I love New York Magazine. The new one came today with our Rudy on the cover, and Chris Smith unraveling the myth that is 9-11 hero, Rudy. And though it seems like its fish-barrel time, this stuff bears repeating to anyone out there who doesn't know this all by heart already. I can't imagine how many more people that old Rudy can piss off, but he seems to have nailed down every single last one of the 8-10 million New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers out here, creating more and more material all the time,and Leaving New York Magazine's editorial board no choice but to put him on the cover every other month in terms only as damning as his actions. But then, its really not hard to damn Rudy when you know him like we do.

And really, how much better can it get than: "Rudy has Seen the Enemy and He...is Us," "Rudy Vs. NY," and "Rudy is Running Against the City he Claims to have Saved. He Knows better. So do We." The banner headlines of the piece, quite truthfully, say that the only way for Rudy to fully be the hero that he needs to be in order to win the republican nomination, is to demonize the NYC that was before he became mayor. It was one thing, living through what we lived through after he came to power, to hear his laughable claims, and imagine how fun it would be when the tape started to roll on a tearful Donna Hanover out front of Gracie Mansion, having just found out that he was leaving her on TV, but its quite another when he needs to paint our city and us, as some sort of depraved animals hanging out in sex shops and smoking our crack pipes in alleys. Remember, it was Rudy who was schtupping his Goomah on our dime, the All Spin Zone has the details here....and it must be nice to have a police escort out to the Hamptons, for Christ' sake...that is the most expensive and public place around and he boldly put the tab on revolving city agencies, including an agency for the disabled; has he no shame? No...the answer is NO!

...but the condescending attitude is completely familiar to any New Yorker. The city in the nineties was far from perfect. But were we really living in the hellhole of depravity and despair that Giuliani describes without ever realizing it? And was he the man who single-handedly tamed 8 million misbehaving New Yorkers, delivering us from an economic and physical nightmare?

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fitting snugly between the invocation of his September 11 heroism and his mocking of Hillary Clinton: Rudy Giuliani is the man who saved New York. His campaign TV ads are a perfect distillation of the strategy. Before Mayor Rudy, the city was a black-and-white jungle-land of sex shops, violence, and crushing taxes. After Rudy, New York is Oz: sunshine, happy young couples, and shiny gold-plated statues. The message, which Giuliani hammers in his appearances outside the city, is that he made big bad New York safe for the rest of the country. For the pitch to work, Giuliani has to demonize the city he inherited and claim all the credit for the improvements he left behind. The city itself is his original enemy.

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So far on the campaign trail, the genial Rudy has been showing his face. The city saw plenty of that other guy—the nasty, credit-hogging, conflict-addicted, wife-humiliating Rudy. The man who tried to put himself above the law and stay mayor after September 11. And we know he’s still in there.

The thing is that Rudy did clean up certain aspects of New York City that probably stayed in place due more to our firmly entrenched knee-jerk liberalism, than to what was best for regular New Yorkers. But Rudy took those problems of laxity and a need to tighten up the ship, and parlayed them into an excuse to expunge all texture and individuality, along with most of the middle class, from Manhattan, and to drive the regular folks further and further out, making the island one of rare wealth and wimpy sameness. He made the city safe for the rest of the country, as a tourist destination and an eastern arm of Disney; safe enough for just about anyone to visit without the classic fear of getting mugged on every street corner. But it was his methods that were a little more than questionable, not to mention his cronyism and his not-so-private private life.

As Mayor, Dave Dinkins, was probably not tough enough, and alot of what was going on needed some healthy adjustment. For instance, in Washington Square park, at the height of the crack epidemic, the police were instructed to only give bench warrants to the hundreds of drug dealers who boldly approached passersby. The warrants led to not much, because people didn't show up for their dates and the paperwork was out of control. The police would drive their squad cars into the park and sit there, moving the loitering crowds from one side to another, and the whole thing had a rather gauntlet-like feeling if one were, say, walking the dog or pushing the baby in the stroller. There were also cars parked every night along 8th st (where I lived on the 18th floor,) with huge speakers that, when cranked up, rattled the windows all the way up there. this went on, with the percussive bass going boom-boom-boom, until all hours of the morning, when upon going down to walk the dogs there would be stragglers urinating here and there, and every car window along Mercer street would often be broken...in a row...as the crack addicts who had little care for anything rifled through cars for anything that could be sold. I remember going round to Green street one morning and a strung out guy breaking the window of a car right in front of me. I went into the copy store and the car alarm was blaring...and no one came.

