A tribute to Mayor Guiliani

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Who Giveth This Woman?

In our crippled and wounded city people, who last week led beautiful, active lives, are being identified by their fingers, bits of skin that yields DNA, a sock, a shoe containing a foot, some hair. It's horrible to read with one's morning coffee but we better all brace ourselves. This is our life now.

Despite it all, yesterday afternoon there was a wedding - a defiant gesture to the principle that life must go on. The bride was the sister of New York City Firefighter. She was marrying a New York City cop. With her father dead this year, her brother had been scheduled to give her away. Her brother died in a three alarm fire on Staten Island in August. Now she had no one to walk her down the aisle.

We have a mayor some people love to hate. Rudy Giuliani has taken incredible personal abuse for years. He was called a grandstander, a Nazi, and a bully. Yet, during this terrible week he has led us - a sleepless field marshall, organizing, directing, consoling, explaining and moving, constantly moving, about the city he clearly loves with a passion larger than ours.

Giuliani had a plan when he got elected. He thought a city should be livable, clean and safe. What he did to make New York that way made a lot of people crazy. He started by telling street people who jumped on the hood of your car at a stoplight with a squeegee (ostensibly to wash your windshield) to stop it. It was startling and symbolic. People defended the squeegee men. The poor darlings had a right to "work." He told police to arrest you if you smoked pot on the street, drank beer out of a brown paper bag in public, slept in doorways or peed in the street. He sent vans to drag homeless, dirty and starving drug addicts out of Grand Central Station and forced them to take a shower to get rid of the lice and sleep in a shelter. Chain snatchers went to jail and bunked with muggers. The same man who repeatedly stole cars from our block, time after time, for years, went to prison on Rudy's watch. There have been no cars stolen here in years. No one has been mugged on side streets. No chains have been snatched through open bus windows. The zonked out street person who opened my bank door for me and muttered obscenities as he pressed a dirty coin cup into my chest disappeared. The overflowing trash can on my corner is emptied twice a day by a corps of blue garbed former addicts paid for by something called the Doe Fund. I thanked one of them once, shaking his hand and telling him how much his work meant to the neighborhood. I asked what the Doe Fund gave him in return. He smiled and answered, "Soap and hope."

Through all of this the American Civil Liberties Union went through daily cardiac seizures.

Rudy Giuliani, because he had a plan and didn't care if we loved him, backed our police and lowered our crime rate by half. He got the mob out of the Convention Center and the Fulton Fish Market. Times Square is no longer a cesspool and live porno shops are really hard to find. In his own bull headed, self-confident, sometimes infuriating way he had given us soap and hope. He also proved that the Democrats who ran this city into the sewer and then used the excuse that it was ungovernable were wrong.

I wish Rudy had handled his personal life in a more moral and tidy manner. I wish his hot, Italian temper hadn't made a lot of people dislike him. I wish he had just forgotten about maintaining his tortured comb-over and just gone bald like millions of other men that women always found sexy anyway. There was hardly a week that passed that he didn't find something to do that visibly underlined what he was all about. People said he was just another showboating pol looking for attention. "That's just Rudy," they would snarl, at any public gesture.

Yesterday, the sister of the firefighter who died leaving her with no one to give her away walked, beaming, down the aisle of St. James Lutheran Church in Gerrittsen Beach, Brooklyn. She was not alone. Rudy Giuliani had promised to take her brother's place when he died. Yesterday he kept that promise and offered her his arm. Then, he sat for thirty minutes in the front row of the church with her mother and smiled. "That's just Rudy" they will say today.

Right.

--Lucianne Goldberg

-- Lucianne Goldberg (lucianne@New York.City), September 18, 2001

Answers

Once I am mayor, I promise to restore this city to the cess-pool of its former glory.

-- (Mark Green @ Tammany.Hall), September 18, 2001.

The Sept 11 primary election has been rescheduled for Sept 25. Statement by Mark Green.

-- (David Dinkins@DNC.com), September 18, 2001.

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