Do You Believe in Tony Soprano?

It seems as though we are now living in our own drawn-out episode of The Sopranos with mafioso style rulers and drug pushers in charge.

Do You Believe in Tony Soprano?

I do.

Cast your mind back to the olden days before your life was overturned by a fictional emergency for which everything had to be sacrificed. Remember when you could enjoy the newspapers and watch television without a creeping sense of dread of yet more lies and gaslighting. Recall old dramas and thrillers, the possibility of escapism; the ubiquitous procedural detective series, even the playful (dare I say it, postmodern) shows such as Twin Peaks, where you could enjoy the cultural references and spot the goodies and the baddies and the twists and turns of a good old yarn. Ah, yes. The olden days of about four years ago.

Four years ago. Before the promise of ‘it’s only three weeks to flatten the curve,’ when it wasn’t, and ‘we are all in this together,’ when we weren’t. A time before you might kill granny by breathing, before human touch and togetherness were criminalised, before mountains of surgical splashguards landed in the oceans and killed wildlife and put yet more wretched plastics into the rivers and the fish, and the sea. A time before the Nuremberg and Helsinki codes were smashed to smithereens. A time before your normal human rights were shredded, and before you ever even heard of an illness called ‘myocarditis,’ and before you knew of anyone who had suddenly died or died suddenly.

And of course, before you could be castigated as a misinformation spreader, a terrorist or a murderer when all you were trying to do was inform or warn others of danger. And then to see that some of those you warned became ill, or worse. Back to a time when you could look to institutions to function in the way you might have expected. That is, to step in or step up before things got really bad. A time when we quaintly regarded politicians to be public servants, not dictatorial masters ruling over us. For that matter, consider a time before politicians or monarchs took it upon themselves to prescribe any kind of medication for you without so much as a sliver of medical knowledge. A time when such politicians would have respected (and left it to) medics who were actually experts in virology, or even pharmaceuticals. A time when medics themselves diagnosed something wrong in you before prescribing appropriate medication, and all without fear of losing their licence to practice. A time when we naively assumed medicines were tested to destruction before being unleashed upon otherwise healthy people. A time when you might have considered your physician to be something other than a highly paid, high status drug pusher. (Remember the image of the drug pusher, we’ll come back to that).

Think about a time when science was not (because it can never be) ‘settled’ on anything. A time when we had investigative journalism to call out the politicians. Yes. The olden days of about four years ago. When you had not really heard of the World Economic Forum, and the WHO was good, and the UN was necessary. When Bill Gates was just a computer geek in a jumper.

Not Bill Gates

And now you know. All you have ever known has been shattered to smithereens. On purpose.

For boring old normals like me, the senseless violence and murder of these last four years (for that is what it was) was firmly relegated to an impenetrable secret underworld far away from me. It is a world we glimpsed only through the lens of fictionalised entertainment. Now, that entertainment has somehow unconcealed an underbelly of filth and corruption in those we thought we had elected to responsible government. It has pointed to the farce of the monarch whose role it is to defend the people, not join with those who seek to do them harm.

For those who struggle to believe in the higher power that some refer to as God, there used to be the world of the rational, a world of reason to which one pointed for clarity and truth of sorts. However, there is little of even the rational world left to believe in these days. Rationalism has not saved us. Reason cannot save us. And as for believers, they may well ask, where is God, why does he not stop the evil?

These days, I cannot bear what passes for entertainment in a woked out world of compliance. Like many others I know, I have retreated to the shows that let me glimpse a world I once knew, one that seems so distant and irretrievable.

And so, retreating to a world of fiction we may find the right moment to ask, unafraid of how it sounds, if you do not believe in God, do you (can you?) believe in Tony Soprano?

I do.

I guess you remember Tony. Larger than life, the Italian American with his shuffling identity problems and overbearing mother who once cast his screen shadow as the lovable avatar of evil. The devil has all the best tunes they say, and he certainly gets to play a good part in television and film. Tony, the so-called antihero. Tony, the psychological misfit in a violent psychodrama of hell.

Is he real? Tony, I mean, not the devil. Or maybe they are and were one and the same. Before you jump, I know, he was played by the late James Gandolfini, so you may sneer and say he cannot be real.

Real or not, I have a hunch that up to the end of the olden days of four years ago, many would have found it easier to believe in Tony Soprano than to believe in the higher power of God. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, who does not actually “exist,” is an essential character in the series. In order to “get” what’s happening in the drama, you have to accept his existence, However, this is only within the diegesis or world of the story.

