American Values and Organized Crime: Suckers and Wiseguys

Abstract

Eliot's statements about time in the opening of Four Quartets are also statements about culture. Our symbols of self all contain our collective past in our individual present. And indeed, our individual and collective future is but a hall of mirrors reflecting past on present as we go forward. Culture brands our behavior so that most sensitive observers are both looking in and acting at the same time. Our cultural images of what we ought to be often define what we are and become. We are trained to think in stereotypes, standardized images that hide individual uniqueness. To create a unique self is a difficult task, a luxury few have the wit or leisure even to attempt. Most of us are thus content to be molded by a role as defined by culture. 1 This process, however , is a subtle one . Patterns are drawn not only from sense data and technological reality , but also from a desire to be, as well as an understanding of what has worked in the past. Thus we are not only cultural creations at best, caricatures at worst ; we are ongoing representations of myth as repeated and delimited by our society over time. When we ask "What's American about American crime?" the answer is flashed for all of us (Americans ) to see. If we say "violent urban street crime," a host of modern American cultural images appears. A different set appears if we say "Jesse James," and a third set if we say "organized crime." This paper concentrates on the third set of images. Organized crime provides a panoply of American images containing all of the relativity of Eliot, while bearing the unique imprint of our American culture. Th e taproots of American culture are those Lockeian values embodied in the writings, declarations, and documents of the Founding Fathers and their interpreters. These values are based in beliefs in individualism , property, or "materialism," competition, and freedom of action, or inde-