MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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The wife and I are going to New York City for a weekend. It's been six years since the last time we set foot in the Big Rotten Apple.
"Oh, you won't believe how much the city has changed since then!" The hotel reservations clerk is positively gushing with excitement over the new and improved Fun City. "The subways are so clean and as for Times Square...well, they've just ran out all the drugs and hookers. You won't recognize it."
Is that a fact?
Humph. Guess it would burst the clerk's enthusiasms if I told him how I kind of liked the sin, smut and scuzziness of Times Square. For a writer strolling along grubby 42nd Street on a hot Friday night the creative juices would start flowing like a ripe orange. Forget about the danger and think about the fun. Of course you had to put on your best "street face" and walk like you knew where you were going to avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous situations. But that was just part of the NY experience. Yeah, it was nasty and trashy, but there was something alluring in the City's split personality of lavish elegance and sordid impurity.
But out with the decrepit and disreputable is the way of the world in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's town. Hire a ex-federal prosecutor as the CEO of the nation's biggest city and what you get is someone with a sledghammer approach to politics. Giuliani has remade New York into a tourist - friendly burg where the cabbies are supposed to be polite and the street people have been shuffled off to more hospitable climes. Or so it is said.
Not that means anything to me as a Black man. I'm not a West Indian immigrant, don't own a beeper and don't hang out in after-hours dance clubs, so I feel reasonably certain I won't have any close encounters of the worst kind with the New York police force.
However, it doesn't matter much if you're dressed to the nines looking harmless, corporate and every inch a non - threatening Negroid in New York City. Just being Black can be enough to convince a cop you should be stopped and show identification if he or she happens to be in the mood.
I regard cops as basically good human beings doing a job that alternates between long stretches of tedious routines and boredom, set off by moments of horror, fear, anger, aggression and adrenalin. Which of those motivated Officer Justin Volpe when he sodomized Abner Louima with a toilet plunger is anybody's guess...
If any of those emotions set off the officers who emptied 41 shots in the general direction of Amadou Diallo is something that may come out during their respective trials. Rudy G. has gone out of his way not to be critical of the cops. He is betting that his hard ass image is going to make him, not Hillary Clinton, the next U.S. Senator from New York.
Giuliani is savvy enough to know that every now and then you've got to show
you're in charge and everything's under control. Just as presidents need to have their very own little wars, ambitious politicians such as Mayor Giuliani enjoy flexing their muscles and stomping down hard on those pesky minority groups. Split a few skulls, spill a little blood and just keep the city clean for the paying tourists.
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"The Lion King" is playing on Broadway. Just another manifestation of the Disney empire creeping in and possessing everything it touches. Not even the squalor of old Times Square can resist the power of Mickey Mouse. Giuliani, through force of will and a delusion of the absolute rightness of what he does, did what many thought could never be done: he's made the toughest
town in America into just another family-friendly shopping mall. At least, that's what everyone tells me. Something may have been lost in the process and it may have been increasing the comfort of yuppies and businessmen at the expense of Blacks, Latinos and anyone that looks the least bit greasy and non-conformist.
Or so it is said by those in the know.
Used to be it was the thugs and riff-raff lowlifes you had to be cautious over. This time it's the supposed "good guys" that give me reason to pause. Depending on your skin color, Mayor Giuliani will gladly accept all of the credit and none of the blame.
"Yes! Mayor Giuliani really has made this city cleaner and safer. Are you bringing your kids? You can go to 42nd Street and all the pornography, prostitutes, pimps and crime is gone. Swept away like garbage. Mr. Winbush, you're not going to believe how much the city has changed."
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There's a certain amount of excitement and unease as we ready ourselves for our flight into LaGuardia Airport. Never too far from the back of my mind is this nagging thought: "Just how much has changed and how much has stayed exactly the same as it ever was."
Most travelers have enough to worry about. Will I have a good flight? Will my bags be at the same airport I'm at. Hope I don't get gouged by a unscrupulous cab driver bringing me into town with a side trip to New Jersey. Did I bring enough money or is my credit card at its limit? How are the kids back home? Did I leave the air conditioning on in the house? With all that crap to worry about, should anyone have to fear a random act of police brutality, too? Being a tourist doesn't bother me. Do I have to feel like a moving target as well?
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