The Hyphenated Citizen – By Philip Petraglia

I just finished reading Christopher Castellani’s excellent trilogy chronicling the life of a fictitious Italian American family. The first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena, published in 2003 takes place during the nineteen forties as World War Two rages on. The location is Santa Cecilia, one of those many small towns in Italy where opportunities were few to come by, except if one was lucky enough to leave for the “New World”, especially America. The main character is Maddalena, a beautiful blonde who forsakes marriage with her true love to marry Antonio, a fellow villager visiting from America, who persuades her to accompany him to Wilmington, Delaware. For those of us like myself born to immigrant parents, it’s a way for us to imagine what our parents must have been like as teenagers and young adults. We see the lack of social mobility, the poverty, and the importance of family, whether in regard to parents or siblings. Life was hard in these small villages, but there was romance and besides which our parents were young, healthy, and full of hope.

The second novel, The Saint of Lost Things, published in 2005, has the Grasso family settled in Wilmington’s Little Italy. Like other immigrants, whether in the U.S., Argentina, or Canada, the Italians attempted as best as they could to recreate a little piece of home within certain geographic limits. This allowed them to have their bakeries, grocery stores, and cafes, but it also meant a certain distrust of “the other”, those other people with strange and unfamiliar ways. Castellani describes the struggles and the blue collar jobs they occupied. But he also brings to life the card and bocce games, not to mention feasts and great dinners. These were communities where people knew their next door neighbours, and where most people travelled by bus. A car was a luxury and suburbia with its very private neighbourhoods was just getting started. The second novel has Antonio Grasso, the family patriarch, start the Al Di La restaurant with his brother Mario. He leaves a secure but dead end job to do so. The restaurant does well, and before you know it the family leaves for the leafy suburbs of Wilmington.

“All This Talk of Love”, published in 2013, has the Grasso family living in the suburbs, along with other hyphenated Americans, like the Irish and the Poles. For Antonio and his wife, Maddelena, suburbia is both comforting and somewhat strange. Gone are all the Italian institutions. So they drive back to the old neighbourhood for whatever Italian produce they need. But suddenly the old neighbourhood looks strangely unfamiliar to Antonio. The Italians are gone and replaced by “the other”. By this time, Prima, their only daughter, is happily married to Tom Buckley, whose Irish descendants have been in America since the early 19th century. But he’s Catholic and like many non-Italians who marry into our tribe he immediately becomes assimilated. What’s not to like? The In-Laws are totally dedicated to their grandchildren and they treat him like Royalty despite all the teasing. Prima and Tom have several children, and one of them, Ryan Buckley, is chosen by Antonio to be the future owner of the AL Di La restaurant. Like most grandchildren of Italian immigrants, Ryan doesn’t speak a word of Italian but he retains his grandparents’ better qualities. He understands the concept of “la bella figura” without really understanding it, and Antonio believes he’s the most qualified member of his family to honour the restaurant’s traditions and reputation.

But I’m jumping ahead. Antonio and Maria Grasso had three children: Tony, Prima, and Frankie. Tony we only know of from recollections, his misfortune having been to be born with a certain “condition” which his parents are not able to accept until it’s too late. Prima marries Tom Buckley and they go on to have a family of their own. All their boys are solidly All-American types. By this time the Italian fabric of the Grasso family has become almost totally Americanized, as happens to most grandchildren of immigrants. But by far the most interesting of the three is Frankie, whose valiantly attempting to finish his PHD at a Boston area University. Frankie is the most mysterious of the three to his parents. He’s in his late twenties and he’s not yet finished school, married or even dating. They’re proud of his inclination towards higher education, but they don’t really understand what he’s training for. Will he be assured of a job once he’s finished? Will he get a job in Wilmington and eventually get married? Is he eating and taking care of himself? Boston to the Grassos might as well be in another country. They communicate regularly by telephone, each conversation as if the first in months. It almost seems like a state affair! But hearing his voice assures his parents that all is well. Of course they’re not aware that he’s sleeping with the very Waspish Professor Birch who can at times come across as patronizing.

