Word: mayor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jokey mayors used to be all the rage in American cities. I remember Mayor William Schaefer of Baltimore jumping into the seal pool of the National Aquarium to fulfill his promise of what he'd do if the building did not open on schedule. Mayor Schaefer was a character. Mayor Edward Koch of New York was also a character. He once said he wasn't interested in running for Governor because there weren't any decent Chinese restaurants in Albany--a perfect mayor-as-character joke that turned less funny when he decided to run for Governor. In those days...
...many of us who live in New York City did think Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was joking when he said he was cracking down on jaywalking. It was something Humphrey Bogart as a private eye might have said sarcastically to a homicide lieutenant whose guff he did not intend to take ("That's real good, flatfoot, but isn't it about time for you to go out and arrest another nun for jaywalking?"). But then a law student crossing Sixth Avenue got a $50 jaywalking ticket. What we had forgotten was that Mayor Giuliani is never joking...
...prototypical mayor-as-character from the past was Fiorello La Guardia, who was a symbol of the warmth and ebullience associated with New York Italians. Mayor Giuliani has said that he models himself on La Guardia. This must strike many New Yorkers as the equivalent of Kenneth Starr's saying that early in his life he decided to adopt the style and wit of John F. Kennedy: something got lost in the translation. (Those who believe in a just and vengeful God, as Starr apparently does, must have felt the heavens rumble when, around the time the Office...
Giuliani, who may be the only Italian in the Greater New York area with no trace of personal charm, cannot be imagined in La Guardia's most memorable mayor-as-character role--reading the funnies to the city's children during a newspaper strike. We can picture him instead lecturing children about wasting their time on funnies or maybe even arresting them for reading the funnies. We can picture him saying those who disagree with him on the funnies issue are irredeemably corrupt human beings...
...popular mayor. What might be considered the Frank Perdue school of urban analysis holds that Giuliani is popular precisely because New Yorkers, now more optimistic about the possibility that the city might be manageable after all, see him as the sort of person it takes to do the managing--a relentless proctor who is burdened by neither a sense of irony nor a sense of proportion. Once you put yourself in the hands of someone like that, of course, you'd better take care to cross the street only at designated crosswalks...