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 uesday
is Election Day in New York, and it looks like Mark Green’s
going to be mayor. I’m trying to get used to it. I’ve
had a long time to prepare for it. But I’m still sort of .
. . numb and disbelieving about it.
I remember
the presidential election of 1992: I couldn’t quite bring myself
to believe that Gov. Clinton would win. I knew the polls showed
him ahead. But I couldn’t believe that the American people
would go ahead and hand the highest office in the land over to Bill
Clinton — a philandering, pot-smoking, draft-dodging liar.
A perfect representation of ’60s values and ’60s psychology.
I mean, George Bush represented the World War II generation —
and the American people were going to hand this office to the guy
with the sax? To the boxers-and-briefs guy? To the Gennifer Flowers
one? To the candidate who lied like mad about what he did in the
draft?
Deluded, I
told myself the polls must be wrong. That the people — in talking
to pollsters — were merely punishing Bush for wishy-washiness
and inattention. They’d come around. They might be flirting
with Perot, too — but in the end, they wouldn’t risk a
Clinton presidency, even if the Cold War was over.
I might have
been the only guy in the country surprised when the American people
did what they said they were going to do on Election Day 1992: vote
in Bill Clinton. (This is a dumb thing for a political journalist
to admit, of course.)
Anyway, I’ve
had years to get used to a Mayor Mark Green — but I
have yet to wrap my mind around it completely. Green is a protégé
of Ramsey Clark and Ralph Nader. He has never had any real political
power: and now he’s about to get his hands on the mayoralty
of the biggest and most complicated city in America! Everyone says
— and he says — that he’s learned moderation, that
he’s not the same old leftie. But would you achieve your dream
of becoming mayor of New York: and then turn your back on all your
longstanding beliefs and dreams and notions and intentions and ambitions?
I believe that Mayor Green will be like a kid who has been handed
the keys to the candy store — with no adult supervision. Well,
the electorate and (possibly) media will act as adult supervision.
But Green will probably try to stuff as much candy into his mouth
as possible, in the form of left-wing governance.
Yes, I really
fear the déluge après Rudy. So do many other
New Yorkers, whether they say so in chatty website columns or not.
When the missus and I moved here a few years ago — and loved
the place — everyone said, “Oh, you’re so lucky to
be here during the Giuliani renaissance. You should have seen it
before — you wouldn’t have wanted to be here. And who
knows how long it will last once Rudy’s gone?”
I’d like
to relate something that happened to me in the summer of 2000. I
will do so with complete honesty, with no poetic — no Impromptus-esque
— license. It was a beautiful day, and I was taking a walk
in Riverside Park, along the Hudson River. The sun was shining,
the grass was green, the birds were chirping. Welfare-to-work people
wearing green T-shirts were picking up what litter there was. The
place was essentially spotless. People were picnicking peaceably.
It seemed almost Edenic.
And the thought
came to me — completely unbidden, mind you — “All
of this is gone once Mark Green gets in. It just disappears: poof.”
I hope not.
But the fear is there. The fear is there, in part, because people
forget. They forget how awful a situation was, and what it took
to correct it. And I fear that the criminals and the racialists
and the poverty hustlers and the apologists and the socialists and
all of Dinkins New York — Bonfire of the Vanities New
York — will close in again.
Said Giuliani
in a speech not long ago, “Some people romanticize the way
things were [in the bad old days]. . . . They think it was somehow
charming to have graffiti on every wall and sex shops on every block.
But remember what it was really like: Remember the fear, and the
disrespect for people’s rights . . . It seemed like no one
cared.”
Yes, it seemed
like no one cared. And it was certainly true that Mark Green didn’t
care — about the ghastly laboratory for left-liberal experimentation
New York City had become. He was part of the problem. And Giuliani
was the answer.
Is the problem
now back? Mike Bloomberg, Green’s nominally Republican opponent
in the race, is no Rudy. But he’s also no Green. So I say:
Go Bloomie.
From time to time, I write about my hometown, Ann Arbor, Mich.,
where I learned about the Left and life. I have made very frequent
references to Ann Arbor in the last several weeks. As a result,
tidbits concerning the place have rolled in, and I’d like to
share with you a story about Halloween.
What the heck,
let me just run the Associated Press report, without comment. Its
heading is “Boy Yanked from Class for Vagina Costume.”