So why should this wonderful trilogy be read? We live in an age where millions of people around the world are emigrating in search, like the Grassos, of a better life. There’s no melodrama in these novels and the Mother country is treated for what it was: a beautiful place that had personal romance, mystery, and hardships. It reminds us of where so many of us come from without glorifying the Old Country. We see the choices that so many immigrants continue to make. Castellani gives these people context and in so doing renders them more human. These immigrants are seen for what they were and continue to be: naïve but incredibly brave with dreams and aspirations. Castellani does not go into outlining the great achievements immigrants have given their adopted countries. But we can with a little bit of imagination imagine them building the Brooklyn Bridge and New York’s subway system.

And lastly, there’s a selfish reason for reading this. For those of us like Frankie Grasso lucky enough to be born in two worlds, it allows us to reminisce about those great Sunday meals which seem like a million years ago. They bring to mind animated conversations where there was never even the remotest chance of some mutual understanding. But so what? Better to have a little bit of conflict and at least know where you come from. Total harmony can be both boring and uninspiring.

Of course no Hollywood Producer will ever likely bring these pages to the Silver Screen. There’s none of the violence so often associated with immigrant life. The stories are also complex and too real. Absent is any sense of persecution. Nor is this a rags to riches story. What you get instead is a moving story of simple people trying to make the best of it. This trilogy should be read by future generations seeking to attain a truer understanding of the immigrant experience.

North American Mayors Behaving Badly – By Philip Petraglia

In previous articles I discussed the growing importance of cities in human civilization. Not only is 50% of the planet’s population living in urban areas, but that rate is expected to rise to 75% by the end of this century. Cities are the engines of our economy, whether in the West or in much of the developing world, including China and India. So what are we to make of the current scandal in Toronto involving the city’s mayor, Rob Ford, accused of smoking crack cocaine? This is a charge he repeatedly denied until the police commissioner released film showing the mayor coming out of a known crack house. Ford’s defence was ingenious. He simply pushed it aside and informed his citizens that it probably occurred during one of his drunken stupors. Regardless of whether it’s the BBC or CNN, the foreign media is having a field day, all at the expense of Toronto’s reputation. The mayor of Canada’s largest city is single handily trying to destroy Canada’s reputation as a first rate country run by competent politicians.

Not to be outdone by its rival down from the 401, the City of Montreal has its own allegedly crooked mayors to deal with, starting with Gerald Tremblay, mayor of Canada’s second largest city from 2002-2012. It was revealed in October 2012 before a special commission appointed to study how City contracts are awarded that the mayor’s party received money from Mafia-linked interests in return for lucrative sewage contracts. Worse still, it’s alleged the mayor knew of these ties but simply chose to ignore them. And how did the mayor respond? He looked at the Fight or Flight option and decided to resign and disappear from the public view. His successor, Michael Applebaum, was then voted in by the city’s councillors (November 2012) on an interim basis, and would become the first Anglophone mayor since 1912. Interim is better than nothing, but this too was asking too much of the real estate developer. He was arrested on June 17, 2013 by police and now faces 14 charges including fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust, and corruption. Most of the charges stem from real estate dealings between 2006-2011 when Applebaum was borough major.

But big city mayors are not the only urbanites behaving badly. There’s the case of Gilles Vaillancourt, Mayor of Laval from 1989-2012, Canada’s thirteenth largest city with a population of slightly over 400,000, who was forced to resign on November 9, 2012 amid rumors and allegations of having ties to organized crime . He currently faces charges of gangsterism.

The U.S. of course has its own share of big city majors out of control, starting with Bob Filner, mayor of San Diego from December 2012 until August 2013. He would eventually resign over allegations of sexually harassing female employees in his office. Other notables include Kwame Kilpatrick, mayor of Detroit from 2002-2008, who resigned after being charged with eight felony counts that included perjury, misconduct in office, and obstruction of justice. He would go on to serve 120 days in jail and pay a heavy fine besides losing his pension.

So there you have it. We live in an age where mayors from both Canada and the United States are bringing dispute to their office. Why should this matter to citizens? For starters mayors are like ambassadors for their cities. This is especially important in an age of increasing competition between cities as trade and commerce goes global. The out-going mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, said so himself in regard to London. His fear is that London will one day supersede the Big Apple as the world’s financial capital. Think New York City, and competent mayors like Fiorello LaGuardia, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg come to mind. Bad ones like John Lindsay who almost bankrupted the city also come to mind.

