We Are More Than A Single Sentence

“This is the most serious fucking decision I’ve ever had to make in my life. I need proof. I’m not going to hurt a man that I love because of some cop gossip from a degenerate fucking gambler with a badge.”

So said Tony Soprano in Season 1, Episode 11 of HBO’s The Sopranos. Tony said this to his police informant, Detective Vin Makazian, dutifully played by Emmy-nominee John Heard.

“You know, you got an amazing ability to sum up a man’s whole life in a single sentence. ‘Generate gambler with a badge,” Makazian responds.

He goes on to say, “You know when I was a kid, when I was a kid and my old man would be in one of his ways with the screaming back and forth and eventually it would end, it would end with her throwing the closest thing to him and he’d smack her around! I don’t know why, but I would run into my room and I would hide under my bed. There was something peaceful and there was something safe under that bed. And that’s where I would wake up the next day, everything back to normal. How ‘bout you, Tony? You ever feel like hiding under a bed?”

“Yeah, right now." They both chuckle in a moment of comic relief.

HBO’s The Sopranos, widely regarded as one of the greatest shows ever to premiere on television, revolves around the show’s namesake, Tony Soprano, and his family, as he tries to balance the nuances of successfully raising two teenagers in the suburbs outside Newark and his involvement in a crime family centered on illegal gambling and extortion. The Sopranos has been attributed as launching the famous “anti-hero” television genre, spinning off other successful television shows such as AMC’s Breaking Bad and Mad Men, NBC’s The Blacklist and Showtime’s Ray Donovan, among others. Most impressive about these shows is their ability to portray nuanced human behavior, depicting the most horrid of acts and the most relatable everyday struggles in the same character. This character, be it Tony Soprano, Don Draper or whoever, could remain somewhat sympathetic despite their documented history of atrocious behavior.

I’ve written elsewhere about the anti-hero TV types, even going as far as the say that Don Draper is my moral hero. This is more about what Vin Makazian said to Tony Soprano in the quote above. Tony has a remarkable talent of summing up the entire life of a person into a single sentence. Of course, we know that that’s not literally true. Makazian may well be a degenerate gambler with a badge, but we also know he’s a victim of childhood trauma, hence the conflicting dichotomy of Tony’s summation and Vin’s subsequent story of his childhood abuse.

It’s so easy to harp on an individual who made (and perhaps continues to make) poor choices. Moving beyond the clearly horrible choices of Tony Soprano (I’m not suggesting we find a way to excuse murder for the sake of experiencing empathy), there are individuals in all walks of life that have made poor choices and have also been on the receiving end of others’ poor choices. A “respected” police officer such as Makazian, on the outside, seems like an upstanding citizen and community member. He experienced traumatic events as a child growing up in a toxic household. He’s also a gambler, and in an earlier episode, beat a man during a traffic stop. We don’t need to excuse the latter to empathize with the former. It should be mentioned that Makazian goes on to commit suicide later in this same episode referenced above.

In The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark writes, “Pervert is a verb, and we do it all the time. To pervert is to degrade, to cut down to size - and we do it to people in our minds. We devalue them. We reduce them to the limitations of our appetites, of our sense of what might prove useful to us, of our sense of what strikes us as appropriate…Perversion is a failure of the imagination, a failure to pay adequate attention. While perversion appears to be the modus operandi of governments and the transnational corporations they serve—and the language they both speak in their broadcasts—the reductionism implicit in the perversion doesn’t ultimately work. It doesn’t do justice to the fullness of what we are…There’s always more to a person—more stores, more life, more complexities—than we know. The human person, when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable and dear.”

Despite the murder, the adultery, the extortion, the poor anger management and more, don’t you think David Dark could say the same about Tony Soprano? Nobody here is saying that those things are okay. They are not and any moral person would categorically reject the behavior of Tony Soprano. But the power of these types of shows, and the type of scene quoted above, is that it humanizes the character. He’s not just a degenerate; a murderer; a gangster. He’s also a father; a son and a nephew; a psychiatric patient. Perhaps the most horrifying is that this humanized character doesn’t feel so distant anymore; suddenly, we may see ourselves in the character.

Let’s pivot away from Tony Soprano and anti-hero TV shows. Think of Qulon McCain, a homeless and mentally-ill man who spent almost a year in jail for stealing four pairs of socks from a Bloomingdales in New York. What would normally be a misdemeanor was bumped up to felony burglary in the third degree, as under New York law, someone who “knowingly enters or remains unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein” commits third-degree burglary. Given everything that McCain struggled with at that time, given that the charge was purposefully inflated as a “tough on crime” tactic and given that the estimated cost to house an inmate on Rikers Island in New York for a single day is about $800 (already far outpacing the cost of the socks, let alone the costs after an entire year), there’s a chance we can agree that this is an injustice. Nobody is condoning theft; however, it’s undeniably true that McCain is a victim of the system. Perversion would lead us to believe that he’s just some druggy, some degenerate homeless man, some “schizo” with a rap sheet. Such perversion is immoral and antithetical to our humanity.

Human beings are incredibly complex creatures. We are an unknown mixture of everything that’s happened to us and everything we decide for ourselves. We’re also inherently more than that; as Brene Brown argues in The Gift of Imperfection, we are all inextricably connected and such connection should be celebrated. So one could say that we’re also, at least in part, made up of those in our lives we’re connected to. Despite how easy it is to navel-gaze, Vin Makazian is not just some “degenerate gambler with a badge.” He is much more than that. Qulon McCain is not just some ex-convict with a drug problem. He’s so much more than that.

For almost my entire life, my father has been employed as a warden of a jail. In a decently small and close-knit community outside Pittsburgh, it was very common to encounter a former resident of that jail when we went shopping or went out to eat. My father never put his arm over me to hold me back, he never told me to stay away from that man (and it was a man every time, as I remember), he never even brought up the reason why the guy was placed in that jail in the first place. Every time, without fail, my father would say hello with a big smile and shake his hand. He’d ask how he was doing, ask if he was staying out of trouble and wish him the best. And that’s so often how it went. There was no discussion when we got to the car about how I should be careful around guys like that. We went on with our day, and that was that.

Whether you’re a person with a documented history involving the justice system or a person who continues to struggle day-to-day making poor choices disconnected from legality, we can all agree that we are more than a single sentence. We can agree that we’re more than the choices that we’ve made. It’s more difficult to live that out, but it’s imperative that we try. It’s getting worse, this perversion, in the age of social media. Everyday, I see vitriol directed at those “Trump supporters” as if that’s all they are. Everyday, I see disgust launched at those “socialists and baby killers.” This kind of dehumanization is wrong, full-stop. We are more than who we vote for, we are more than our backgrounds, we are more than the color of our skin and we are more than the opinions that others have of us.

Header image courtesy of Home Box Office Entertainment.