Amerigo Bonasera's Dilemma and the Petty Bourgeois' Lot

In both Mario Puzo's bestselling novel The Godfather, and Francis Ford Coppola's classic film adaptation of that book--for all the very important differences between them with regard to emphasis, structure, flow, even resolution--the drama begins the same way, with Amerigo Bonasera's woes sending him to Don Corleone for redress. In the more than half century since Amerigo's story was introduced to the world the meeting been endlessly referenced, not simply because it was the opening scene of what became a screen classic, but because of the particular power of that scene, which may have at least something to do with its eloquently summing up the dilemma of Mr. Bonasera not just in the wake of a particular crisis, but the course of his larger life that has all the more resonance for the ubiquity of what is most important in it--a petty bourgeois struggling with the reality that the society in which he believed is not what he had been told it was, thought it was.

The matter of trust seems a plausible place to begin--the propensity to trust other individuals, society's institutions, the received wisdom about "how the world works." It seems notorious among serious observers of social life that the lower one goes in the social scale the less trust one finds, and vice-versa, and it is not at all hard to imagine why. Those at the bottom know full well that they are "bound but unprotected." Thus they not only distrust each other, but Authority, from which they expect neither protection nor justice in a world in which their will is constantly thwarted, and they are used to not getting their own way. They are in fact likely to feel themselves living in a world determined to cheat them, use them, beat down on them while being denied a proper chance to defend themselves--punished if they defend themselves--with this state of being perpetually bullied the more galling because of how exposed they are to the dangers, and because of how little it would take to destroy them, a false accusation, for example, likely to suffice. And it is the opposite with those at the very top, the unbound but protected who, as unending corporate scandal demonstrates, break the law right and left knowing that if the government ever makes an issue out of those misdeeds of which they know themselves guilty the worst they are likely to face is a fine apt to be far smaller than the profit of their malfeasance, practically a modest tax on their "illicit" income, all as if they face worse they can count on government being afraid to "spook the markets" by coming after them, on passports that will let them relocate with their ill-gotten gains to a country from which their extradition would be exceedingly unlikely, and at worst, a short term in a facility far less fearsome than the hell-on-Earth in which a government preaching human rights to other nations keeps its Unwashed, with this perhaps shortened by a timely presidential pardon, after which they can simply go back to their old "onward and upward" path through life, as it were. Amid all that the rich don't trouble themselves much with how the world works--it works for them, after all--and anyway have others on the payroll doing for them the thinking upholding the status quo requires, as they question very little per se (indeed, often show themselves surprisingly naive generally, as when a con artist gets a hold of them, because they are so used to being protected rather than looking out for themselves). By contrast the poor, if not necessarily having much of a chance to put together a proper "big picture" of things, may feel they don't know much, may in fact be susceptible to all kinds of misapprehensions, but are likely to be sure that the official line promulgated by politicians and the media and the rest isn't the truth. All that talk of equality? Even just the "equality under the law" that right-wingers bitterly hostile to egalitarianism are usually prepared to countenance in a nominal way? Not only can't they take such rhetoric seriously, they would find it hazardous to do so, forgetting how things really work dangerous in an immediate, personal way--and the pretense likely to be intolerable given the bitterness and even rage that those who endure the lot of the bound but unprotected are likely to feel if they feel any human love for themselves at all (society's denial of their right to do which is still another source of bitterness and rage).

The petty bourgeois, as might be expected from their association with "middleness," stands in between those at the top and the bottom--but far from evenly. In practice they too are among the bound but unprotected. But they are not disposed to think much about disparities here, to think of themselves as at least not very much bound while being reasonably protected, and indeed to identify with those above them and despise those below them. It helps that the System does seem to work for them--at least enough for the pieties to have some credibility, such that they are prone to believe what Authority tells them, about, among much else, equality, and of course, opportunity. Rather than bearing out homilies about how "hard work gets you ahead" the painful experience of the poor is that hard work is likely to merely allow people to survive, and often enough fail to do that, as their "hard work" enriches those above them and not themselves. But the petty bourgeois' conditions of life have them believing in the prospect of upward mobility, and the good petty bourgeois that if they are not billionaires they have more in common with billionaires than the poor, that they are like them upstanding "makers" rather than "takers," and that they have a fair chance of elevating themselves, or their children, into the ranks of the truly privileged if they just try hard enough, with this only the just reward of their upstanding, making-rather-than-taking, hard work. (Indeed, if it is really the case that "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" syndrome is a force in American life it is plausible that it is most significant at this level.)

