Voting for the Vowels

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Voting this year is the easiest it’s ever been.

In all of the preceding years, I would study the positions of candidates, read the opinions of trusted sources about the candidates, and listen to debates between candidates, if they were truly debates and not just soundbites and insults.

Now I simply vote for candidates who have an “i” on the end of their surname, like the “i” at the end of my last name. This saves a lot of time.

The Arts & Entertainment (A&E) network taught me this time-saving technique. It frequently runs “Voices Magnified” spots, which are a way of the network demonstrating how virtuous, enlightened and open-minded it is. The spots are based on the widespread specious premise in the media, in education, and in other institutions that certain disadvantaged minority groups don’t have a voice in America and need to be pandered to by paternalists.

Some disadvantaged groups are excluded from this inclusivity. There are never any A&E spots, for example, that feature an unemployed Scots-Irish coal miner in West Virginia who has black lung disease and lives in poverty in a hollow in a rundown shack with his wife and five kids. Wrong race, wrong ethnicity, wrong gender, wrong sexual orientation, wrong intersectionality, wrong politics.

In keeping with its specious premise, A&E has been running a spot that features a young woman whose off-white pigmentation suggests that she could be Sicilian, Middle Eastern, Mexican, a member of the Cantoni clan, or some other ethnocultural group from a southern clime. The mystery of her group identity is solved when she speaks in a heavy Spanish accent. She says: “As a Latino, we need more people who look like me to be elected to office.”

My poor immigrant grandparents and my working-class parents would’ve been insulted if they had been stereotyped and pandered to like that. They would characterize fellow Italians who resisted assimilation as looking and sounding like they “just came off the boat.”

It’s embarrassing to admit that my forebears were Neanderthals in need of DEI training. But it wasn’t their fault. You see, it’s a scientific fact that about three percent of the Italian genome is comprised of Neanderthal genes.

Anyway, A&E is apparently unaware that Latinos are not monolithic or homogeneous. They could have ancestral roots in any of the following countries:

Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Saint-Barthélemy, or Saint-Martin

Latinos can also have any of the following racial/ethnic ancestry:

Amerindian, Black, Mestizo, Mulatto, Zambo, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, British, Greek, Polish, Ukrainian, Croat, Irish, Jewish, Armenian, Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian (Source: Wikipedia)

On a personal note, as a result of the great Italian diaspora, there are tens of millions of people of Italian ancestry in Latin America, especially in Argentina. That raises the question of whether a Cantoni of Argentinian nationality is a Latino or an Italian.

Americans have been led to believe that the official racial/ethnic categories parroted with religious fervor by government, media, universities, K-12 schools, corporations, and DEI apparatchiks are monolithic, homogeneous, discrete, and without any crossover. I’m speaking of these seven categories: White, Black, Hispanic (or Latino), Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Middle Eastern.

This reflects mass indoctrination, mass propaganda, and mass ignorance.

Not one to break from the herd and think for myself, I followed identity politics in completing my mail-in ballot. My votes went to politicians with an “i” at the end of their name. There were two on my ballot: a guy named Davoli (rhymes with “ravioli”) running for a local school board, and Rep. Ciscomani, who is running in my Arizona district for reelection to the US House.

Ciscomani’s first name of Juan gave me pause. He could be Italian, or Latino, or both. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I assumed he’s the former.

Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.

About Craig J. Cantoni 56 Articles
Community Activist Craig Cantoni strategizes on ways to make Tucson a better to live, work and play.

2 Comments

  1. Hey fella, sounds like you’re against identity politics but don’t have the guts to vote for Trump and Kari Lake. Grow a pair or don’t whine when they come for you because you didn’t stand up when you had the chance.

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