THE AGE OF TOUCHINESS

By Melvin Maddocks

A proper image is a matter of civil rights.

--P. Vincent Landi Italian-American spokesman

TO history's roster of metaphysicians must now be added the Italian-American Civil Rights League. By a bloodless coup--metaphysics instead of machine guns--the league recently declared: The Mafia doesn't exist. In effect, the league lined Cosa Nostra up against the wall and stared right through it.

The simplicity, the purity of the idea has proven irresistible. After being picketed and besieged by mail, the Justice Department became the league's first convert. Attorney General John Mitchell agreed to deport the Mafia--as a word, that is. In a confidential memo the Mitchell kiss of death was to be reserved not for the Mob, but for all Justice Department employees who used the terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra officially. The league subsequently persuaded the film makers of The Godfather, which is about practically nothing but the Mafia, to excise the hated term from their screenplay. That was a feat roughly comparable to composing a history of World War II without mentioning Nazis.

Behind the "don't-mention-Mafia" campaign, behind the talk about promoting an "image of law-abiding Americans," are two intriguing social forces. One, breathing heavily, is a positive lust for respectability. The irony is that the men of the Mafia, for reasons of camouflage, have arrived at the life-style of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. But the double irony is that propriety has now become its own parody. While the children of the league labor to prove how sober, hardworking, puritanical they are, the children of the Mayflower, dressed in a travesty of the 1930s' Italian-gangster wardrobe, are straining twice as hard (from Swiss ski lodges to Caribbean beaches) to prove they are, at heart, impulsive Latin playboys.

The other and more significant force is a new style of sensitivity or perhaps paranoia. It is best articulated by Comedian Flip Wilson. In his familiar television routine, a dialogue is going famously, fairly humming with jolly good will. Then the other party touches Flip--a friendly clap on the shoulder, a matey hand on the sleeve. Wilson recoils like a Prussian who has been slapped. An expression of non-negotiable hostility does a slow freeze across his face. In a rising falsetto he cries: "Don't touch me! Don't you ever touch me!" Wilson is not just self-mocking the compulsive suspicion of a black being pushed around again in a white world. In the last analysis, with his quite-literal touchiness, Flip is standing in for most of us.

This seems to be both the Age of Touchiness and the Age of the Beleaguered Minority. Blacks. Jews. Jehovah's Witnesses. Women. The Very Young. The Very Old. Homosexuals. Suburbanites. People from Philadelphia. Who does not qualify? Never have Americans been so willfully aware of belonging to one minority or another, never have they been so defensive and so belligerent about it. Not a day passes but new and ever touchier minorities surface.

Feeling oppressed, in fact, has become something of a national sport with its own succinct rules. A posture of unequivocal outrage is de rigueur. An oppressed minority need not include in its title the lawyer-thrilling term anti-defamation league. But it helps, especially at the top of the stationery when one writes letters to the New York Times. The decisive moment of victory in the game is not when an oppressed minority gets off the defensive but when it puts everybody else on the defensive. When, like the Italians with their anti-Mafia crusade, it makes others not only act but talk and think the way it wants them to.

At that point, of course, the oppressed minority becomes an oppressive minority--and there is no escape. The Italian Americans dare make no jokes about homosexuals; the p.r. men for the Gay Liberation Front have their stationery drawn and ready. And if the G.L.F. knows what is good for it, it will make no nasty cracks about those Oriental actors who recently accused Broadway of discriminating against them.

Minorities in the U.S. are, of course, oppressed and persecuted. But to define this reality in terms of "image," to argue that the use of familiar words describing familiar facts constitutes "persecution," only trivializes the ideals of equality and social justice. When touchy minorities turn hypersensitive and overreact to ethnic slights (some real, some imaginary), they succeed only in transforming tolerance into a subtle new form of hypocrisy, more mouthed piety than reform of the heart.

Does it really serve truth to pretend that Italians have had no connection with the Mafia? And what difference does it make if they did? It is obvious to the point of boredom that, despite this connection, the vast majority of Italian Americans are law-abiding citizens. What is gained by pretending that Jews and blacks and Armenians are not different from one another, or that they lack racial and ethnic characteristics? What cause is helped when oppressive minorities declare that only black comics can tell jokes about blacks, or only Jews jokes about Jews? The babble of competing minorities drowns out the legitimate cries of agony. The cancer victims of American society are put in danger of taking their place in line behind the poison ivy cases.

It may be time for a new oppressed minority to arise against the other oppressed minorities: the Nader's Raiders of ethnicity, blowing the whistle on narrow aims and self-serving performances. To measure the dead-end futility of the touchiness game, one must imagine the final absurdity. The year is 2000, and a new oppressed minority has surfaced. Chapters are formed, stationery is bought. Letters are typed to the New York Times:

To the Editor:

A racial cliche damaging to our minority image has lied its way into the American mind. In films, in plays, in novels, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is consistently portrayed as an elderly, square parent-type, a money-oriented materialist who cares more about his electromobile than his wife and children.

This vicious stereotype has nothing to do with the facts. You should be leading the media in correcting this subtle act of bigotry. Instead, within the past two months, you have used a pejorative name--an insect's name!--13 times in stories dealing with our minority.

We are making every effort to remain nonviolent. But our patience is being exhausted, You have been warned. Don't call us WASP. Don't you ever call us WASP.

Yours sincerely,

The Order of the Sons of

England in America

. Melvin Maddocks

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