Date: July 10th, 2026 12:00 AM
Author: cowgod
The Senator showing up at all gives the game away. A real sovereign doesn't need to come sniffing around the table imho. He sends an office, a board, a statute, a man with a stamp. He has a Turnbull. Turnbull's a good man iirc. Instead he comes himself. He wants to wet his beak in person. He wants the tribute warm. And by doing that he reduces himself. Then Michael finishes the demotion.
Then he wakes up in the brothel, drunk and Ruined, with a dead girl in the bed and Tom Hagen holding the mop. After that he gets nothing. Not even the fee for the gaming license.
Maybe that is the whole fuckin' allegory. America is not conquered from outside. It's subverted by becoming more itself. TheImmigrant arrives outside the club. He learns the rules. Then he learns the rules beneath the rules.
At first the old stock sneers at him. Then it takes his money. Then it invites him to dinner. Then they make him CEO of Microsoft. Then it discovers he understands the country better than the people who inherited it.
That is The Godfather. Not an Italian story. An American story. The ethnic outsider doesn't destroy America by refusing to assimilate. He assimilates perfectly into the real America: patronage, violence, property, public virtue over private vice.
By the end, the Senator sings the praises of Italian-Americans because that is what America does once the money gets large enough. It launders the outsider into the establishment and calls the transaction progress.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881330&forum_id=2...id.#49990018)