Or is that the case?

God too can be understood as an essential character in the biblical drama, even if you cannot quite get Him in your life. Surely it is the least the atheist can do to accept that minimal level of God’s existence, as a character in a biblical drama.

Of course, there is more than a grain of truth in the character. Tony, I mean, not God. We could say that Tony Soprano represents and IS something truthful in an abstract sense. We know such Mafia types exist. Moving away from the Ford Coppola or Scorsese tendency to glamourise mobsters and bullies, The Sopranos creators wanted their depictions to work in quite a different way. Notwithstanding the “Godfather” positioning, Tony Soprano is probably as far as we can get from the character of God-the-Father in the Bible. However, we should remember that his character has a few things in common with the deity. After all, he is presented as all powerful, awe inspiring and controlling (if not actually in control).

It should also be remembered that part of the pleasure of The Sopranos series is the mundanity and minutiae of mob boss Tony’s family life. The arguments with his children, the bust-ups with his wife. As it happens, family life drama dominates the book of Genesis. From the blunders of Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, to the trauma of Noah and the machinations of Jacob’s conspiring with his mother, not to mention the thorny matter of child sacrifice that Genesis’s particular ‘Godfather’ demands. Genesis presents the drama serial par excellence if we could but see it. Every reading yields new thought and fresh interpretation. This, of course, is the power of storytelling.

Additionally, The Sopranos was a series that (in its own way) presented moral dilemmas and spiritual questions. Its subversion of former screen conventions echoes the Biblical subversion of pagan conventions. For example, in the Bible’s reworking of tales like the Epic of Gilgamesh to bring a moral centre to the fore.

The Sopranos was at times very violent, depicting all manner of sexual transgressions, crime, theft, male power (Tony, his assorted friends) and female power, (Tony’s monstrous mother, and Dr Melfi). Along with an overarching theme of dominance over others, threats and murder, some characters were shown as selfish and cruel.  Yet others were naïve, kind, showing great restraint in the face of real temptation.

The Sopranos de-glamourised the Godfather figure into a balding overweight middle-aged man, a man who sought counselling for his deep-seated psychological problems. This foregrounded the multi-dimensional aspect of the human condition. The series also de-glamourised that lifestyle and showed it as one that is riven with stupidity, frustration, fear, distrust and corruption. Death hovers over everyone, all the time.

In both The Sopranos and the Bible, actions have consequences, and sometimes people, the characters, just never learn. As Leon Kass explains, writing about the Hebrew Bible, it is not so much about ‘what happened,’ but ‘what always happens.’ And so, the Sopranos show frequently digs below the exterior glamour of the big house and Carmela’s fancy jewellery to reveal an enslavement from which there is (as you might expect from the devil) no exodus.

So how do we relate this to the nostalgia I describe for the olden days of four years ago? It seems as though we are now living in our own drawn-out episode of The Sopranos with mafioso style rulers and drug pushers in charge. Nice business you got here, shame if something were to happen to it if you like the wrong tweet or share misinformation. That is right, in our new version of the Sopranos, you get whacked for telling the truth, be it about sex and gender or government mandated medication. And let us not forget, that Tony Soprano’s world revolves around drugs and misinformation. Give the game away and you could find yourself dead. How quaint to think that in the olden days of four years ago, the FBI played the part of the good guys in The Sopranos forcing Tony’s nephew’s girlfriend Adriana to work with them. Her ensuing ride into the woods and her desperate futile scurrying on all fours before being shot was one of the more shocking scenes in the series.

Now it is the FBI and the CIA that have flipped and work for the drug pushers and the mafia mobsters of Pharma and WEF. It really is no good chitter chattering about the many forthcoming elections, who might get in, and who has the best policies. You will get what Billy Goat and the WEF mob have already bought and paid for from their choice of enforcers. And it really is no good bemoaning some ‘lack of competence’ on the part of our rulers. They are not incompetent nor stupid. They know exactly what they are doing. They are carrying out their orders. Either they are in on it, or they are too afraid to speak out about it. ‘It’ being the New World Order set in motion by that aforementioned fictional emergency. In western nations, your vote is now irrelevant as the choices have been made for you. It is not so much that ‘you will own nothing’ and be ‘happy about it,’ more like, you will get what you’re given, and you will do as you’re told.

