God Bless Rudy, Our Attack Dog

Last week, as New York and Washington burned and millions wept and prayed, Rudy came on tv and told us we were strong.

This was a man in control of his own authority, in control of his own emotions, in control of the facts. He took to the airwaves every few hours to tell us what he knew and what the system was doing to get us through this wretched time. He was brusque but not rude, swift but not impatient. When reporters asked questions that called for speculation, hypothesis or confirmation of rumor, he politely but firmly refused to answer them. He embraced only facts. He stood up for reason and order.

His name: Rudolph Giuliani.

I know, I know. It seems incredible to me, too. Like so many New Yorkers, I'm deeply skeptical of authority, and quite aware of power's ability to misguide and corrupt those who exercise it. Ever since our bespectacled Republican mayor moved into Gracie Mansion, I've held him up as Exhibit A.

Some of the ugliest fights in my marriage were about Rudy. When he ran for reelection, my wife, who's more liberal in some ways than I am, voted for Rudy. I voted for Ruth Messinger, not because I thought she was a great politician (she struck me as merely competent) but because I wanted to protest Rudy's casual arrogance, his comfort with force, his self-destructive certainty in his own rightness, his determination to transform New York into a stop-and-frisk shopping mall with wall-to-wall superstores, Starbuckses and surveillance cameras. I thought he was an emblem of America's deranged worship of predictability, cleanliness and conformity?a swaggering vice principal who'd inexplicably been placed in command of a major urban center. My wife saw him as a necessary evil, an infuriating emblem of the true price of security; a man who loved the city the way an attack dog loves the house it lives in?and who, like some attack dogs, is guaranteed to bite the wrong person on occasion.

On Tuesday, our appointed president and his handlers rushed away from the devastated East Coast?a tactical maneuver that, in retrospect, seems perfectly sensible, given the attempted assault on Air Force One, but that at the time struck fear into the hearts of every American. Giuliani's first impulse was to move closer to the scene of the crime. He went straight into lower Manhattan, a soot-choked deathtrap where skyscrapers tumbled like sandcastles. It was impulsive, macho, stupid behavior?and you had to love him for it.

My wife was right.

Rudy is brash, arrogant, myopic and tone-deaf. He worships the power of the state like no mayor in modern times. His reflexive defense of the NYPD throughout his reign, even when that organization was accused of the most appalling crimes (Diallo, Dorismond) imaginable, reeked of Nixon and George Wallace. He had no idea how to reach out to anyone but WASPs, Jews and white ethnics, and still doesn't.

His extramarital scandal mellowed him, but not for long, and not by much. Whatever the situation, he still responds by digging in his heels or lashing out. As far as he's concerned, if you're not on the same page as Rudy?screw that; the same paragraph, the same sentence?then you must be stupid, crazy or corrupt.

But no matter how much we hate to admit it, we need people like him.

Watching him travel the length and breadth of lower Manhattan last week, relaying information, calling for calm and frequently yielding the floor to the emotion-choked heads of the police and fire departments, I realized that he's finally attained the greatness he's nakedly chased throughout his professional life.

The aftermath of the bombing distilled his philosophy of power and its proper uses, and clarified his version of native pride and fellow-feeling. Rudy doesn't care about you because you're you. Rudy cares about you only because you're a part of this?his?city.

He has always acted as if an attack on him were an attack on New York; now the terms of that equation have been reversed?and this passionate, deeply flawed man makes sense at last, even to his enemies. Rudy is the guy who gives correct directions to lost tourists when everybody else in earshot either ignores them or shrugs and walks away?and he helps not because he's compassionate (although, at times, he can be) but because he wants the world to know that there is still such a thing as knowing what the hell you're talking about. Rudy is the guy who tells punk kids partying on the street outside your house to shut up and move on because people are trying to sleep here. Rudy is the one person in a crowded restaurant who dares to rush a crazy man with a knife.

One of the planes hijacked last week is rumored to have crashed in Pennsylvania because a few brave and crazy male passengers decided to rush the hijackers and sacrifice hundreds for thousands. I bet Rudy nodded to himself as he read that story.

There's a guy like him in every city, in every neighborhood, on every block. And you're glad.