You know this, Johnny. Mitt is using Santorum as Luca Brazzi.

Listen to me, Johnny. They know Santorum's only a pezzonovante, but they want you to fear him so that Mitt will look benign. You know, how simply the fear of Luca Brazzi got that bandleader to sign that contract? Remember, Johnny, this isn't personal with them. It's strictly business. Mitt might have the spinelessness of Fredo, but they're gonna make him the Don. Then they can get him to do anything, because - remember, Johnny? - it's been Barzini, all along.

In a darling and endearing way, there's no doubt that the Tea Party feels that Santorum is its own Luca Brazzi against poor Mitt - their enforcer of his morals, if you will. But this thing's been bought and paid for since the Bush Supreme Court's Citizens United case, and all that remains is the spending.

If you're coming from Iowa, the way you get to New Hampshire is through Vermont. But I don't think Santorum will haul his gaudy misanthrope bus across that humane terrain. I think he'll descend by air, on the tweets of Rupert Murdoch. And he will have Michelle's maniacs behind him now, beefing up demand for teen suicide.

We'd rather they didn't do that. We have a history and we have a culture to show that history, of what these people's crimes are. But the smart money says that the terror they'll propagate this year will be nakedly financial, frightening everyone they can to be unfair in order, once again, to be safe. I have to believe that the lewd irony escapes no one, that our high priests of entrepreneurial risk in the coddling arms of the tax code are our extremest fetishists for the pipedream of security. We shall not hear fascism; we shall hear job creation.

But you know, for this very reason, that this one will be more strenuous than all the rest before. If they have to come out from behind the defunct screens of anti-communism, welfare queens, Willie Horton, islamofascist [sic] bogeymen, and all the other phony tempests in their demagogic teapot over time, and fight tooth and nail for the liberty to screw the United States to the dungeon floor with inequality till hell freezes over, they are going to put everything they have into making quite sure that they do it. They will call up all of their courts and all of their 'journalists' to remember what they owe their Don, because now they are exposed.

But first, we'll have to wade through the muck of Santorum's stalking horse campaign. This too, we've seen before: the disease of phobia, sowing the disturbance of doubt, for the vulnerable to be isolated, to suffer, and drop out, and the rest to soldier on in patriotic resignation. 

Our history condemns them all, from Nixon through the second Bush al-ready. And still they don a new mask, and still they boast they are the first day of history. Yet still a bandleader doesn't want to hire a nasty front for the mob. It leads all but ineluctably to one giddy notion: what if there were 6 of these defiant bandleaders, or make that 16? There can't be that many rounds in Luca's 38. And if there were 16 million bandleaders, even Murdoch would get the news. And then if there were 60, who knows what chance there'd be, for the same old story? 

There has only to be a limitation.

                       

Francis Ford Coppola, director
Francis Ford Coppola and
  Mario Puzzo, screenplay
The Godfather
op. cit.


vii   Jeremy Young
viii  Photograph Alfred Eisenstaedt