9/11: The Fall of 'America's Mayor'
The sweaty man suspended from practicing law — because the New York State appellate court found he sought to mislead judges — and now hawking gold futures and conspiracy theories in YouTube videos and on right-wing radio used to be “America’s Mayor.” On this 20th anniversary of New York’s worst day, when the city is in the midst of another crisis, this one not a crash and collapse completed in 102 minutes but a slow-rolling disaster, it’s impossible not to look again on Rudy Giuliani.
In the image he’s burnished for 20 years, he is covered in that sickly grey-white dust, the fitted Yankees cap pulled tight over his pate, walking purposefully up West Street, a cloud of collapsing tower behind him. While George W. Bush was flown in circles seeking safety — offline and unreachable by the press for several hours after the attacks — Rudy was on the scene, as he’d been at so many fires, water-main breaks, snowstorms, and parades. Twenty years later, he’s still struggling through that cloud of death, perhaps more consumed by it now than then. On 9/11, even critics of Rudy’s mean-spirited mayoralty ceded that he was Churchillian, offering surety to a shaken city. But so many “What happened to Rudy?” stories have been written by now that we’re panning already-sifted fool’s gold, the last bits of the reputation of a man who long ago became so much smaller than himself. These pieces all feel like eulogies for Rudy. But Rudy didn’t die. A different New York did.
Whatever relevance he held into the Trump years was the flickering half-life of prestige earned on September 11. That itself was a reinvention. On September 10, 2001, Rudy Giuliani was a lame-duck mayor who’d scuttled a U.S. Senate run the year before as his marriage and health imploded. His political career was at an end. He had dismal approval ratings among New Yorkers, who had long since soured on his peevishness, brownshirt disregard for civil liberties, and compulsion to throw oil on the fires of racial discord. As Rudy, in his first term and emboldened by the “Gingrich revolution” of 1994, rolled out one cruel and dehumanizing policy after another, these pages and the lips of many an outraged New Yorker cried fascism. Little did we know. On September 10, New Yorkers were ready for Rudy to exit stage right.
Then the planes hit.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/09/10/9-11-the-fall-of-americas-mayor/
= new reply since forum marked as read
