Pity the billions belonging to the major western religions for the knee-capping their faiths received on Sunday's installment of "The Sopranos." Duplicity, hypocrisy, ignorance, arrogance, gullibility: Thank God for Catholics, evangelical Christians, and Jews. Someone has to inhabit the pole opposite the Ojibwe and Schrodingerian adherents who advocate "oneness" and reject the very notion of duality. At least Hesch is given the chance to strike a blow for modern pragmatism, with his dismissive response to his wife's comment that evangelicals might be the Jews' best friends. "Just you wait," he snorts. Amen.
Of course, pity is never as major a motif on "The Sopranos" as self-pity, and Sunday's episode was redolent with it. Johnny Sac, Tony, Paulie, Da Lux and his struggling minion, Sister Dottie, Paulie's "mom," Schwinn, Janice–each was given an opporunity, overtly or subtly, to complain how bad he or she had it compared to the next guy. Listen closely and it sounds like most of the conversations we have in the course of our days. If we're not bitching about the quotidian "crises" our jobs present us with–those little fictions a workplace runs on, whether it's tight deadlines or the loss of the "skim" on a trash route–we're complaining about the sleep we didn't get, the love we didn't get, the appreciation we still don't get. How boring, in other words.
It's not simply a close call with death that spurs Tony to think deeper; it's the thought of endless days spent in this mindless recitation of the meaningless. Hell on earth, you could say–an irony on which Schwinn might like to comment if only he hadn't had his larynx removed (an irony in itself). The silence now emanating from Schwinn's room as Tony passes it on the way out of the hospital is not just the silence of the crypt, but the cosmic silence of humankind's insignificance.
But whether Tony truly understands this, gives only passing thought to it, or remains simply too afraid to face it is an open question, the answer to which may or may not have come even if he did stop in to "say goodbye." "There's enough garbage for everyone," Tony says, and though it functions nicely as North Jersey philosophying it's really nothing more than an evasion. It's a quip that underscores his continued avoidance of meaningful engagement with the big issues. He remains, like a child, more moved by comparisons of man's presence on earth to postage stamps at the top of the Empire State Building.
On the other hand, at least it's a start. But even if Tony could acknowledge the Ojibwe wind carrying him along, the cyclones conjured by Schwinn to explain the nature of oneness are more apt an image. The leaves rustle, wavelets breast the placid water of the pool, but up in Kearny a boy witnesses the beating of his father, while another son wades into water way too deep and is now into Paulie for four thousand dollars a month.
When violence churns the air like a tornado, it's hard to contemplate the meaningless of dualities; in fact, seeing things in black and white seems the only course–a necessity. But it's a trap, as the events and rhetoric of our own world have shown us in the past few years. Evil and good? Heaven and hell? It's way too simple, and that's the big problem, just as Schwinn insists. Just you wait.
