At 02:02 PM 10/7/2005, you wrote:
>I fear, Mark, you probably are right on this one.
>
>But it didn't start with Bush vs. Gore. I think you're an old-time New
>Yorker, too.
>
>Who ran against John V. Lindsay in 1965 to become Mayor of New York? I
>just ran a search and nothing turns up. I voted for the man known to some
>of us later as "Pretty John"--my first vote.
>
>Lindsay had everything. He was tall, WASPy looking (he was, and probably
>was the last Episcopalian Mayor New York may ever have:-), he could talk,
>he appeared to have money, he was educated, he wasn't "street"--the last
>might actually have made him appeal to the "street"-level New Yorker in
>the outer boroughs.
>
>The only problem is that Pretty John forever gave me a mistrust for guys
>who look like old time white-man figures of Jesus Christ in Church
>iconography. The bastard signed my paychecks. I worked for the City for
>several months in 1966 and then from early 1968 until September 1969. I
>worked for the Department of Social Services, aka Welfare, El Bienestar
>Publico, and El Welfare. I was stationed in the South Bronx and worked
>"underground" with members of Vista to undermine the system.
>I saw from the inside the kind of "boss" behind the liberal image.
>Basically Lindsay in his dealings with labor was a whore and a bully.
>Too strong? He played to the "minority" consituency at the expense of his
>employees in the uniformed services, the schools, and social services. He
>put our union leaders in jail. And then he turned around and gave us in
>Welfare better contracts than he gave the teachers (this is before Al
>Shanker started WW3). The best deal at the time I believe belonged to
>Sanitation: $23K to START in 1969. Love that garbage.
>
>We undermined the system fer sure dude. We helped coordinate
>demonstrations to bring all the clients up to "standard" on clothing and
>furniture by giving out huge checks for the asking. We were on a campaign
>to bankrupt the City. We were being
>oh-so-subversive-bring-the-Revolution. What we were doing was playing
>into John Vliet Lindsay's hands. He was going to break Welfare and
>reassemble it according to policy wonkism. Was he working within Federal
>guidelines and with the assistance of people in the Nixon
>administration? I don't know. I DO know that when Jack Goldberg, his
>Commissioner of Social Services, went on close-circuit TV one summer
>morning in 1969 and said that the codes for clothing and furniture were
>dead as of an hour ago...well, it was ugly. Resentment and disbelief.
>Clients waiting in the Intake hall, and we had to go down and tell them
>the money stopped. I felt physically endangered.
>
>Probably we all helped set New York up for the 1975 Apocalypse. Abe Beame
>was just the City's Herbert Hoover, the stooge for things that Lindsay
>helped many of us set in motion. No, it wasn't just Welfare, but we helped.
>
>Image. Every so often the jerk did his Louis XIV routine, and the Deluge
>in our time was the 1969 snowstorm where the plows hit our street (West
>92nd) the next morning but didn't seem to touch Queens until the third or
>fourth day. The joke that the New York Mets' improbable and still-fabled
>World Series win against the Baltimore Orioles saved Lindsay's reelection
>campaign may not be a joke. He was getting killed in the outer boroughs,
>needed a miracle, and Gil Hodges handed him one.
>Still...I felt sad for him in 2000 when he died, pretty much forgotten, in
>South Carolina, stone broke and surviving on the charity of friends and
>supporters. The image he gave was so beautiful you wanted to believe it
>was real. It wasn't.
>
>So yes...when Gore appeared I saw another Lindsay. Don't follow leaders,
>watch your parking meters.
>
>It's just that I'm not sure how many people realized how unspeakably
>dishonest Bush and his handlers could be or what a disaster would come in
>behind him. Take a guy not from Central Casting but out of Tod Browning's
>"Freaks" and make him President..."George The Wonder-Ape."
>Why do I get the feeling that both Bush campaigns weren't so much fought
>and won as stage-managed?
>
>I wonder who follows. Hillary the Martha Stewart of Chappaqua? Bill
>Frist the Virgin Surgeon? And Jack Anderson was still right: you can't
>trust them.
>
>Ken
Pray it's not Giuliani, bro.
My feelings are pretty much the same asd yours about Lindsay (born and
raised in Brooklyn, me), ythe only Republican I ever voted for, just before
he bolted and became a Republican. Remember him walking in shirtsleeves
through the night of the harlem riots? Probably the only white guy within a
couple of miles, and a tall target. That was a moment. Years later, after
his political collapse, he passed within inches of me at some event, and it
was astonishing--he was so beautiful he should have been Abe Lincoln
without the warts. But he was just another pretty face.
This has got to be weird to eavesdrop on in Oz.
Mark
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