Sex & the War City
And Rudy’s mistake.

September 20, 2001 5:10 p.m.

he world, they say, has changed, but not teenagers. My friend has a thirteen-year-old daughter in a school in northern Connecticut. She was told on 9/11 that New York had been bombed. (This is not the only account I have heard of the idiotic conduct of out-of-town schools. Ignorant of the geography of the city, they speak to their charges as if the five boroughs had been Dresdenized.) My friend called his daughter, who was hysterical. "Are you dead?" she asked repeatedly, weeping. He was able to demonstrate that he was not. Some hours later he called back. "Why are you calling?" asked Miss Blasé. Just to see how you're handling the Holy War, dear.

My trainer has three children. His daughters, 14 and 10, have been devouring the newspapers, but he said his six-year-old son "just thinks some bad men did a bad thing." He's ahead of a lot of the columnists in the newspapers.

Another sign of returning normality. A young woman, leaning against the fence of a chic small hotel, two blocks from my house on Irving Place. The two short buildings it occupies were nineteenth century prole housing, but they have been beautifully improved, and many models stay there. As I approached, I saw there was a photographer and his assistant in front of the young woman. A shoot was in progress.

There is no shooting today. In a weird obedience to the calendar, the weather has turned autumnal just as autumn is about to begin officially. The blue sky turned grey, and it has been raining on and off, not with summer-storm intensity, but with a nagging fall soak.

This has driven away more than the professionally beautiful. During all of hell work, one was struck by the smiling skies, and the smiling flesh they brought out. As haggard firemen were raking up body parts like leaves downtown, young women above 14th Street were displaying their most beautiful parts. The winking navels were like a thousand charms against the evil eye.

I have not heard anyone discuss the role of sex in the war of the worlds, but I think there is one. At first I imagined the killers almost as H. L. Mencken might have: snake handlers of central Asia; rubes who eat with one hand and clean themselves with the other. Such would naturally look on Babylon with loathing, and express their hatred in zealotry. In Paradise, the sloe-eyed girls with ever-renewed virginity who are the warrior's reward would balance the account of their deprivations here.

Then it came out that some of the killers had spent the night of September 10 in a strip joint in Florida, getting lap dances. Soldiers have ever done thus. That means, though, that the enemy is different from my imagining. They are not outside what the Great Satan represents of modernity, but they are in it too. They accept their mullahs' condemnations of our sins, but they jump at the chance to sample them.

What about gayness? T. E. Lawrence did not bring homosexuality to Arabia. It is a natural outgrowth of polygamous societies, in which powerful men monopolize more than their share of available women, leaving the shlubs to fend for themselves. Do the killer cults react to the Gay Moment in the western world with a similar combination of wrath and desire?

At the time of the Gulf War there was a popular poster of a female G.I., wearing brief fatigues and bandoliers, and holding a machine gun. That poster was a thrill. For just that reason, it was an immoral poster. We should be aware that our enemies are subject to the same temptations.

Mayor Giuliani made his first mistake, in cracking the door to the possibility of running for a third term, if the state changed the election laws. He would win in a walk, but he should resist the temptation. Even he will not be able to solve all the city's problems, and since much of the heavy lifting is going to be done by the federal government, it matters less who is in City Hall. The mayor should leave on a high note, like DeGaulle after World War II, and bide his time for a return. Or he should leave, period. He has already made himself by far the greatest mayor in New York history. The only competition would be DeWitt Clinton, and he helped the city most as governor, by building the Erie Canal.