Not Fredo Key.

Of course I dislike the fact that the weakest, stupidest character in the Godfather movies is named Fred, and now the dumbest idiot in TV news has been named for him as well. It's another black eye for Freds.

I don't wish to recount the whole Fredo incident, where CNN host Chris Cuomo threatened violence against a live troll who used the term "Fredo" toward him as an insult. You've probably heard the story, wondered why a TV personality who supports a brutish masked gang can't handle a little name-calling. But I'm just looking at the cultural issues.

The question that struck some people who were not Chris Cuomo's supporters is whether using the term "Fredo" is ethnic slur on Italians. At first, I said no. After all, George W. Bush was tagged as the Fredo of the Bush family, when people thought his dad, who couldn't beat a womanizing goober for reelection, was the Don, and Jeb, who looked hapless and anti-Republican in a national campaign, was the Michael. So no, the term is used to insult non-Italians too.

Then again, it does specifically attack a character who was the dumbest brother in an Italian family, and specifically a crooked Italian family. Which would mean that calling Chris Cuomo "Fredo" is like calling him not just an idiot, but the idiot in a family of ruthless Italian criminals. I suppose that's what he was trying to say when he wanted to make it into a racial epithet (although as far as I know, "Italian" is not a race). It would make his late father, Mario, the former governor of New York, into the Don, and his brother Andrew, the current governor of New York, into the Michael. And all of them into thugs. I don't really think that the Cuomo political family are more (or that much more) crooked than any other New York political family, but that is an exceptionally low bar for good behavior.

Readers of this blog may know that I have nothing but contempt for Andrew, a wicked, wicked man who thinks he is some kind of hero, and who seriously may have been the one person most responsible for the world economic crisis of the late 2000s. But put him aside for now -- please. The question is, should any Italian be angry at being compared to the Corleones? And this is where it gets sticky.

I would say that Godfather references are a slur on Italians, except for one thing: I grew up in working-class New York City surrounded by Italians, going to a high school dominated by Italians, and they almost universally loved the Godfather movies, had no problem with organized crime in the city, and did things like sell illegal fireworks (through order forms) and run betting slips right in school. It wasn't the Irish kids, the Jewish kids, or the approximately four black kids doing these things.

Was this all of the Italians I knew? Of course not. One of my best friends was an Italian nerd who had nothing to do with anything illicit and thought the Godfather was operatic nonsense. But I didn't know a single one of them to say anything like Gee, those mob movies are painting us in a bad light. The ones who expressed an opinion liked that the films made Italian people looked scary, liked looking powerful. It was certainly better than looking like Hitler's Fredo during World War II.

That's why Goodfellas was to me a great curative -- because it showed what low, mean, often psychotic creeps mobsters are, and how they completely ruin the lives of innocent people who get in their way. All that honor and family bull from the Corleones was nowhere to be seen. At its heart it is the anti-Godfather, and good for it. Were it taken seriously, and the facts behind the story grasped, it would do to mobsters what the Superman radio show did to the Klan -- make it clear that being involved in these things was for creeps and losers. It might also get the point across to people that lawlessness results in what Richard Fernandez recently called "a low-trust society where nobody can rely on the formal rules and reliance is placed on nepotism, tribalism, personal loyalty, and threats to transact business at all."

There is one important thing that Godfather II and Goodfellas have in common: Fredo would have gotten murdered in both of them for being an idiot. Stupid is as stupid does, as another nineties movie taught us.

(In a side note, John Cazale, who played Fredo Corleone, only made five feature films in his short life, and in back-to-back years his character gets shot to death while doing things according to Al Pacino's plans. Weird.)