all three movies by FF Coppolla, but had never read the tome. I was surprised at how fun it was to read. I am reading through Marianne Moore's letters, and can go through fifteen pages maximum before I have to do something else. But in the Puzo book I can easily do 150 pages. It's hard in fact to stop. On p. 324, Michael has shot the corrupt cop McCluskey, and also Sollozzo, who had tried to off his father.

He's in Sicily waiting for his heels to cool so he can go back to America and replace his father as Don.

"In this antique garden, Michael Corleone learned about the roots from which his father grew. That the word 'Mafia' had originally meant place of refuge. Then it became the name for the secret organization that sprang up to fight against the rulers who had crushed the country and its people for centuries. Sicily was a land that had been more cruelly raped than any other in history. The Inquisition had tortured rich and poor alike. The landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church exercised absolute power over the shepherds and farmers. The police were the instruments of their power and so identified with them that to be called a policeman is the foulest insult one Sicilian can hurl at another" (324).

I realized that part of the Lutheran tradition had been to separate church and state, and to allow one to play off against the other, so that absolute power did not create absolute corruption. There were checks and balances, one check being the individual conscience itself, which was to set itself against all other sources of authority. The fear of Papists that was generated by the Puritans and Protestants generally came not so much out of fear of the actual people, or their liturgy, but out of fear of the terrible power that the Catholic hierarchy created, how it dwarfed individual conscience, and turned the people under its thumb into conformist stooges afraid to think for themselves: illiterate baboons who acted with the coordinated savagery of a legion of animals.

"Justice had never been forthcoming from the authorities" (324), so the Mafia became a kind of Robin Hood agency. But in turn the Mafia was secretive, and became just another source of monolithic power. Michael doesn't trust the local doctor to reset his jaw that has been broken by the corrupt police officer McCluskey.

"Taza offered to treat his face but Michael refused. He had been there long enough to learn that Dr. Taza read everything but his medical literature, whch he admitted he could not understand. He had passed his medical exams through the good offices of the most important Mafia chief in Sicily who had made a special trip to Palermo to confer with Taza's professors about what grades they should give him. And this too showed how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the society it inhabited. Merit meant nothing. Talent meant nothing. Work meant nothing. The Mafia Godfather gave you your profession as a gift" (325).

I suppose something similar could be said for communist societies, in which talent, and merit, and work mean nothing. What matters is how well you are regarded by the higher-ups. It is only that which matters. Good party members are preferred to good doctors, or good writers, or anything else.

Whereas God is supposed to be blind with regard to how well-connected someone is, and to prefer instead those who have real merit, the Mafia or the Catholic Church in Italy have historically been otherwise. Communists, too, regard their own corrupt system as above any other consideration, and it is difficult to get anywhere without the benefit of the larger organization.

"Michael thought about his father's organization. If it continued to prosper it would grow into what had happened here on this island, so cancerous that it would destroy the whole country. Sicily was already a land of ghosts, its men emigrating to every other country on earth to be able to earn their bread, or simply to escape being murdered for exercising their political and economic freedoms" (325-326).

Machine politics work. The Democratic machine under Tammany worked. The Language Poetry machine worked. But ultimately a certain crumminess prevails in which membership matters more than merit, and hard work of any kind is not rewarded, it is only affiliations that matter. But in the long run this corrupts poetry itself, as it corrupts society at large.

Bad doctors with good connections rise to the top and are well-paid under such systems. Poets with good connections are the ones that get paid. Creepy politicians who are connected to the big Chicago machine roll over those from smaller organizations, and they are able to pay off journalists, in order to arrange hit pieces against politicians from outlying states like Alaska, or Arizona.

People without brains get Ph.D.s from dissertations in which every word has been stolen from elsewhere.

And ultimately this corrupts & wrecks the very institutions they build.

Matthew 7:24-7:

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."