Truemors
The Rudy Schema: National Disasters Play Well In Florida
by Timothy Holland
email: prof.holland@gmail.com
Rudy Giuliani showed very little concern for the Iowa caucus and all but ran to his southbound plane with 9% of the vote in New Hampshire Tuesday night. Giuliani is placing his eggs in the Florida-and-beyond basket and we will have to wait until January 29th to see if his campaign strategy has any merit. If voter interest matches his convictions in Florida, it will likely be because he was the mayor of New York on September 11, 2001, and he will not let us forget it. During Saturday's debate, Guiliani sounded more like a record skipping on the turntable of the GOP's Lower East Side: "9/11...9/11...Ronald Reagan...9/11," etc.
September 11 was paradoxically the best thing to ever happen to Rudolph Giuliani. I say paradoxically not because it was a day of mass and horrifying murder, but because of the events that transpired in these interesting years that followed. His campaign ideology could be described as some kind of twisted pragmatism, if we are feeling generous. If, however, we are willing to be less diplomatic, we can call it what it is—pathological opportunism. I say it because of the inherent irony that Giuliani has been able to capitalize on a tragedy and the mistakes that followed it. Until now, that is. It will be interesting to see if the people in Florida and beyond collectively agree to buy in to this line of thinking. It won't be long until the former mayor of New York hires morphologists and phraseologists to invent new ways of using 9/11 in order to avoid ruining its meaning and impact by virtue of overuse.
Soon, it will be a verb. Perhaps Rudy Giuliani can "9/11 his way to the presidency." Perhaps, if he and his team of linguists are exceedingly prolific, it will become a gerund: "9/11ing is no laughing matter." Although, I doubt it. Giuliani probably won't get the stomping he deserves in Florida, but he will definitely get it and for all the wrong reasons.
He will be beaten so badly on February 5th he will have to move through the rest of the month on all bruised fours and by the end of March he will have to roll himself Westward like a baby who has not yet learned to walk, trying to move from one end of a crib full of crumbs to the other. That is, of course, if he doesn't drop out altogether. The Southern and Midwestern heart does not easily warm to a non-Anglo New Yorker with liberal social values and an expensive mistress. Giuliani's running for the presidency on the basis of 9/11 isn't entirely unlike a prostitute running for Head Madam in a whorehouse on account of having contracted the worst case of the clap in modern history. It is generally odd, but we are living in odd times. It seems far more logical for him to run on his successful efforts to reduce crime in New York City and his hiring of innovative criminologists, but everyone seems to remember that Giuliani as the parent who crashed into the party and ruined fun for everyone and we are not living in logical times. It was under Giuliani's watchdog eyes that the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993 and it was Giuliani who subsequently placed his state-of-the-art emergency command center in Building 7, rendering it useless during the attacks of September 11, 2001.
It is unfair to blame Rudolph Giuliani for either of these events, but is it necessarily fair to applaud him? And if so, what exactly is it that we are applauding? He was there, of course, and he didn't take a twenty-minute break to read a few passages from "The Pet Goat," but have these really become the qualifications for the presidency? I, too, was downtown on that day, covered in ash and concrete dust and far from any children's books, but I didn't feel it qualified me for anything more than 45 minutes a week with a therapist and a tall glass of whiskey. Maybe that's one difference between us, but it's not the one that keeps him from my kitchen. More importantly, however, and for other reasons entirely, it will not be enough to win him the nomination, much less the general election. Giuliani's political days are numbered and when he rolls his way back home to the city he exploited it will be a very small inner-circle of lawyers, accountants and thugs that are waiting there to welcome him.
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