Rudy Before 9/11

Cintra Wilson remembers what Rudy Giuliani was like before he became "America's mayor," and provides a cautionary tale as he gears up to run for the White House.

There is at least one nice thing one can say about former New York mayor and current Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani -- besides, of course, his penchant for dressing in drag, his love for opera, and the fact that he used to share an apartment with a gay man.

On 9/11, all Americans were frightened children, and in a moment of mythic personal heroism, Mayor Giuliani filled the gaping leadership void. The president looked like a petrified chimp; Cheney was spirited to an underground bunker. Only Giuliani could pull himself together sufficiently to get on TV in the midst of the wreckage and show America that a grown-up was still breathing. On that terrible day our reptile brains looked at Rudy Giuliani and said, "We're OK now. Daddy's home."

And we forgot, some for a moment, some permanently, that Daddy was psycho.

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His political career may have been defined by his willingness to confront scary bogeymen, but during slower periods when there were no obvious villains around, Giuliani's interpretations of who or what constituted an immediate threat became increasingly bizarre, personal, puritanical and dangerous. Before the planes hit, when he had too much power and not enough to do, Giuliani, like an old soldier who comes home and starts abusing his family in lieu of a real enemy, was pulling a Great Santini on New York, rooting around in our sock drawers with a Maglite, looking for vices to confiscate and sins to punish. By the mid-'90s, Mayor Rudy was abusing authority according to the whims of his own paranoid, hyper-defensive personality disorder in way that would have made Tiberius self-conscious.

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In 1999, Giuliani picked his most absurd fight: with the Brooklyn Museum over the art show "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection." Without seeing it, Giuliani became offended by "The Holy Virgin Mary," a now famous painting by Turner Prize-winning-artist Chris Ofili, of a black Madonna, employing the controversial (yet puerile) elements of elephant dung and female genitalia -- ostensibly for shock value. And Rudy, shocked down to his adulterous Underoos, went off on a rampaging fit of Comstockery that made even ardent supporters think he was an overreaching jerkbag.

In a move widely perceived as power drunk and control freaky, Giuliani threatened to close the Brooklyn Museum and cancel its annual funding if the offending painting was not removed. He even issued statements about his intention to establish a "decency panel," granting his office (read: himself) the power to decide what creative works were decent enough to be allowed to be considered art in New York City. When graffiti artist Steve Powers staged a protest by drawing a caricature of Rudy and charging all comers a buck to throw fake elephant poop at it, cops threw him in jail.

The museum, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, countered with a lawsuit, charging Giuliani with violating the First Amendment -- and won. The ruling by federal District Court judge Nina Gershon stated, "There is no federal constitutional issue more grave than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy." Even Rudy's fellow New York City Catholics opposed his actions by 48 to 42 percent -- and Jay Leno, on national TV, compared him to Hitler.

Then, of course, there was the infamous 2001 ferret ban. New Yorkers, as the end of Rudy's reign neared, were half-expecting him to adopt the Singapore model of public canings for spitting and enact a citywide ban on gum.

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America's Mayor may be America's next president, and America's next Angry Daddy. There is no consolation in knowing ahead of time how wrong that could go.

"At the end of the day," predicted Steve Powers, he of the fake elephant poop, "[Rudy will] find a way to screw things up again. He's the victim of his own temper and temperament, especially when he has a real taste of power. Once he treats America like he treated New York and really gets out of hand with it, forget about it."

In my lifetime we've had two presidents -- Nixon and Bush II -- about whom I've truly wondered about their mental state. We don't need a third.