Salon Newsreal | Letter from occupied New York

A L S O+T O D A Y

Michael Jordan's final act
By Dan Brekke
The legend is leaving at the top. That's why we need him to stay
(01/14/99)

T A B L E+T A L K
Speaker Howdy Doody? What do you think of Livingston replacement Dennis Hastert? Get partisan in the Politics area of Table Talk

___________________
Planning a trip to New York? Be sure to check out barnesandnoble.com's great travel books before you go!
___________________

Portrait of a political "pit bull"
By Russ Baker
Rep. Dan Burton, who called President Clinton a "scumbag," has a few questions to answer about his own behavior
(12/22/98)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
R E C E N T L Y
Starr's lowest blow
By Bruce Shapiro
In indicting Julie Hiatt Steele, the independent counsel continues a pattern of bullying women
(01/13/99)
Impeachment diary II
By Anonymous
While senators basked in the glow of Friday's bipartisan trial accord, both sides were already plotting to renew the war
(01/13/99)
Ebonics II
By Lee Hubbard
Oakland students' test scores are among the lowest in the state, but Oakland teachers press ahead with Mumia Abu Jamal teach-in
(01/13/99)
Tainted witness
By Murray Waas
The Arkansas trooper who corroborated David Hale's story received payments from the American Spectator
(01/12/99)
Working class hero?
By Micah L. Sifry
Jesse Ventura will have to reconcile his millionaire libertarian views with his blue collar support
(01/11/99)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the
Newsreal Archives
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

spacer

LETTER FROM OCCUPIED NEW YORK | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -
Meanwhile, our Rudy, who began by threatening to abolish the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Civil Rights Division, to sell off public hospitals and East River bridges, to cancel the city's contract with Legal Aid; who'd subsequently propose uniforms for teachers, a casino on Governor's Island, a $15 million bomb-proof bunker for himself in the World Trade Center and turning the homeless out of city shelters after 90 days (which proved to be illegal); who has dumped every police commissioner, superintendent of schools and any other vassal who got more ink or air time than their feudal liege; who has belittled his predecessors and ridiculed his own task force on police brutality and won't even talk to the black community ("They're going to have to learn to discipline themselves in the way they speak"); who has declared Holy War on squeegee men ("drug-addicted psychopaths"), licensed street vendors (350 banned during daylight hours from Midtown and the Financial District), bicycle messengers and delivery boys (mostly immigrants), hookers and sex clubs, underage drinkers, aggressive panhandlers, Fourth of July Mafia fireworks, Chinese New Year's celebrations, salsa music on Amsterdam Avenue and boom boxes everywhere -- meanwhile, this Rudy has been busy on a dozen other Draconian fronts:
He has abolished remedial classes at City University. He has tried to eliminate subway and bus passes for schoolchildren. He has closed libraries while expanding the Museum of Modern Art. He's cut every social service for the poor, from medical assistance to foster care to food stamps to heating for the elderly, and slashed the budget for parks and recreation, hospital workers and after-school sports and enrichment programs, while offering zoning variances, tax abatements and customized incentives to First Boston, Depository Trust, Viacom and the Stock Exchange. He has bulldozed the community gardens of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to make room for yuppie condos, forced single-mother welfare recipients onto "workfare" even if they can't find child care, ordained that the disabled show up in downtown municipal offices to prove that they are indeed disabled, abolished the methadone program and unleashed a gleeful police force to do whatever it chooses in the Mussolini meantime, from invading mosques to no-knock wrong-address raids on black and Latino homes. While it might not be true that the cops in the 70th Precinct stationhouse who raped Abner Louima with a toilet plunger actually advised him that "It's Giuliani time!" the spirit is accurate enough. The city also stands to lose as much as $1 billion in damages from 53,000 illegal, pre-arraignment strip searches of "misdemeanants" arrested in 1996 and 1997 for such minor offenses as scalping a ticket, driving with a suspended license or selling a pair of sneakers on the sidewalk without a vending license. (But who cares about the Fourth Amendment when you've got a police commissioner who wants a DNA specimen from anybody ever arrested in the imperial city, including subway turnstile-jumpers?)
I am reminded of the late Donald Barthelme, who wrote, "We have rots, blights and rusts capable of attacking the enemy's alphabet," plus "real-time online computer-controlled wish evaporations." Barthelme went on to add: "There are flowers all over the city because the mayor doesn't know where his mother is buried." I am also reminded of Kafka's Castle, Potemkin's Village and Godard's Alphaville. According to the Community Service Society's July 1997 report on poverty, 1.5 million New Yorkers had a standard of living equivalent to that of a family of four getting by on less than $12,000 a year. When another 100,000 lost their food stamps in August of that year, the number of soup kitchens and food pantries increased from 800 to 1,000, serving 60 million meals per annum, but turning away 2,600 people every day.
How mean is Rudy? So mean, to wrench a Molly Ivins quote from context, "He wouldn't spit in your ear if your brains were on fire." Which is why the municipal unions are so scared of him that leaders of District 37 -- the city's largest municipal union, representing everybody from social workers to crossing guards -- fraudulently rigged a 1996 vote to ratify a wage freeze contract. More than six weeks after the votes of all the other locals had been tabulated, rejecting this contract, clerical workers Local 1459 suddenly reported an amazing 10-2 margin of approval, putting the wage freeze over the top. District 37 is now in trusteeship and its leaders have resigned in disgrace, while Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau tries to decide whom to indict first.
This is what happens when you elect a former prosecutor. With concrete, he barricades his own City Hall. He thinks of himself as Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick or E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, but he's a lot more like William Blake's Urizen, "self-enclos'd, all repelling" -- "Dark, revolving in silent activity,/Unseen in tormenting passions,/An activity unknown and horrible,/A self-contemplating shadow,/In enormous labors occupied." One almost wishes that the widespread rumors of romantic hanky-panky with his press secretary, Christyne Lategano, were spot on -- especially if you've ever seen Rudy's wife, Donna Hanover, pushing a bit too hard on the perky pedal at the harmonium of her cable TV recipe show on the Food Network, between interviews with a meat-thermometer salesman and a flack for "The Great Fluff Off" at the Year of the Marshmallow festival. Talk about your Miracle Whip.
But crime is down, unless you count police brutality. And so is the caseload of parasitic welfare cheats, although after three years of slave-wage workfare the Giuliani administration refuses to tell us how many have graduated to real jobs, or whether those jobs used to belong to someone else, once unionized, since downsized. And so is the number of hospital workers, especially in the cafeteria food services, which will teach that union what happens when you don't endorse the mayor. And thus the city is safer for all those delirious professionals who venture out at night in their yupscale neighborhoods, sun-dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume a minimalist bistro meal of cilantro leaves, goat-cheese medallions and half a scallop on a bed of eurodollars, tethered by their red suspenders to gaudy balloons of avarice and ego. Oh, the quality of My So-Called Life! Like Bombay, we have a huge low-wage work force and a filthy-rich managerial class and produce products consumed elsewhere. As in Singapore, we're caned for littering.
Once upon a time, the whole idea of New York was to derive from our rainbow mosaic an energizing principle; to find, in diversity, our jumping beans. And once upon a time, the idea of government involved taking care of the young, the old, the odd, the powerless and strangers. But that was before we decided to measure everyone by his or her ability to produce wealth -- and to morally condemn or punish anybody who failed to prosper. Look into Rudy's prosecutorial eyes. He is evicting patients from a state-run psychiatric clinic in Brooklyn in order to punish a city councilman who crossed him with a homeless shelter no one needs. He is dispatching our garbage on scows to New Jersey, not having bothered to ask New Jersey in advance, like some sort of Flying Dutch DeLillo Cleanser. Wouldn't he have been much happier back in the heyday of the sci-fi Cold War squelching Triffids, Pods, Blobs and Body Snatchers? Man-eating dandelions! Meteoric slimeballs! Bloodsucking carrots! Collectivized Bolshevik killer ants!
I am reminded of Fox Mulder and the Unabomber. Of Max Headroom, and Mark Pauline's robot scorpion. Of the Vampire of Dusseldorf, the Silesian Bluebeard, Jack the Ripper and Brian De Palma, who explained: "I don't particularly want to chop up women, but it seems to work." I am reminded of Gabriel García Márquez's autumnal patriarch, and "the solitary vice of power." Scariest of all, I am reminded of another poor-boy-made-good lawyer out of synch -- of Richard Nixon, alone in a darkened wing of the White House, as if Watergate had been a play by Samuel Beckett, listening on tape either to himself or maybe Elvis.
SALON | Jan. 14, 1999
John Leonard is media critic for "CBS Sunday Morning," television critic for New York magazine and Culture Watch columnist for the Nation. His new book, "When the Kissing Had to Stop," will be published by the New Press in June.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Become a Salon member. Click here.