If your car got hit down there in those days, the best course of action was not to call the police, but to run east and look for your stuff laid out on blankets by the junk sellers that lined the streets of the east village in what we used to call the Real Reaganomics. It only took around 10 minutes for bikes and other goodies to end up laid out for sale. Important papers were dumped in garbage cans or dark doorways around the corner, and just running round fast enough one could probably recover the draft of the doctorate or whatever else had been stupidly left in the car. It was usually just replacing the side window that was a drag. I seem to remember that insurers wouldn't write windows into policies for cars that lived in the city, but I cant remember exactly.
Who hasn't bought a video camera box with a brick in it? I haven't, personally, but my ex-brother-in-law did when he first came to live in NYC. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you missed a tiny cultural phenomena that flickered through cities in the days before laptops and cell phones on every hip.

The crack epidemic was a huge problem and how to handle it was not to trust criminals to show up for a court date. The thing to do would have been to arrest truckloads of people over and over until they took it underground, as they tend to do in more controlled situations. The response was bound to be good, and it would look good, and I don't know why Dinkins didn't do more; were his hands tied by bureaucracy? Knowing the answers to my questions would take more time than is warranted, because it was all washed away in the flood of Rudy, who empowered the police to not only arrest the culprits, but also to bend probable cause into an art of gestures and glances, so that just about anyone could be thrown down and basically strip searched right there in Washington Square Park, (which I use as an example only because I can report first hand, having been there.) Throw in a little police brutality, of which we have heard the tales, and the drug dealers got alot more careful. They sort of moved back into the recesses and back to the project neighborhoods.

I met David Dinkins a couple of years ago at the Waldorf at a lunch for Brooklyn Law School, which alma mater he shares with my grandfather. he was quite older than I had realized he would be, and he was very soft spoken and sweet. He talked to the kids, and told us about his kids and grandkids, and how he still played tennis. I realized how much I respected him for his pure liberal vision, but that he just wasn't cut out to play the heavy, and the climate at the time in NYC was one of great frustration. Still, crime had already begun to come down by the time Dinkins was finished and he did beef up the police force. It took Rudy to take the force to another level and give them the power to enforce his ideal of the police state that he envisioned.

At the same time, Rudy was cutting welfare in whatever ways he could. The thing that worked then, and what is working now where I'm living in CT, is to make the forms and process really difficult, and as harrowing as possible. How anyone can take credit for the dropping enrollment numbers, when we all know how he did it, is beyond me. In other words, they made it so hard to get into the system that people left for other towns. With them, left some of the most interesting facets of city life, and possibly those who would be the great city artists or politicians or city workers...we sent away our greatest resource, which used to be our young people raised in a city with public education and diversity...and access to culture and experience like no other place in the world. We sent them away because Rudy thought they were unsightly in how it all looked back then. That was a choice that he made for us; as he cruelly had the cops jostle the homeless off of the heat grates all night until they went away too.

There was no problem solving in that equation. In some cases, more real than urban legend, and confirmed to me by city workers, bus tickets were bought to help in the relocation of the poor. And at the time of the great do-over of Grand Central Station, I used to go on about how the homeless who used to line the walls there with palms outstretched like some old Calcutta film, were actually ground up and put into the concrete of the new walls and tiles and floors. Who wouldn't want to have the station be as nice as it is now? But what did they do with those people in that richest of rich cities? One wonders...and I'm sure there are many answers and alot of legends. My tin foil hat theory was that unused tunnels below the subways became a teeming city of under-dwellers with full, rich lives, who only surfaced from time to time to take in some light or to get supplies. I still study the dark recesses when the train slows to rumble through an old abandoned station, thinking that I will see a family slip into the shadows.

