Good Riddance to The Sopranos. HBO's paean to the Mafia ends later tonite. Good. The Sopranos is hideously evil trash, every episode of which should be destroyed — including the one in which two of my friends appear as extras. Anyone who willfully tries to preserve so much as one episode should be "whacked" and chopped up for parts for decent people. That anyone should praise that monstrous series shows the utter evil into which too much of this country has descended. Since when is murder-as-entertainment praiseworthy? On what planet?
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I am appalled and indignant that a reporter (reportress, actually) on News 12 New Jersey dared to say today that New Jersey was proud of that evil garbage and The Sopranos was very good for New Jersey. Oh, yeah, preserving the stereotype of New Jersey as crime country is good for us! Filming in NJ brought in $60 million, so that's good, right? Oh? What if Murder, Inc. were a New Jersey-registered corporation paying state taxes and good wages to hitmen? Would that be good for New Jersey too? What is wrong with people?
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Everyone responsible for The Sopranos should be flogged and banished from media for life. Indeed, they should be banished from society for life, each of them sent into solitary exile in the Arctic. The United States is far and away the most violent and crimeridden nation of the industralized world, and a large part of that is because violent crime has been normalized by a popular culture dominated by subhuman, antihuman scum. If we can't just slit their throats, chop up their bodies for parts for decent people, and burn what we can't use (then use the ashes as fertilizer in a protected forest), we can at least condemn all such vile outputs as the loathsome and morally indefensible Sopranos.
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HBO could partially redeem itself by having the series end with the arrest of every member of the mob 'family', and their conviction and sentencing to death — or, better, by staging a joint FBI-New Jersey State Police raid that kills every last mobster in a firefite in which the worst injury a law-enforcement officer suffers is a non-life-threatening wound to a shoulder or leg. That's unlikely, tho, isn't it? Too bad. I might almost tune in if I could watch that. Nah, I'd have to subscribe to HBO, and I'm not about to do that.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,508 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:07 PM