THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE (M. Beerbohm 1897)

In my last installment here I brought u the story of two young women in 1991 raped and thrown off a high bridge in St. Louis into the Mississippi River, where they drowned. I forgot to mention anything about their screams, which must have been terrible. I tried the internet for a transcript of the trial of their killers, to see what was said there, but couldn’t find one. I did find some history of the people who stood in silent protest in the usual way when one killer was executed thirteen years later. I am pretty sure they never read the transcript either.

I feel it’s natural to segue from this to discussing a man who, of all the males in this country can be considered as the least likely ever to hold a vigil for a murderer. He is much more suited to be the one escorting the fellow to his appointment in the death chamber. The man I’m talking about is of course Rudy Giuliani, and I believe it’s quite accurate to describe him in this way. People who have actually seen murders don’t usually feel much revulsion at seeing a murderer punished, and Rudy saw hundreds of murders committed in front of him on 9/11.

That’s Rudy’s great strength. He’s a tough guy and isn’t that what America needs? In New York the other day six young men were killed in one morning in separate shootings. Their ages were 21, 23, 24 and 25. In Wisconsin six people were killed in one shooting by a maniac. Third World countries are flooding us with drugs and illegal immigrants. Others are itching to get at us, preferably with nuclear weapons. We’re just too rich to be popular except as prey. A steady hand on the tiller is needed to get us through the breakers.

But Rudy’s in trouble with people who can’t accept his past support of abortion, gay marriage, gun control and I forget what other preoccupations of the American left. Such capers didn’t please his supporters either when he engaged in them, but they weren’t meant to please them, they were meant to appease his opponents. The left, led by the New York Times, hated Giuliani from the start. Leftists are a very powerful and very malignant element in New York. To defy them on their three pet issues is an invitation to them to work up their hate to boiling point and begin an all-out attack meant to embroil him in such melees that it would impair his ability to run the city.

Rudy’s drive to run the city was too strong for him to risk this. It was a lot easier for him to give the radicals the lip service they wanted than to take them on and jeopardize the job he was doing, which only he could do. He put first things first and refused to be diverted by things extraneous. That is my read on his declarations of support for the pet causes of the Times.

From my knowledge of his background, which isn’t so different from my own, I find it hard to believe that he is any kind of an enthusiast for gay rights or abortion or any other progressive panaceas. In other words, conservative voters should just regard his advocacy as simply a demonstration of hypocrisy and not be put off by it from voting for him. They’d better face the fact that Rudy is an opportunist, who is capable of “rowing to his objective with muffled oars” as the saying goes. But he has an objective.

There is no doubt what that is. It’s law and order enforced with an iron hand, his. Men like that, who follow a vision, are all things to all men when it comes to achieving their objective. When Giuliani got into it with Yasser Arafat at Lincoln Center I wouldn’t read about it because I knew it could be nothing but a stunt staged by Rudy to influence the Jewish vote. I believe it also attracted the attention of Osama Bin Laden, with bad results for New York.. But ambitious men do these things. They also tend to make the best presidents and prime ministers and generals.

Speculating on Rudy’s career led me to an analysis of the practices of the two major parties in making their quadrennial clutches at power in Washington. I have a baseball syndrome about this. We fans have an automatic reaction to our team’s postseason results. As soon as his team is eliminated in the playoffs the baseball fan automatically begins to calculate its chances for the next season. It’s genetic. And since I have a sense that Rudy isn’t going to make the White House this time, I took a look at his possibilities for the future.

They would appear to be better in the Democratic party than in the Republican. The Democrats are just more persistent than the Republicans. This tradition began in 1892. Grover Cleveland had been defeated for re-election to the presidency in 1888, but his faithful Democrats nominated him again in ‘92 and waddya know, he won. After that they really got in a groove. In 1896 they nominated William Jennings Bryan, who lost to McKinley. Undiscouraged, they nominated him again in 1900. Same story. He lost to Theodore Roosevelt. This only stimulated them more. They skipped 1904, but in 1908, who do you think they nominated again? That’s right, the indispensable man once more. They were convinced he couldn’t lose a third time, but there it was. Three strikes, he was out.

As a demonstration of party loyalty, all this was above and beyond but there was more to come. From 1932-44 they had a chance to demonstrate it again, this time at no cost to them, because Franklin Roosevelt won all four times. In 1952 and ’56 though, they went back to losing heroically with two nominations of Adlai Stevenson. Since then they have only re-nominated incumbents like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and given losers no second chance. The Republicans have followed the same rule, only once re-nominating a loser, in this case Tom Dewey, who lost big in ‘44 and followed it up by doing the same in’48.

If Rudy runs and loses next year, then 2012 looms ahead. Being the determined kind of fellow he is, I wouldn’t bet against him to lead the ticket again in that year. No more after that, though, unless he wins, of course. If he loses a second time, he probably wouldn’t even want to try again and possibly equal Bryan’s record. That distinction would never do for him. There’s no way that anyone’s ever going to call Mayor Giuliani, America’s pillar of law and order, a…three-time loser.






Designed and Hosted by Online Ontime Ltd.