Fearing Mayor Green, dressing up back home, more “mainstreaming” of porn, &c.

November 5, 2001 9:20 a.m.

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.