Rudy didn't fix us in the terms that he claims. He just applied a sort of marshal law as the crack epidemic was dying a natural death, and he made it really, really hard for the poor and the lower middle class to survive in the city. He rode a wave of numbers that began in the previous administration and made it his own. He played the heavy full tilt, but what he really did was to put the city into debt while pouring money into superficial and cosmetic fixes, without doing much for the infrastructure in human or mechanical terms. He basically kicked out those that he didn't want to deal with, all the while treating us all like we were some sort of rabble, and acting himself like he was the arbiter of what was acceptable as art, culture, religion, and values. And just like the hypocrite that he is, he held himself to a completely different standard than the rest of us.

So, this is what Rudy did; and meanwhile he was busy making glaring mistakes about security and communications. How rich of a concept it is, that Rudy is a security specialist, telling large corporations and Arab governments how to stay safe. Don't they even realize the nuts and bolts of his mistakes and how bad he was at the design of the security for the people of NYC? Hell, he almost got himself killed!



The truth is that Rudy is all bluster and bullshit. He comes off like a tough guy from the neighborhood, but I know that neighborhood, I grew up there, and most of those boys get dragged off by the ear when their mother found out what they've been up to. This guy is not qualified to be president. A few months ago I wouldn't have given it a second thought but then the ugly swift-boaters slithered out to test the air and see if it was time yet, and I realized that a Hillary Clinton or pretty much anyone (if it could be done to a decorated war hero, then anyone is in danger,)could be swift-boated before the dems could even turn around to fight back, and someone like Rudy could end up as president. I can't state strongly enough how dangerous I think that would be....and I know that a huge portion of the country knows this; but its the others who are just against Hillary or who just don't think that worry me.

...from New York but not of New York....a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic town, a prosecutor not a career politician, an outer-borough Roman Catholic in a Manhattan-centric, agnostic world. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a New Yorker. In fact, many of his character traits—his anger, his blind loyalty—come straight out of the tribal culture of New York’s old neighborhoods. On the presidential-campaign trail, Giuliani defines every issue and problem facing the country—not to mention his political competitors—as “enemies.” He sees an America besieged—by illegal aliens, by liberals, but most of all by Islamic terrorists....

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If I’m president of the United States, it will be crystal clear we will not allow Iran to become a nuclear power. We will take whatever action is necessary to stop them! We will not take the military option off the table. We will not beg to negotiate with them. We’re gonna make them beg to negotiate with us!

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Giuliani is suggesting he’d clean up Islamic terrorists like so many South Bronx crack dealers. He’s repeating one of his favorite phrases, that a President Giuliani would “keep us on offense” against terrorism. But it’s the way he says it that rings suddenly loud and clear. This was the man who told President Bush he wanted to personally push the button to execute Osama bin Laden.

And that's it, right there. This man cannot go further than Iowa or maybe New Hampshire. If the American people allow this to go on much beyond that, then we will have to just realize that this isn't really America anymore; the fringe has taken over and maybe its time to make other plans....maybe Stockholm or Denmark or Canada...But, I am going to try to hold onto Chris Smith and New York Magazine for one more cycle. He says that we, especially us New Yorkers, are wise to old Rudy. But how much sway do we have when the terra talk start in earnest and people want to hear the swagger and brag.

I was looking at my Bush Countdown key chain today. The battery went out a month or so ago and I was afraid that it might mean something. I felt so much better watching the days, minutes, and seconds tick away. It flashes back on from time to time but its set itself back in the 700 +/- range, so I'm just not putting stock in it anymore....but the thing I was thinking was: And then what? Whats next for us? The field is so strange on both sides, and I cant fathom what anyone can do besides start to unravel what amounts to a nightmare of chaos. I've put alot of my fear and anger into despising Bush and his people, but soon, everyone will say that we have to move forward and forget the past.

My fear is that in forgetting the past, we are condemned to repeat it. And if anyone is Bush-lite, its Rudy. So, keep those exposes coming boys! Something has to stick on this guy...or maybe just the mass of a million smaller things will take him down....but, as I say...and then what?

Cross Posted on RIPCoco

Labels: lies, NYC, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani