Joe Bob's America: Giuliani time

NEW YORK, Jan. 8 (UPI) -- I've never seen anything like this Giuliani Kissy-face Love-in we had here last week. It's getting to where you can't even trust New Yorkers to be smart-asses anymore.

The man was everywhere. His picture was everywhere, with thatlop-sided grin. The papers were full of headlines like "Rudy's Legacy" and "The Giuliani Years of Triumph." That Time magazine cover with Rudy on top of a skyscraper, proclaiming him "Person of the Year," stared out at you from news racks in Garden City to kiosks in Penn Station.

So it was actually kind of reassuring when I went down into the Brooklyn Bridge subway station, right next to City Hall, and found the newsstand's papers sold out. Except for one -- the Amsterdam News. Its giant banner headline: "YOU'RE OVER, RUDY."

"Called everything from Ghouliani to Nebachudnezzar," reads the lead story, "Mayor Rudy Giuliani won't have us to kick around anymore in a few days. As a soon-to-be former mayor, Giuliani has been alternately compared to Fiorello 'The Little Flower' La Guardia and Boss Tweed, the first tyrant of Tammany Hall."

Now THAT'S the New York I know. The city's No. 1 sport used to be pummeling the mayor, and the black-oriented Amsterdam News was holding true right till the bitter end. For years now Wilbert A. Tatum, the paper's chairman of the board, has been writing a column entitled "Giuliani Must Be Removed," and he finally got to do his 145th installment, headlined "Goodbye to Rudy, the weakest link." He never got him removed, so he settled for the next best thing, the doctrine of Time Wounds All Heels.

But Tatum was part of a tiny minority in this image-bashing city turned suddenly boosterish. Rooting for Rudy had become fashionable for the first time in years. He's now even more popular than ex-mayor Ed Koch, who used to get on subway cars and shout "How am I doing?" ("Great job, Ed," was the usual reply.)

And yet surely everybody hasn't forgotten what a big goofball Rudy is. When he took office on Jan. 1, 1994, his first big issue was ... Squeegee Men!

He declared war on the guys with the Windex bottles and the dirty rags who descend on cars while you're waiting in line at the Holland Tunnel, cleaning windshields for tips. He considered this a "quality of life" issue and assigned cops to put the guys in jail for ... I'm not sure what the charge was -- "aggravated automotive maintenance"?

And it wasn't so much that he picked this issue for his crusade. It's that he was so insane about it. He didn't just say, "That's something we need to pay attention to." He was always the kind of guy who would say, "These guys will never walk the streets of New York again!"

He loved using an elephant gun to get rid of fleas, whether he was crusading against turnstile-jumpers, topless bars, porno shops, homeless people who refuse to go to the shelters (one winter he had them arrested), or modern art that he found sacrilegious. (He cut off the funding of the Brooklyn Museum because of an installation featuring a defaced Virgin Mary.)

As a former prosecutor, he went against the general philosophy of "live and let live" that New York has always been known for and chose a policy of bombing the infidels into oblivion.

His big victory was the crime rate, which plummeted during the Giuliani years, partly because he beefed up the Police Department and partly because crime goes down in times of prosperity anyway. But even in that arena he was just a LITTLE BIT over the top. He loved to hold press conferences surrounded by men in uniform, to announce that there would be NO HOOLIGANISM at this year's St. Patrick's Day Parade. When a cop shot an unarmed man on the street, Giuliani released the dead man's juvenile record, as though to say, "See, we got rid of a bad guy after all."

When he was criticized for that -- even his closest supporters thought he'd gone too far -- he replied that the dead have no right to privacy.

The standard cocktail party question in New York used to be, "What do you think of Giuliani?" (Always spoken with raised eyebrows and rolling eyes.)

The standard answer was, "Weeeeelllllll, I think he's cleaned up the city."

In other words, it was a little like Moscow in the 1950s. "Weeeeeeelllllll, Josef is a little rough around the edges, but Russia needs a strong leader right now."

Rudy had no patience for the once-sacred causes of what he considered the wimpy Greenwich Village liberal. Education, homeless services, welfare, food stamps, public hospitals, AIDS services, low-income housing, day care, neighborhood parks, libraries, legal services for the poor -- watch Rudy's eyes glaze over! But ask him about money for Lincoln Center, or keeping the Yankees in New York, or a new stock exchange, and he becomes Knute Rockne in a baseball cap. In fact, by the time he left office, the Greenwich Village liberal had all but disappeared from New York political life, and the village itself had become gentrified. Rent control was all but gone, so it became one more neighborhood full of million-dollar condos, too expensive for any belly-aching bohemians to live there anyway.

Even his most ardent supporters, like the New York Post editorial writers, thought he was a little insensitive. They had a field day with his extra-marital affairs and the disintegration of his marriage to the much-admired, much-pitied Donna Hanover, a reporter for Fox News. When his divorce court judge finally ordered him to stop bringing his girlfriend to Gracie Mansion while his wife was still there, even the Post said, "Have a little class, man."

And then he got prostate cancer. Cancer is actually what preserved him for his Sept. 11 date with destiny, because up until then he was widely favored to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the race for the U.S. Senate. But when he dropped out of that race, his whole image changed as well.

People started talking about the "kinder, gentler Rudy," like one of those lifetime Hollywood drug addicts who goes to Betty Ford (drug rehabilitation center), finds Jesus and joins the Red Cross, all in the same month. He was still just as goofy -- he tried to get his term extended, which would require a change in the law, because he thought the city would be better off with three more months of him -- but he didn't seem so mean-spirited when the subject of, say, subway panhandlers would cross his desk.

I guess the question I have about all this is why, in the 21st century, New York even has a system that concentrates so much power into one man's hands. New York city government is still pretty much run like cities a hundred years ago, with a mayor so powerful he almost always gets his way, when almost every other major city in America has converted to some type of manager form of government that limits the mayor's power.

Every four years New York rolls the dice with its future, betting on somebody like Michael Bloomberg, the new guy in office, who has never held any political job and whose opinions about most things are fairly obscure. At least with Giuliani you had the advantage of hearing him shout his views from the rooftops. When Bloomberg made his inaugural speech, he announced that he would be cutting his own mayoral staff by 20 percent -- the first his staff, sitting in the audience, had heard of it.

Meanwhile, the city was still celebrating Giuliani's final crowning achievement of becoming Time's "Person of the Year." Giuliani wears the badge proudly and speaks of it often. Once again, I think it's a little goofy, as though he doesn't understand that the award does not mean you're a good person. Time has given the award to Gandhi, but the magazine has also given it to Stalin. It simply means that you affected the world, "for good or for ill," more than any other person this year. (The Amsterdam News would still insist that he affected it for ill.)

It's as though even Time magazine, which has an international scope, has been sucked into the Giuliani Mystique. The other guy they considered for the distinction was Osama bin Laden. In terms of the number of people, worldwide, affected by the two men, I would think Osama bin Laden is easily the better choice. His name is known in every country of the world. Giuliani's is not. His activities range over 60 countries. Giuliani's do not. His influence, especially over young men, affects millions. Giuliani's does not. If the world "changed forever," as Time often insists, then bin Laden did the changing. It's as though Time magazine, based in New York, has forgotten the criteria for its own award!

One of the Time editors went on several cable TV shows to talk about how they made the choice. He said, "Well, bin Laden was certainly in the running, but we have to think of history. Does anyone remember the name of the Japanese admiral who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor?"

But the parallel would not be the admiral. The admiral in the World Trade Center attacks was Muhammad Atef, and we probably WILL forget his name. The parallel with Pearl Harbor would be Emperor Hirohito, who remained in Japan while his navy and air force did the dirty work, and we DO remember HIS name.

It's as though someone went to the Christmas party at Time magazine and said, "So, uh, what do you think of Giuliani?"

And Time, raising its eyebrows, answered, "Weeeeeellllll, he cleaned up Ground Zero."

(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebob-briggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)