A great mayor is like a lightening-rod serving to direct a city’s energy and policies in the right direction. Montreal today suffers from infrastructure problems. Pot holes, a week public transportation system, and rotting pipes underneath the city all go back to Mayor Jean Drapeau’s obsession with putting Montreal on the map. What citizens got was more than a billion dollars in debt. Drapeau’s obsession was not with doing the nuts and bolts of repairing and maintaining the city’s infrastructure, but with bringing glory to the city. Cities like San Francisco and Portland (Oregon) have managed to gain an international reputation without hosting costly events, but this is something mayors lacking in good sense don’t understand.

But probably our biggest concern should be with what this says about the future. Cities are growing at a rate where they are now overshadowing their rural areas. How cities are managed will have to change to keep up with this reality. Mayors must be given more power if cities are to be administered effectively. This means that both state (provincial) and federal governments must eventually transfer power to the cities, which could one day come to resemble city states minus armies and ambassadors. But this won’t happen if cities keep voting in office politicians who are either corrupt or morally challenged.

And this brings me to my next point. For some reason cities attract a certain type of candidate for mayor. Except for a few notables like Bloomberg and Giuliani in New York, they tend to attract intellectual lightweights and candidates lacking in vision and purpose. Perhaps this is because mayors are seen as being responsible for administering a city’s basic needs, like collecting the garbage and making sure police services are rendered efficiently and fairly. But providing basic needs are not to be sneered at, In addition, cities won’t be given more power if citizens keep voting in office politicians like Rob Ford.

In Canada we know that cities are created by the provinces. Over 50% of Canada’s population lives in the country’s ten largest urban areas. One can imagine the provinces transferring more taxation powers to these urban centers. For example, Canada’s cities may one day be permitted to keep a percentage of sales taxes collected in its territories, or even a percentage of income tax paid by its residents. But this won’t happen if mayors are seen as corrupt or ethically challenged politicians who can’t be taken seriously.

A Tale Of Two Cities – By Philip Petraglia

My wife and I moved from Montreal to Victoria about four years ago. People move for all sorts of reasons. It can be related to work, family, lifestyle; the reasons are endless. Our friends here in Victoria sometimes ask us whether we miss the city my wife and I were raised in. Of course we miss our friends and family. But to be perfectly honest, neither of us really miss a city we both outgrew.

Montreal is one of those places you should visit in the summer. From the International Jazz Festival to the Just for Laughs, there are plenty of free outdoor activities to take in. Plus there’s all the people watching that folks from Montreal are famous for. It seems like the city leads the world in gawking. I’m not sure that’s a good thing but it’s a reality that many visitors can attest to. Autumn is another great time to visit, what with the leaves changing colour and the smell of winter in the air. Mount-Royal is especially a great place to take in the colours. No need to head for the Laurentians or the Eastern Townships. You can even get there by bus if you don’t like to walk. As for winter, that’s something both my wife and I don’t miss. Minus 10 temperatures with lots of humidity can be pretty unbearable. It’s especially bad in the morning when you’re heading off to work. But as a child, winter was probably my favourite season. The more snow the better!

Montreal has as many people know some pretty good restaurants. But it’s not the French inspired restaurants that stand out for me. The Italian bakeries and cafes in the North End of the city, Portuguese restaurants on The Main (St-Laurent Boulevard) and Jewish Delis all attest to the city’s cosmopolitan vibrancy. Most hipsters and foodies probably prefer the Plateau Mont-Royal, a section of Montreal that was once home to much of the city’s French Canadian working class. But something happened a few decades ago, and now it’s become the hip place to live and be seen in. Call it gentrification run amok or of you like, the francophone version of Greenwich Village.