Enjoy.
A teenager
got into trouble at his high school after wearing a Halloween
costume resembling a vagina. Christian Silbereis’ classmates
at Community High School apparently were less offended by the
costume, which was fashioned from a pink cape, than the school
administrators who suspended him Wednesday for the rest of the
week. “It’s anatomically correct,” Silbereis told
the Ann Arbor News.
The outfit
took first place at the school’s costume contest, where students
selected the winners. The 17-year-old senior said he feels bad
if the costume offended anyone but wondered why it would. “It’s
just another body part. They teach us about it in school.”
Silbereis
said his mother, Rosalyn Tulip, a midwife, created the costume
last year and wore it to a party. [This is where it gets really
Ann Arbor-y. Whoops, I said no comment. Sorry.] When Silbereis
asked if he could wear the outfit to school, Tulip cautioned him
that it might make some people uncomfortable. She also said she
would support such a decision because it is a positive way for
people to talk about their bodies. [Yeah, as though they needed
any goading. (Sorry.)]
Maggie Jewett,
the school’s assistant dean, said staff members were outraged
at the costume and felt demeaned by it. Silbereis said he took
off the costume in his fourth hour of classes after Jewett came
into his class and told him to either remove it or go home. He
pulled it back on, however, for the contest and received wild
applause from students who declared him the winner.
After the
contest, Jewett told Silbereis that he was suspended for the rest
of the week, he said.
Ahh.
Journalists have been talking lately about how the war is real
journalism, and real living, unlike the Lewinsky case or
the Condit case or what have you. (Funny, when they talk about trivial
news, they never mention arsenic-in-the-water or Jim Jeffords’s
milk subsidy.) On NBC the other day, Tim Russert said, “This
is not covering the New Hampshire primary, or the impeachment of
Bill Clinton, or the disappearance of Chandra Levy. This is the
real deal. This is life and death.”
Life and death?
Odd, but I haven’t seen Chandra Levy shopping on Fifth Avenue
lately.
Madeleine Albright is back at it, beating her chest about the military
pusillanimity of the first George Bush. Appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s
show, she said, “I support what the administration is doing
now. But I think that going back and trying to figure out what went
wrong [during the Clinton years] is not useful. Because we can go
back to original sin. Why wasn’t the Iraqi war finished?”
All right,
one more time, slow-like: The U.N. mandate called for the expulsion
of the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Democrats like Madeleine Albright
supported barely that. The Democratic vote in the Senate against
the war was 45-9. If Bush had gone an inch beyond the mandate,
Albright & Co. would have cried bloody murder.
The Clinton
team had ample opportunity to rein in Saddam Hussein — it could
have eliminated, as a national priority, his mass-destruction facilities.
Now, regardless, it’s up to George W. Bush. Will he, as he
said, “do future generations a favor”? We can only hope.
Charles Krauthammer’s essay on the back page of last week’s
Time
— “Wars of Choice, Wars of Necessity” — is a
perfect distillation of what’s going on here, and what must
be done. So perfect is it, even gossip columnist Liz Smith singled
it out as must-reading. When Krauthammer has Liz’s approbation:
the country must be on the same beam.
A story from New Zealand touched my heart. I couldn’t possibly
say why. According to Reuters, “Image-conscious lawmakers want
television cameras in Parliament repositioned to eliminate unflattering
coverage of their bald spots. Cameras in viewing galleries now stand
about 15 feet above the debating chamber, and point downwards to
film proceedings.” The leader of “the small right-wing
ACT party,” Richard Prebble, said, “Photographing [the
parliamentary action] from the ceiling just means you see pictures
of bald heads. Now that’s really unflattering.”
Having seen
photos of myself, taken from the “wrong” angle, I can
only whoop and applaud.
I couldn’t help smiling on seeing a recent column by Ellen
Goodman. It’s been observed that, in this crisis, people are
writing mainly about their foremost, and longstanding, concerns.
Those (of us) who are gung-ho about SDI manage to write about SDI.
Those — again, of us — who are concerned about “identity
politics” continue to write about that. Those who are greatly
concerned about homosexuality tend to gravitate to that topic, even
when writing about the war.
And here comes
Ellen Goodman, who is a feminist — a gender-conscious scribbler
— before she is anything else. Her column began,
There’s
a photograph on my desk that’s been there for a week now.