A L S O+T O D A Y Michael Jordan's final act By Dan Brekke The legend is leaving at the top. That's why we need him to stay (01/14/99) T A B L E+T A L K Speaker Howdy Doody? What do you think of Livingston replacement Dennis Hastert? Get partisan in the Politics area of Table Talk ___________________ Planning a trip to New York? Be sure to check out barnesandnoble.com's great travel books before you go! ___________________ Portrait of a political "pit bull" By Russ Baker Rep. Dan Burton, who called President Clinton a "scumbag," has a few questions to answer about his own behavior (12/22/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Starr's lowest blow By Bruce Shapiro In indicting Julie Hiatt Steele, the independent counsel continues a pattern of bullying women (01/13/99) Impeachment diary II By Anonymous While senators basked in the glow of Friday's bipartisan trial accord, both sides were already plotting to renew the war (01/13/99) Ebonics II By Lee Hubbard Oakland students' test scores are among the lowest in the state, but Oakland teachers press ahead with Mumia Abu Jamal teach-in (01/13/99) Tainted witness By Murray Waas The Arkansas trooper who corroborated David Hale's story received payments from the American Spectator (01/12/99) Working class hero? By Micah L. Sifry Jesse Ventura will have to reconcile his millionaire libertarian views with his blue collar support (01/11/99) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		LETTER FROM OCCUPIED NEW YORK \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Meanwhile, our Rudy, who began by threatening to abolish the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Civil Rights Division, to sell off public hospitals and East River bridges, to cancel the city's contract with Legal Aid; who'd subsequently propose uniforms for teachers, a casino on Governor's Island, a $15 million bomb-proof bunker for himself in the World Trade Center and turning the homeless out of city shelters after 90 days (which proved to be illegal); who has dumped every police commissioner, superintendent of schools and any other vassal who got more ink or air time than their feudal liege; who has belittled his predecessors and ridiculed his own task force on police brutality and won't even talk to the black community ("They're going to have to learn to discipline themselves in the way they speak"); who has declared Holy War on squeegee men ("drug-addicted psychopaths"), licensed street vendors (350 banned during daylight hours from Midtown and the Financial District), bicycle messengers and delivery boys (mostly immigrants), hookers and sex clubs, underage drinkers, aggressive panhandlers, Fourth of July Mafia fireworks, Chinese New Year's celebrations, salsa music on Amsterdam Avenue and boom boxes everywhere -- meanwhile, this Rudy has been busy on a dozen other Draconian fronts: He has abolished remedial classes at City University. He has tried to eliminate subway and bus passes for schoolchildren. He has closed libraries while expanding the Museum of Modern Art. He's cut every social service for the poor, from medical assistance to foster care to food stamps to heating for the elderly, and slashed the budget for parks and recreation, hospital workers and after-school sports and enrichment programs, while offering zoning variances, tax abatements and customized incentives to First Boston, Depository Trust, Viacom and the Stock Exchange. He has bulldozed the community gardens of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to make room for yuppie condos, forced single-mother welfare recipients onto "workfare" even if they can't find child care, ordained that the disabled show up in downtown municipal offices to prove that they are indeed disabled, abolished the methadone program and unleashed a gleeful police force to do whatever it chooses in the Mussolini meantime, from invading mosques to no-knock wrong-address raids on black and Latino homes. While it might not be true that the cops in the 70th Precinct stationhouse who raped Abner Louima with a toilet plunger actually advised him that "It's Giuliani time!" the spirit is accurate enough. The city also stands to lose as much as $1 billion in damages from 53,000 illegal, pre-arraignment strip searches of "misdemeanants" arrested in 1996 and 1997 for such minor offenses as scalping a ticket, driving with a suspended license or selling a pair of sneakers on the sidewalk without a vending license. (But who cares about the Fourth Amendment when you've got a police commissioner who wants a DNA specimen from anybody ever arrested in the imperial city, including subway turnstile-jumpers?) I am reminded of the late Donald Barthelme, who wrote, "We have rots, blights and rusts capable of attacking the enemy's alphabet," plus "real-time online computer-controlled wish evaporations." Barthelme went on to add: "There are flowers all over the city because the mayor doesn't know where his mother is buried." I am also reminded of Kafka's Castle, Potemkin's Village and Godard's Alphaville. According to the Community Service Society's