Of course, for all that the petty bourgeois is far more likely to come into contact with working class persons than they are billionaires, with their common attitudes toward each other underlining the disparity. The working class man is apt to regard the conventional petty bourgeois as simple-minded where a great many things are concerned, with an exaggerated idea of how high he stands in the world. Meanwhile the petty bourgeois sees the suspicious, cynical, view of the world common among the socially disadvantaged not as a plausible response to their conditions of life but the paranoid idiocy of the "uneducated," and sure that they have only themselves to blame for this foolishness, that they ought to be more like themselves, that if they thought and acted as they did they too would be "successful." (The petty bourgeois is a great believer in their ways being the right ways for everyone, ever commending their own "aspirationalism" to those they see as beneath them in a spirit of "Perhaps this will have a humanizing effect on the dog-stealers!") But all the same, realities being what they are they do, now and again, make the petty bourgeois themselves face the hollowness of their pieties. They "did everything right" and worked hard, but didn't get as far ahead as they thought they would--or at all--and if their accustomed response is to blame the so-called takers for their not being a billionaire yet (must be all those welfare queens living high on their tax money!), this is not always their response, realizing as they might that if the System seems to work for them it does so only incidentally, its real purpose serving others far more privileged than themselves. They might find as Amerigo Bonasera did who the law really works for, and that it's not them.

It is a powerful shock to experience what people lower in the social scale than themselves experience all of their days--but the response to being faced with the question "Little Man, What Now?" is hardly universal among people, and still less so across groups. If one possible reaction is to say that the System must be changed, as the history of movements for change of the past several centuries show, the reaction of "rebellion" is less automatic than the left hopes and the right fears--and especially unlikely among people of Mr. Bonasera's strata. There is the alternative of private, sullen apathy, which has people going through the motions as they do their bit within a System in which they no longer believe, and this "ritualism" would seem common indeed among the "middle class" in Robert Merton's analysis--but for Mr. Bonasera in the circumstances this is too much. There is also the alternative to either looking to "change the System," or disbelieving in the System but going through the motions it requires, accepting the System, accepting its goals and values, its structure and essential functioning, but being ready to break the rules to get their way, with, indeed the petty bourgeois notorious for that response (this, in Merton's vocabulary, "innovation"). Hence the famous fascination of the petty bourgeois with the successful criminal who breaks the law and gets away with it. (Thus their brains all but breaking with delight as they watch Tony Soprano on the screen, or, in a moment in which the government has just sacrificed "Main Street to Wall Street" on an historic scale in the wake of irresponsibility, stupidity and criminality that broke the world, rather than being revolted by the lionization of a self-satisfied vulgarian jackass grifter when looking on Martin Scorsese's dramatization of the antics of Jordan Belfort fantasize about being a "Wolf of Wall Street.")

So does it with Mr. Bonasera. He speaks the first line of the movie, which is "I believe in America" and there is never any reason to doubt him when he says so, his whole life testimony to that, evident even in his dealings with Corleone in the scene that follows, as we have every reason to think he goes on believing in America. But all the same, in this specific crisis, his daughter ruined by a politician's son, this very allusively named man (Amerigo evoking Ameriggo Vespucci and the continent he "discovered," and Bonasera the Italian Buonasera, "Good Evening") goes in his grief to a man who owns politicians likely more senior and powerful than the reprobate's father but whom he had, in spite of the man's wife being godmother to that only daughter over whose suffering he now agonizes, earlier spurned in his desire to be a good citizen and a good man--for he now finds it unbearable to let the injustice done him and his stand, and sees no alternative to, reluctant as he was to come to such an accommodation, plead for that other man's friendship, knowing full that it may mean repaying a very great favor far beyond his own powers someday.