It’s a newspaper portrait of Afghan tribal leaders gathered
at a Pakistan border town to plan for a post-Taliban government.
The picture
shows a diverse group of elders, colorful in their turbans and
varied in the robes of their clans. The caption that I have scrawled
across the bottom reads: What’s wrong with this picture?
You see,
these elders, indeed all the 1,500 leaders who assembled, didn’t
include a single woman. Those who were deciding the shape of the
negotiating table had already decided that there would be no women
at the table.
Nothing wrong
with this. It’s just that, if you had been asked, “What
would Ellen Goodman write if there were a war against terror on?”
you would have written something very close to those paragraphs.
It’s not true, really, that “everything changed”
after 9/11.
The New
York Times had a decent story on Saturday about Arundhati
Roy, the beautiful novelist who is a vicious anti-American, and
has been especially noisily so since 9/11. Her book The God of
Small Things sold a zillion copies — I suspect because
of the jacket photo.
As a protest
against her beauty, Roy has shaved off most of her hair. I was especially
interested to read, in the Times story, that she “mocked”
a critic of hers — a fellow Indian — for writing a biography
of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, saying, “I think we’ve
had enough, come on, enough stories about white men.”
So she’s
a racist too. Perfect.
We at NR have been talking lately about the “mainstreaming”
of porn (or about the “pornographication” of the mainstream,
if you like). A story in the Styles section of the Sunday Times
concerned prostitutes and strippers, and the memoirs they’ve
written. This led (somehow) to the subject of what strippers wear.
Consider:
Ten years
ago, only professional strippers wore thongs, [the book-writing
stripper Lily Burana] said. Now average women buy them at Kmart
and Victoria’s Secret. An elevated sexuality in popular culture
— Britney Spears’s hot pants, the charged images in
music videos — saturated the country when Ms. Burana wrote
her book, she said. In 1997, when she started [a] strip tour,
she was able to find appropriate outfits only in boutiques that
catered to the sex industry.
“By
2000, I was buying my outfits at Contempo,” she said, referring
to a shopping-mall clothing chain. “The clothes for teenagers
have become so strippified. I was a little alarmed. . . . All
of a sudden I had this mad flash of protective conservatism. But
it was a cultural marker.”
Yes, exactly:
a marker of the mainstreaming of porn, and something that —
the stripper was right — should cause alarm.
Finally, let me hail a little reading. Saturday’s New York
Post printed a column by Michelle Malkin covering what amounted
to a Muslim hate rally against the United States — held in
the National Press Club. But here’s what she mainly covered:
the general media’s lack of coverage of it. A chilling story
— and a reminder of the importance of the counsel, Know thine
enemy. And part of knowing him, for heaven’s sake, must be
listening to him.
I must also
mention the November issue of Commentary.
All of it is commanding, but let me focus particularly on Mark Helprin’s
“What Israel Must Now Do to Survive.” We have discussed
before how Israel cannot afford to absorb much of a blow —
a good deal of its action has to be preemptive. The country is simply
too small, too vulnerable, for anything else. Writes Helprin,
As everything
may ride on a few seconds of combat, one can only hope that Israel
has exceeded itself in the development of this last line of protection.
[The reference is to missile defense.] And the line that stands
just before it demands not only the exact intelligence
necessary for Israel to preempt the use of weapons of mass destruction,
but the will to do so.
Lately there
has been a dearth of preventive attacks against the region’s
facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, perhaps
because of American pressure or because, in the years that Bill
Clinton ate [marvelous phrase], Israel forgot that facts are better
than dreams. Is it not obvious that now is the time, when American
and Israeli interests with regard to weapons of mass destruction
plainly coincide, for Israel to destroy the laboratories, reactors,
processing plants, and depots whence untold terror might arise?
No, it is not
obvious, to enough people: but it should be.
Then there
is a piece by the meticulous and ever convincing Arch Puddington
about Durban — we must not forget that horror of a U.N. race
conference, whose relevance to the current crisis is shudderingly
clear.
Last, I’d
like to purr a little about a short story by the glittering literato
Joseph Epstein. It is called “My Little Margie,” and its
prose and emotional power are terrific. A first-rate story (about
love and relationships) amid the war and war talk: couldn’t
be more welcome.
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