July 1997 report on poverty, 1.5 million New Yorkers had a standard of living equivalent to that of a family of four getting by on less than $12,000 a year. When another 100,000 lost their food stamps in August of that year, the number of soup kitchens and food pantries increased from 800 to 1,000, serving 60 million meals per annum, but turning away 2,600 people every day. How mean is Rudy? So mean, to wrench a Molly Ivins quote from context, "He wouldn't spit in your ear if your brains were on fire." Which is why the municipal unions are so scared of him that leaders of District 37 -- the city's largest municipal union, representing everybody from social workers to crossing guards -- fraudulently rigged a 1996 vote to ratify a wage freeze contract. More than six weeks after the votes of all the other locals had been tabulated, rejecting this contract, clerical workers Local 1459 suddenly reported an amazing 10-2 margin of approval, putting the wage freeze over the top. District 37 is now in trusteeship and its leaders have resigned in disgrace, while Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau tries to decide whom to indict first. This is what happens when you elect a former prosecutor. With concrete, he barricades his own City Hall. He thinks of himself as Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick or E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, but he's a lot more like William Blake's Urizen, "self-enclos'd, all repelling" -- "Dark, revolving in silent activity,/Unseen in tormenting passions,/An activity unknown and horrible,/A self-contemplating shadow,/In enormous labors occupied." One almost wishes that the widespread rumors of romantic hanky-panky with his press secretary, Christyne Lategano, were spot on -- especially if you've ever seen Rudy's wife, Donna Hanover, pushing a bit too hard on the perky pedal at the harmonium of her cable TV recipe show on the Food Network, between interviews with a meat-thermometer salesman and a flack for "The Great Fluff Off" at the Year of the Marshmallow festival. Talk about your Miracle Whip. But crime is down, unless you count police brutality. And so is the caseload of parasitic welfare cheats, although after three years of slave-wage workfare the Giuliani administration refuses to tell us how many have graduated to real jobs, or whether those jobs used to belong to someone else, once unionized, since downsized. And so is the number of hospital workers, especially in the cafeteria food services, which will teach that union what happens when you don't endorse the mayor. And thus the city is safer for all those delirious professionals who venture out at night in their yupscale neighborhoods, sun-dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume a minimalist bistro meal of cilantro leaves, goat-cheese medallions and half a scallop on a bed of eurodollars, tethered by their red suspenders to gaudy balloons of avarice and ego. Oh, the quality of My So-Called Life! Like Bombay, we have a huge low-wage work force and a filthy-rich managerial class and produce products consumed elsewhere. As in Singapore, we're caned for littering. Once upon a time, the whole idea of New York was to derive from our rainbow mosaic an energizing principle; to find, in diversity, our jumping beans. And once upon a time, the idea of government involved taking care of the young, the old, the odd, the powerless and strangers. But that was before we decided to measure everyone by his or her ability to produce wealth -- and to morally condemn or punish anybody who failed to prosper. Look into Rudy's prosecutorial eyes. He is evicting patients from a state-run psychiatric clinic in Brooklyn in order to punish a city councilman who crossed him with a homeless shelter no one needs. He is dispatching our garbage on scows to New Jersey, not having bothered to ask New Jersey in advance, like some sort of Flying Dutch DeLillo Cleanser. Wouldn't he have been much happier back in the heyday of the sci-fi Cold War squelching Triffids, Pods, Blobs and Body Snatchers? Man-eating dandelions! Meteoric slimeballs! Bloodsucking carrots! Collectivized Bolshevik killer ants! I am reminded of Fox Mulder and the Unabomber. Of Max Headroom, and Mark Pauline's robot scorpion. Of the Vampire of Dusseldorf, the Silesian Bluebeard, Jack the Ripper and Brian De Palma, who explained: "I don't particularly want to chop up women, but it seems to work." I am reminded of Gabriel García Márquez's autumnal patriarch, and "the solitary vice of power." Scariest of all, I am reminded of another poor-boy-made-good lawyer out of synch -- of Richard Nixon, alone in a darkened wing of the White House, as if Watergate had been a play by Samuel Beckett, listening on tape either to himself or maybe Elvis. SALON \| Jan. 14, 1999 John Leonard is media critic for "CBS Sunday Morning," television critic for New York magazine and Culture Watch columnist for the Nation. His new book, "When the Kissing Had to Stop," will be published by the New Press in June. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.