Like most cities, Montreal has its share of walkable neighbourhoods. One of my favourites is in the Jean-Talon Market area, adjacent to Little Italy, which these days is anything but Italian, as the old inhabitants fled to the suburbs starting in the late seventies. Why live in a walkable but congested neighbourhood when you buy a spacious bungalow in the suburbs? As for Little Italy, it’s become more ethnically diverse, with lots of young people crammed into small apartments, which get to think of it, is how lots of young people live in the Plateau. But this part of Montreal hasn’t lost its working class or ethnic flavour, and Jean-Talon market is a delight to visit on Saturdays. The prices have changed, and the farmers selling their produce don’t look like farmers, but it’s still a nice experience.

What stood out for me living there was the bilingual orientation of the city. Make no mistake of it, though. It remains a primarily French speaking city, as it should be, Canada is the richer for it, but geography is king, and no one can pretend the city is in France. Besides which, the cuisine is actually better and more interesting in Montreal than in Paris!

So what does Victoria having going for it? For starters, it usually takes 10 minutes by car to get from Point A to Point B. So we usually just walk. Montreal in contrast always seemed to take an hour either because of the bad traffic or the crater size potholes. And there’s the weather. We hardly see snow here, and as for the rain, it’s a lot more manageable than five feet of snow. But don’t confuse us with Vancouver where they get real rain. The great thing about Victoria is you really don’t need winter clothing, a sort of strange phenomenon for Canada. In fact, you don’t even need summer clothing! This city has two seasons: a variation of either autumn or spring depending on the time of year. This would probably depress a lot of people, and also helps explains why we have so many cafes in this city.

What Victoria doesn’t have are affordable restaurants. The city’s restaurants are good but missing are the small eateries where one can get a great falafel for 5 or 6 dollars. The complaint I sometimes hear from merchants are that commercial rents are high. Maybe what the city needs are more food carts. We can also take a page out of Portland’s (Oregon) food scene where a neighbourhood adjacent to downtown is home to small mini trailers transformed into restaurants. The prices and ethnic varieties make for an interesting culinary experience. There’s no place to sit so customers just take their food and walk around, taking in the sights. The city can also give out more permits for food trucks, one of Anthony Bourdain’s favourite ways of dining out! It’s a question of the city using more imagination in determining how food gets to the general public. I’m sure both Thomas Keller and Jamie Oliver would agree!

But we have great geography in this city. We can be in Vancouver in slightly less than four hours, and there’s a direct ferry link between Victoria harbour and Seattle harbour that connects these two contrasting cities in less than three hours. The other advantage is our location on Vancouver Island, one of North America’s gems, where you can be on a wonderful nature trail in 30 minutes. The Juan de Fuca Marine Trail is also about an hour away. Compare this with Montreal. One hour by car gets you to the Laurentians, a region taken over by the Velcro crowd a few decades ago. And the traffic coming back to Montreal Sunday evenings can be worse than rush hour traffic. In contrast, a drive back from Juan de Fuca is as pleasant as a Sunday drive in the country! And there’s one more nature tip you should all remember. The region around Victoria is dotted with countless hiking trails but the local citizenry isn’t anywhere to be seen! It seems like we have these magnificent trails to ourselves.

Montreal’s population if you include the metropolitan area is close to 4 million. Victoria’s population is around 350,000 if you include the suburbs. Each city is great in its own way. So maybe it’s not so much about the city as it is about ourselves and what we’re looking for at a particular time in our lives. I do know one thing though. Growing up in Montreal allowed me to learn three languages. And that’s something few cities offer.

The Future of International Relations – By Philip Petraglia

The current issue confronting the United States and its allies over spying raises some important issues for the future of international relations. Political Scientists and journalists alike are asking what propelled the U.S. to tap into the personal phone of a staunch ally like Angela Merkel. Not only is she staunchly pro- American, she also maintains great personal relations with President Obama. To make matters worse, the U.S. is also accused of spying on Presidents Francois Holland of France, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil. All have expressed outrage and shock that a progressive president like Barrack Obama would ever permit something like this to go on. Why spy on allies you trade and maintain friendly relations with?

What’s worth noting is that no one is calling this an irreparable crisis. The general public doesn’t really care, and experts maintain that everyone does it, in one form or another. The Americans, they add, are just better at it owing to experience and greater resources. Besides which, we live in a POST 9/11 world and America’s goal in spying is primarily to defend itself against terrorism.

