-Caveat Lector-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,639051,00.html
The real Sir Rudy rises from the ash
New York's canonised ex-mayor is in fact a bully and a megalomaniac
Ian Williams
Friday January 25, 2002
The Guardian
Rudy Giuliani may no longer be New York's mayor, but he seems well on
the way to canonisation. Man of the year in Time magazine and an
honorary British knight, he is now to be the subject of a movie
called Emperor Of The City, courtesy of a company better known for
biopics of religious figures such as Moses and Jesus. In fact, for
all his September 11 histrionics, the evidence of his two terms as
mayor show him to be a bullying control freak with a tendency to
megalomania.
"Sir" Rudy became mayor when the American economy was booming, and
New York's with it. Needless to say, he took full credit. When people
didn't have to steal to eat, the crime rate also went down. But it
was actually his predecessor David Dinkins who had expanded the
police force and President Clinton who paid for it. Rudy nevertheless
took the credit, while giving carte blanche to the expanded force to
exercise their white suburban preju
dices.
The cops who rammed a toilet plunger up Albert Louima's rectum in the mayor's first
term got it right. They told their Haitian victim: "This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins
time." Dinkins was indeed a traditional ward-heele
r in hock to the city unions. But so was Giuliani - to the police unions and property
developers who lavishly bankrolled his campaigns.
Manhattan sophisticates liked to say of Hizzoner that you can take the boy out of the
suburbs, but you can't take the suburbs out of the boy.In that case, they must be
scared of sex in the suburbs, if Giuliani's Taliban-l
ike attitude to art was anything to go by. When he took against the "Sensation: Young
British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" - particularly Chris Ofili's The Holy
Virgin Mary - he cut city funding to the Brooklyn mu
seum, until a federal judge ordered him to pay up. But his religious sensibilities did
not apparently stretch to adultery, as he announced his separation from his wife to a
press conference - without telling her.
In October, never one to let compassion cloud his political judgment, Giuliani
returned a cheque for $10m intended for September 11 victims. The Saudi prince who had
presented it had suggested the US might consider a more
balanced Middle East policy. Rudy ripped up the cheque. And within weeks he was
addressing a rally in Jerusalem organised by the Settlers Council at which other
speakers called for forcible expulsion, or "transfer", of a
ll Palestinians from the occupied territories.
But his recklessness over money for New York went further. The mayor actually backed
President Bush when he halved congressional aid to a city where some 100,000 have lost
jobs since the planes crashed. Abusing his post-S
eptember 11 popularity, Giuliani tried to change the city constitution to allow
himself another term.
Yet there were limits to his reverence for heroes. On November 1, Giuliani ordered a
drastic reduction in the number of firefighters on the Word Trade Centre site, where
they had been poring over the rubble for human rema
ins. As an economy measure, it would have made sense, if it weren't for the fact that
every cop in New York had been on almost unlimited overtime for months manning
ineffectual checkpoints. The firefighters' union had sup
ported the Democratic candidate in the mayoral election and Giuliani was never one to
forget a friend - or an enemy. The spectacle of police and firefighters fighting on
the ruins of Ground Zero, the site of Giuliani's ap
otheosis, proved too much even for him. He backed down.
The publicity for the forthcoming film about the mayor says that scriptwriter Andrew
Kirtzman was with Giuliani "on the morning of September 11, while the then- mayor was
searching for a location for an emergency command
centre". In fact, he already had an emergency centre, known as "the Bunker". In the
teeth of warnings that building a bunker on the 23rd floor of a complex that had
already been a terrorist target in 1993 might not be a g
ood idea, he had put this controversial $16m-headquarters in ... the World Trade
Centre.
The 6,000-gallon fuel tank that was intended to provide enough fuel to keep the lights
on for three days kept the building burning for several more. The $1.4m-a-year lease
with one of his campaign contributors would have
lasted even longer: 20 years.
The mayor was never good at listening, however. As Sir Rudy put it: "Freedom is about
authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to
lawful authority a great deal of discretion about wh
at you do and how you do it." But quite why he should be feted by London's Lord Mayor,
knighted by the Queen and hallowed by Hollywood, escapes me.
� Ian Williams is a British writer who has lived in New York for the
past 12 years.
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