Lost in Translation

As for the main thrust of the Vento Canon — that people need to “follow the rules” — Vitiello says the “rules” are so arcane that basically no one can get in legally anymore without waiting for a dozen years, which only fuels the desperation that leads people to hide in car trunks or cross rivers in the dead of night. “If the current rules were in effect when the Irish came here, we wouldn’t get in, either,” adds Kenney. “With the quotas and rules in effect, the Italians — none of us would have gotten in. And I assure you that the Irish and the Italians and the other Western Europeans who came here in waves would have been sneaking in, and their families would have been hiding them and taking care of them.”

Perhaps the biggest lesson to come out of the Geno’s brouhaha is the sobering confirmation of just how hardened our politics have become, how lethally Red State and Blue State, so that everything — from the Iraq war to health-care reform to whether Joey Vento has a right to hang his sign — is a furious battle. Unfortunately, it’s not a battle of ideas, but a battle of sound bites and suffering, of who can make the other side more miserable. And in the end, what does that get you?

Because it’s easy to dismiss Joey Vento and his ilk as nothing but racists and classists, people who want to deny a new generation of immigrants the same opportunities their own ancestors got. But the Joey Ventos of the world have something to say that’s worth hearing, even if it’s uncomfortable or ineloquent. They worry that the America they love is slowly vanishing, that their values, symbolized in the ties that bind us together as a country — the national anthem, pledging allegiance to the flag, paying our taxes, voting in elections, speaking English — are now viewed almost dismissively, quaint relics more suited to community-theater productions of The Music Man. So how do you stand by and watch the America you love slowly wither away? Don’t you have a right — an obligation — to say something? To fight for it? In the end, that’s Joey’s appeal. He is, in his hard-edged, you-gotta-listen-to-me style, the perfect representative to fight another kind of classism: The world he came from and knows so well is no longer being heard.

There is no doubt that Joey Vento is, in many permutations of the phrase, a Good Man. A few years ago, the annual Padre Pio festival was running into financial difficulties; Joey called the pastor, Father Gary Pacitti, and ponied up $18,000 to pay for it. Twice — once for the Daniel Faulkner Fund, which pays school tuition for the children of murder victims, and once for the 9/11 victims fund — Joey donated several nights’ receipts, more than $180,000 total. After Jill Porter wrote a Daily News column in May about a 14-year-old girl who lost her mother in a fire, Joey wrote the girl a check for $5,000. “It really hurts to hear the bad rap he’s gotten in the press,” Pacitti says, adding that when the church’s snowplow was stolen, Joey ponied up $3,000 for a new one. “You know what? He’s an amazing guy.”

Such acts of kindness — along with a vocal posse of supporters — will no doubt be the centerpiece of the Vento defense if and when he faces the Commission on Human Relations. One of the most interesting things to come out of all this is the fact that the complaint in question was generated from within the CHR — no customer or potential customer has stepped forward to protest the sign. When I ask Jack Fingerman, the CHR’s spokesman, who on the board initiated the complaint, he stammers: “I … I don’t … I’m not going to get into that. That’s the commission itself.” A hearing originally slated for late September was postponed.