So what does this international espionage really tell us? What has the media missed? For starters, this is not so much a crisis as an indicator of things to come. No irreparable damage has been done, trade goes on, countries collaborate to fight international crime , NATO remains intact, and diplomatic relations go on. But there are serious changes taking place with regard to how the United States views relations with its allies.

These changes have been going on since the end of the cold war. The collapse of the Soviet Union means we no longer live in a world where countries feel obliged to ally themselves with one of two superpowers. A new reality has emerged with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Countries now feel free to pursue their national interests regardless of whether it offends their allies, especially the U.S. This no doubt is something the U.S. understands.

Of course there are many reasons for countries to cooperate, whether it be in regard to fighting global warming, international money laundering, terrorism, trade barriers, drug trafficking, or illegal immigration. The fact that countries spy on one another does not mean that countries will stop cooperating on these pressing issues. But countries do have interests and concerns that are not equally shared by allies. Disputes will arise, and countries, especially vulnerable ones, will likely have to re-evaluate their relations with one another.

The U.S. is a case in point. It feels in many ways vulnerable, especially since 9/11. Those two planes crashing into the World Trade Center took place on U.S. soil, in America’s biggest city. Europeans probably fail to understand how much this has affected American anxieties over more terrorist attacks. These attacks are something European nations don’t have to concern themselves with, at least not to the degree the U.S. does. But it doesn’t end there. Americans and Europeans don’t necessarily agree on a host of other issues, from global warming to whether genetically modified labels should be placed on food products. The U.S. is basically concerned that reliable allies may no longer tow the U.S. line on important issues. Fear breeds insecurity which in turn leads a powerful country like the U.S. to spy on its allies.

Expect U.S. relations to also change with non-European countries now that we’re living in a post 9/11 world. Saudi Arabia is a case in point. The US has always had special relations with the Gulf Kingdom. America needs its oil and the Saudis are happy to oblige so long as Washington does not raise human rights issues with regard to the treatment of women and religious minorities, like the Shias, who make up 15% of the Kingdom’s population. Lately however Saudi rulers have voiced their displeasure at America’s willingness to pursue friendlier relations with Iran, a predominantly Shia state. As Vali Nasr’s’s fine book “The Shia Revival” (published in 2007) illustrates, the most dangerous conflict in the Middle East is not between the Jewish state and its neighbours but between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. We see this clearly in Syria, with Iran backing the Assad Regime (Alawites see themselves as an offshoot of the Shia branch), and Saudi Arabia, which is backing the Islamic rebels fighting the Alawite dominated regime in Damascus. The Saudis clearly do not appreciate its ally (U.S.) and major trading partner backing a religious foe, especially as Saudi Arabia and Iran fight to dominate the Middle East. The Saudis are also alarmed by what’s transpiring in Iraq, where the Shias were able to take control of the government once Iraq’s Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein, was overturned and eventually killed with the help of U.S. intervention. The Saudis have, in addition, a Shia minority of its own to worry about, and the fear is Shia victories will embolden Saudi Shias to seek a state of their own, something the Saudis would never accept owing to the presence of Shia communities in Saudi Arabia’s oil regions.

Add to this the U.S. goal of becoming energy independent through hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and development of its own gas reserves, and you have a worried Saudi Arabia asking itself how reliable an ally America is. Lastly, there’s America’s concern at the Kingdom’s spread of militant and conservative Islam (Whahhabism) to volatile regions of the world like Pakistan, which the US. believes fosters both terrorism against the West and the denial of basic human rights in regions where this ultra- conservative branch of Sunni Islam takes root. It should come as no surprise then if we eventually learn that the U.S. has also been spying on a staunch ally like Saudi Arabia.

Israel is another country that seems worried by America’s attitude towards a more open Iran. It’s no secret that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Barrack Obama don’t get along. The Israelis are beginning to question America’s commitment to Israeli security, especially now that the Cold War is over and that the Russians are no longer a major player in the region like they were during the Cold War.

These are two classic examples of shifting changes in geopolitics. But countries also spy for other reasons. These include: determining how solid regimes are, whether allies can be trusted, and in the case of the U.S., trying to understand where allies stand with regard to specific U.S. policies. In the end, countries will continue to spy one another. The only question remains how far they are willing to go.