Tony America

Home stretch. I've been asked what do I think will happen in the final episode, and while I've been reading some predictions, imaginable ones, I only want to comment on this week's penultimate Sopranos episode.

It seems to me that the Presidential failure of George W. Bush was a godsend of metaphor for series creator/executive producer David Chase. There have been hints of the family's political leanings along the way, like when Carmela and Tony said thank God Bush was President during and after 9/11, with Carmela reading Fred Barnes' nincompoop sycophantic Rebel in Chief in bed, but never was the connection made more obvious than in this episode's comparison of the War in Iraq with Tony's long-gestating mob war.

The gimme is when A.J. comes down for breakfast and switches on Bush's war on the high-def TV, blasting the volume. His mother and sister are too intimidated by his recent suicide attempt to ask him to turn it down. Instead, the unpleasant violence of the war invades their home, all that continuing horror a direct consequence of supporting this President but something kept off the TV, outside the walls, under the rug. Even "compassionate" Meadow, who's book smart enough about oppression, doesn't care to hear it, a nuisance to her young bourgeois adulthood. And Carmela's been psychologically blocking the bloodshed that has perpetuated her lifestyle for years.

Now here's Tony, architect of his own decimation, his best soldiers gunned down dreaming of an America in the past that never exactly existed, just the narcissistic philosophical underpinning of their violent practices. Tony not only brought the war on himself with an overreaction to a slight of honor in which he attacked a tangental enemy, not the one actually perpetrating the violence against his crew, but the result has been nothing but loss for him. Just like Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, his flawed leadership leads to his team botching an impossible mission, and in the end he's holed up in a stasis-like retreat, his forces markedly diminished, his weaknesses rather than his strength revealed to his enemy, left contemplating a shrinking range of very bad options.

It was salacious biographer Kitty Kelley who said in 2004 (Salon):

...nothing will stand in the way of these people winning. Nothing. You start out looking at the Bush family like it's "The Donna Reed Show" and then you see it's "The Sopranos."

In some ways Tony is the combo Bush/Cheney, with the latter's bullish bearing and the former's incapacity for taking personal responsibility. But the real difference between the two Bosses is that one's run ends next the Sunday.

The other's...not soon enough.