Barbwire by Barbano: Kate Smith & Lady Gaga

   Everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
   Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
   Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
   That's how it goes. Everybody knows...
Everybody knows the scene is dead
   But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
   What everybody knows...
   Everybody talking to their pockets.
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
   and a long red rose.
   Everybody knows. Everybody knows.
That's how it goes. Everybody knows.

— Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016

I hope you understand I just had to go back to the island.
— Leon Russell, 1942-2016

2017 Nevada Press Association first-place award winner

Kate Smith & Lady Gaga
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 2-14-2017 Sparks Tribune / Expansions in blue / Updated 2-16, 2-17, 2-21 & 10-4-2017, 6-1-2019

Feliz al dia de Santo Valentino

When Lady Gaga opened her Super Bowl halftime extravaganza with Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," I got up to make a sandwich.

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Be well. Raise hell.

Andrew

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The New York City Italiana superstar, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, had no idea of the pain that song evoked in my family.

My father arrived at Ellis Island from Italy just a few years after Berlin who "was put in a pen with his brother and five sisters until immigration officials declared them fit to be allowed into the city," according to the BBC.

Piling irony on irony, Berlin donated millions in GBA royalties to the Boy Scouts who today are grudgingly emerging from a century of bigotry. (id)

The legendary composer (born Israel Isidore Baline in Imperial Russia) gave "God Bless America" to songstress Kate Smith who made it her signature hit.

Growing up as the son and grandson of Italian immigrant farm workers in Fresno, California, I was told repeatedly and passionately about Kate Smith supporting internment of Italian-Americans in WW2 concentration camps.

Like Japanese-Americans, my family would have lost everything earned after decades in the fields. My father and mother likely would never have married.

So an Italian girl singing Kate Smith's goldest oldie sent me to the kitchen.

"During World War II, 600,000 undocumented Italian immigrants in the United States were deemed 'enemy aliens' and detained, relocated, stripped of their property or placed under curfew. A couple hundred were even locked in internment camps," the San Francisco Chronicle reported in the emotional aftermath of 9/11/2001.

"Ironically, 500,000 Italian Americans were serving in the U.S. armed forces at the time of the crackdown — the largest ethnic group in the military. One serviceman returned from the war to find his family's home boarded up. One woman received an evacuation order the day after she learned her son and her nephew in the U.S. military had been killed at Pearl Harbor," the Chronicle noted.

Baseball Hall-of-Famer Joe DiMaggio's father lost his job on a fishing boat. Italians were subjected to every indignity short of being forced to wear the equivalent of a yellow Star of David.

A fraudulent threat assessment by some racist general caused The American Century's most shameful chapter.

Because of the aggressive deportation policies of our first black president, the average immigrant concentration camp today holds 41,000 prisoners for years on end. Half a million await their day in court in 2017. Tsar Trump has a huge expulsion record (2.4 million) to break. (Harper's Magazine, Feb. 2017, page 49)

Piling irony on irony, some African deportees are sent to countries where they are not citizens despite hard evidence to the contrary. (id)

Sparks' Kate Smith Elementary School opened in 1963. She was a product of her times. [CORRECTION BELOW.]

Now that storm troopers from an increasingly authoritarian government are indiscriminately rounding up immigrants, it's time to remember that it can indeed happen here.

It already has, in the United States of America, with liberty and justice for some.

Dio benedica l'America.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
______________
Andrew Barbano is a 48-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us> Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since 1988.

During World War II, the U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security
By David A. Taylor / Smithsonian.com 2-7-2017
"By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans. 'There’s no doubt those ideas were still around in 1942.' ”

CORRECTION FROM THE 5-22-2019 BARBWIRE: CROW DEPT. When I make a mistake, I own it and eat it. Two local librarians informed me last week that Sparks' Kate Smith Elementary School was not named for singer Kate (Katherine Elizabeth) Smith of "God Bless America" fame, just defrocked by the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers for recently revealed racist recordings. The longtime Sparks school was named for local educator Kate M. Smith. I apologize and sincerely regret my error. Mea maxima culpa.

ONLINE EXTRAS —>

END OF TIMES SURVIVAL KIT. Defend yourself with humorous or humorless but always-peerless predictions for 2017 by subscribing to the Barbwire Confidential News Service.

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THE GOOD DON. Nominations are afoot for the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame.

Time to ramp up for world-famous Tribune photographer Don Dondero. Details at the Barbwire.US web edition.

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TOMORROW'S NEWS TODAY: FEEL UP YOUR FIRE METER. The Reno Gazette-Journal did big spreads on three consecutive Sundays (Sept. 14, Sept. 21 and Sept. 28, 2014) on NV Energy smart meter fires. Welcome aboard. Barbwire readers were two years ahead on the fire meter issue. (Touch a Smart Meter, Go to Jail — 11 October 2012)

ANTE INTO THE GAME: Support the new season of Barbwire.TV by putting your money where my mouth is. A thousand thanks to those who keep sending show suggestions.

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