Consider the recent mafia style reverberations. In Britain, we are finally talking about Post Office scandal which has taken twenty years and a television drama to reach the masses. Paula Vennells, the erstwhile CEO of the Post Office is an ordained Church of England priest who was, at one point, recommended for the post of Bishop of London by the archbishop of Canterbury. This is a woman who chose to operate with a mafia like code of silence where truth was flatly denied. There had been a serious problem with the Fujitsu software program Horizon. (Fujitsu ‘knew’ about the fault in the way Pfizer ‘knew’ about its product’s ‘faults’) Vennells’s mantra was that the Horizon software was “robust.” (For that read: “safe and effective.”) The overlaps and coincidences there are startling.

For those who do not know, the Post Office in Britain has its own powers to detain, arrest and prosecute people and did so in the case of some 750 sub postmasters and mistresses with no tangible evidence. Many were convicted of crimes they did not commit; many lost their livelihoods; some even went to prison. Lives were ruined, some died before justice was done and at least one committed suicide. After heading up her team of wolves sent out to falsely accuse innocent people of theft, Vennells went on to receive a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) an honour bestowed upon her by the Queen, for ‘considerably improving the financial outlook of the Post Office,’ during her tenure. In other words, Vennells was publicly rewarded for her role in increasing the fortunes of the Post Office organisation.

One of the ways this happened was through threatening behaviour to the hundreds of sub-postmasters who were required under the prospect of prison, to hand over large sums of money. Multiples of thousands of pounds. “Nice little business you got here Mister and Missus Postmaster, it will be a shame for you if you don’t cough up to avoid prison….” And to prison many of these people went anyway. Including one pregnant woman.

The Post Office styles itself as Britain’s most trusted brand, perhaps along the lines of that other venerated and worshipped state entity, the National Health Service (“our NHS”). A service that saw many people, Stalinist style, clapping and banging pots to order during the Covidian house arrests. (First one to stop is dead! Well, almost). People cheered and clapped for a state-run behemoth that left many elderly dying alone in their homes for want of proper medical care. It is crucial to recall that during the height of the hysteria, there was no functioning general practitioner service available to ordinary people in Britain. It was all about saving “our” NHS.

Here is another health-related scandal. Like the Sopranos’ waste management firm that does not dispose so much as relocate the effluence, Britain’s medicines and health regulatory authority (MHRA) now awards itself the moniker of enabler. Did its chief June Raine learn the English language and gain her qualifications only to misunderstand the meaning of an uncomplicated word such as regulator? Is she perhaps incompetent? Not at all. She is just another example of the hard-faced cock-sure liar who feels no need to hide her crimes. The mafia code of silence continues to protect her. If the Mafia boss says it is “safe and effective,” then it is safe and effective, right? Or as it is now claimed, “unequivocally safe.”

It would seem that so much of British public life is governed by a Mafia style code of silence. This might include, but not be limited to the Rochdale grooming gang scandal where young vulnerable girls were groomed and raped by gangs of predominantly Muslim men. The extent and effects of immigration in this and other countries. To ask questions about these things is to garner the label of racist. Of course. Then there is the running sore of excess death rates in Britain and other countries that have administered the untested, unsafe and ineffective Covid 19 injections. The misrepresentation of various data in an attempt to show that similarly injected populations (Sweden) have not experienced such excess deaths amounts to a lie built on the deployment of psychological operations. Deploy your Psy-Ops all you want, but a lie is still a lie.

In a recent interview for TCW: Defending Freedom, Andrew Bridgen revealed that he had been told by the government that they wanted to “cover up the vaccine harms for twenty years.” Yes, the old Mafia solution, bury what you want to hide.

Like a swaggering Tony Soprano who knows he can buy off the police, judiciary the press and anyone who threatens to sabotage the devil’s work, our rulers strut about, grinning, conniving and corrupting. They bury their secrets and threaten those who expose them. They cover up for each other, they lie and profit from their cruelty.

I asked the question: Do you believe in Tony Soprano? He must feel real to you by now. Or how about the divine version, not the Godfather, but God-the-Father?

We see the digging up of the foundations of western civilisation which has served so many so well for thousands of years. Amongst those foundations sits the many Biblical texts, commentaries and more, mostly unread, not thought about. The problem with foundations is that we never really see them, nor appreciate what they mean, nor how they serve us. And if we allow them to be dug up to the point of collapse, then the structure they support will crumble into dust.

We are fortunate to have the capacity to repair those foundations. Many have rolled up their sleeves to get stuck into the work, knowing in some part of their minds that in the repair process they will be unearthing all manner of detritus, filth, decay and, as in certain episodes of The Sopranos, the inevitable ghastly discoveries.

So I guess we had better get used to dealing with the bodies

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