No. Not any more. Thanks a lot Bloomberg.
I think there was actually an episode of the Sopranos where the son was asking why they don’t live in a Corleone-style compound.
Also, Tony wasn’t a “Don”. He was just a boss. Mafia middle management so to speak.
You didn’t kn… I mean, NO of course they don’t! 
<whispered shout> Hey! You ho’s better save some lines for me, dammit!<whispered shout>
“Mafia don” and “boss” are the same thing. In fact, Robert Loggia annoys Tony by sarcastically addressing him as “don.” Tony is not annoyed because “don” is wrong, but because of the way Feech says it.
Above a don/boss was the “capo di tutti capi,” the boss of all bosses, which was eliminated when the “commission” was created. And in fact, as head of the DiMeo crime family, Tony is the top boss in northern New Jersey, or whatever his territory is considered to be. The only reason he might be considered lower than Carmine Lupertazzi is that the New York family is richer and bigger. When Johnny Sack becomes the boss in New York, you see that he’s struggling to put Tony in a subordinate position, but technically they are equals.
N.B.: In the Mob, “Don” is an honorific, not a rank, and sometimes could be applied to underbosses and such. As I understand it, it simply fell into disuse from the 1970s to the present.
Also, Tony Soprano is not “middle management,” he has no superiors to obey or kick up to, he is the autonomous head of an autonomous family, just like the Gambinos or the Bonnanos; his only superior is the National Commission. That doesn’t make him their equal necessarily. One theme that recurs on the show is that the New York Mob guys feel a certain contempt for the Jersey guys. In one episode he has some NY guys over for a backyard BBQ and one tells him, "Tony, the Don does not wear shorts!" (Not that NY guys call anybody “Don” any more either, he’s just using the word to make a point.)
Of course it does, but with most car trips lasting five minutes or less, there usually isn’t enough time to do much listening.
Scoff if you want, but I am an entire 160 feet further above sea level than Chicago. But yeah, grades were mostly put there so one railroad could run its tracks over those of another. I’m fat and notice the slightest grades, so I can feel when I cross the boundary between the watershed draining to the Des Plaines river and the one draining to the Fox river. You can’t always tell that if you are always going up and down.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Apropos of nothing, it always boggled and tickled me that Don Corleone lives in a compound – a sort of Royal Palace, with armed guards – and Tony Soprano lives in a suburban McMansion. What, oh what, has become of Their Thing?!
[/QUOTE]
They don’t want to call attention to themselves. Capone was flashy and it was obvious that he lived far beyond the means he listed on his tax forms. Sam Giancana, boss of the Chicago Outfit, lived here. A nice bungalo on the outside, decorated in the exquisitely bad taste popular with Italian-Americans of his generation, with insufficient security. FTR, he did have nicer places, but this was the home he returned to after cooling off in Mexico.
You couldn’t call Thomas Jefferson conservative by the standards of his time, but he was also anti-urbanist.
But going by his design for UVa, he would make a heck of a New Urbanist architect today!
The New Urbanists, BTW, are not by definition liberal in any political sense, though probably most are. But this is what they’re concerned about:
You can find all of that in a big-city neighborhood, you can find all of that in Mayberry or Bedford Falls, you can find all of that in a New Urbanist development, but you can’t find any of it but the playgrounds and the HOA in the average American post-WWII PUD pod.
Even walk to his Dad’s Building & Loan. From an early age, George Bailey could get a feeling of being in the scene, part of the daily life of the community, like a grownup, or at least observing it closely every day. I want you all to think again about this in particular. Suburbia was designed for raising kids, but they didn’t think it out too well.
BTW, Lake Helen’s children can no longer walk to school. While I worked there, there was controversy over the county school board wanting to shut down Long-Lake Helen Elementary and consolidate its student body with a new school in Deltona, to which LH children would have to be bused. An economies-of-scale thing – one School Board official I talked to called these small-town elementary schools with less than 500 enrollment “dinosaurs”. Eventually (I followed up in later years), that was done. But, it freed up the old elementary school building to be used as the new City Hall, with much more space than the old one – also, at the center of and within walking distance of the whole town, which is something – while the Police Department, previously sharing space with City Hall in the same building and rather cramped in the space, got to take over that whole building. So it all turned out nice in the end, I guess, but better still if those children – all American children – could walk to school.
There’s also been a strand of anti-urbanism in leftist thinking too, with the most extreme examples being Mao’s and especially Pol Pot’s anti-urban campaigns but also in general socialist beliefs that dense industrialization were the product of capitalism and environmentalist opposition to development.
Considering they don’t take Mao’s more extreme acts seriously anymore, even in China, I don’t think they’re the best counterexamples. Obviously they had vastly different ideas from those of American conservatives on how the rural communities would be controlled. Within Western environmentalism there definitely has been a school of thought that tends to disparage big cities as centers of pollution and consumption, but there was considerably more of this thinking in the 1970s.
Not too long ago I found, online, a “vision” of the future Los Angeles, drafted probably some time in the early 1970s. There would be no city as such; it was all a sort of interconnected series of hillocks with hobbitlike burrows in which we’d be living. I don’t recall what the economic foundation of this society was supposed to be. In general I think the idea was to eliminate not only pavement but also the appearance of anything made by humans.
If I can find it I’ll come back with a cite.
Well, the Kibbutz movement in Israel is both left-wing and anti-urbanist.
Right. You look at a city and it looks like it is an environmental nightmare. But the fallacy is that one can only take in so much area within one’s view; so the amount of environmental destruction wrought by suburbs is too vast and spread out to comprehend in that way.
Nevertheless, environmentalists have come very far since then in understanding that cities and compact development are actually, on a per capita basis, the greenest way to reside of the main choices in contemporary American life.
Well, that would still be a city as such.
See also the New Pedestrianism:
Something like this excites me, since I am so pedestrian in my lifestyle (hehe). If I were queen of the world, I’d build tree-lined walkways and bike paths everywhere, including interstate highways!
But urban planning theories like this one just scream “commie-pinko liberal!” They are antithetical to the consumerism-based framework we’ve been operating in for generations. Why should people buy big-ass cars if everything is designed with the pedestrian in mind? And if people buy smaller and fewer cars, then will they continue to load up at CostCo or BJs every two weeks? No. And if people don’t drive as much, then convenience stores, fast food restaurants, Targets, Walmarts, etc also lose their power. Bye-bye gas stations. Houses won’t need to be as big since there will be less junk to find rooms for. The idea of a “starter” home will fall by the wayside. The conservative looks at this and thinks “ECONOMIC COLLAPSE!!” The liberal looks at it and thinks, “YES! BUT WE’LL LOVE IT ANYWAY!!”
Not to mention…a pedestrian-dominated design encourages neighbors to interact with one another. Which not only breaks down the mistrust people have for one another now, but it also empowers communities. The Powers That Be hate empowered communities. Empowered communities petition against big boxes stores, nuisance landfills, corruption, polluted air and water, and other blights. Empowered communities can also be hysterical and self-centered, too. But the status quo thrives on an apathetic populace. Conservatives, by definition, favor the status quo.
Well, no, it just means new pedestrian-oriented business (in which anyone with the money can invest) will emerge and take some of the market-share away from existing auto-oriented businesses. We’ll still be consumerists, we’ll just walk more. But there will still be plenty of gas-stations and drive-thrus and big-box stores in America.