Late eulogy for Giuliani’s potential presidency
Posted By Sika on February 25, 2008
I am listening to the NYC Live version of Bruce Springsteen singing 41 Shots (American Skin), a song, along with Tuesday Morning* by Melissa Etheridge, guaranteed to make you cry (well, ok, by you I mean me) and make you wonder at how we, as a race of humans, have survived this long. It’s distracting, drawing me as it does away from the lecture I am writing and to my time in
Instead I remember Amadou Diallo and the others who were victimized by the NYPD (who themselves were soon to become heroes) and Rudy Giuliani (who also, and less justifiably, was to become a hero). I remember those months when it seemed that all a black man had to do to get shot to death by the cops (or raped, if he was so lucky not to get killed) was stand in a vestibule.
I remember the confusion in The City, the attempt to understand how it is to be a cop and have one’s life constantly threatened by innocent-looking people, how shooting an unarmed man 41 times could be an accident. And then Rudy Giuliani stepped in and clarified everything. Oh, see, the cops psychically know when a grown black man had a juvenile record. It’s a taint that can never be washed away, no matter how many years of clean living may happen between the child’s indiscretions and the man’s slaughter. It became apparent that no other explanation suited than racism. There were no sincere apologies, no recognition of wrongdoing, as if a sealed juvenile record justifiably sentences a black man to an untimely and awful death. The walls rose once again between races, classes, and neighborhoods, which remain always segregated anyway, so as to provide the bulwark against the prejudices of the city.
I guess what I’m saying is: I’m glad Giuliani isn’t going to be president, and I hope his lackluster showing in the race has rid him of the halo he unjustly appropriated after 9/11.
*A song about the gay guy on Flight 93 on 9/11 whose life for an unknown reason (probably his lack of a 9/11 widow) is less lionized than the others’.
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