Mrs. Cuomo, you of all people, who faced anti-Italian discrimination and had to change your name from the Italian “Mattia” to “Matilda,” must tell your sons to get off the public stage.
They are destroying the positive image of Italian-Americans that you and your late husband Mario, and thousands of other Italian immigrant families, strove to achieve.
Italians were the earliest explorers—Colombo, Caboto, and Vespucci led the transoceanic voyages of discovery. At the time of the American Revolution, Fillipo Mazzei established the first commercial vineyard in America, provided political inspiration to his friend Thomas Jefferson, and then acted as a secret agent, shipping arms from Europe back to Virginia.
These people with vowels at the end of their names helped shape what would become the United States.
From the Civil War through today’s war in Afghanistan, 28 Italian-Americans earned the Medal of Honor, most of them posthumously, in defense of the United States.
Italian-Americans in every field have helped the United States move ahead.
Banker Amadeo Giannini helped San Francisco emerge from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire, helped immigrants who could not get credit with handshake loans, and even helped a guy named Walt Disney make “Snow White.”
Astronaut Wally Schirra shot down two MiGs in the Korean War and then went on to be the only astronaut to fly in all three initial U.S. space efforts: Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
Charles Poletti of New York was the first Italian-American governor in the United States. John Pastore of Rhode Island was the first Italian-American U.S. senator.
The first Italian-American Mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, was also one of the founders of the U.S. Air Force. As a young U.S. Army major in Italy in World War I, LaGuardia bought Caproni bombers and trained Army and Navy pilots to fly them. Then his boys flew the first strategic bombing attacks across the Dolomites, striking Austrian industry. This was the precursor of the U.S. 8th and 15th Air Forces’ relentless onslaught against Nazi Germany, as well as General Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command and today’s U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.
This hard-won Italian-American legacy, earned in the face of genuine physical persecution and in spite of Hollywood’s relentless portrayal of Italians as mafiosi, is now circling the drain because of the excesses of your high-profile sons!
It seems that your son Andrew is a scostumato who can not keep his hands off women while in a position of power and public trust. Your parents would have said, Mosse di mani sono mosse di Villani. “Moves of the hands are the moves of villains.”
What would your husband have said if his faulty decisions had resulted in hundreds or thousands of COVID deaths? Infamia!
Your younger son Christopher is a bucciardo and imbrolione. He was two-faced about his COVID infection, acted like a cafone from “Jersey Shore” at a Long Island bar, and now hides when publicity is bad.
Are you proud of them still? Especially Chris, who dragged you on-air and made you a CNN-brand international public figure?
Talk to your sons, Mrs. Cuomo. Please. They are making Italian-Americans imbarazzati.