Woman Bites Cop
But what about women who marry men to whom they wouldn't deign to speak if
the men in question weren't (check one) funny or charming or driving a Corvette
or head of the firm or the best bowler in the league? I mean, I wouldn't even
have known anyone I was ever in love with if the men in question were
"mere wage-earners," and I once lost all interest in someone because I didn't
like his writing. Which I didn't read until it was a little too late.
No, I did not vote for Giuliani for mayor. I didn't vote at all in that
election. I couldn't. My sister Delia didn't vote either, and turned it into a
very funny scene in You've Got Mail , where Meg Ryan starts a fight with
Greg Kinnear by announcing that instead of voting in that election, she went to
get a manicure.
I think Rudy's a great mayor, by the way, and a city probably needs a
Fascist to run it, etc. But a close woman friend of mine was jumped by the
police and arrested and held for almost 24 hours in prison in a case of
completely mistaken identity; the charges were dropped, after months of trauma
for her and astronomical legal fees. The episode made me conscious, in a way I
might never have been (but any black person is), of what the cost of all this
zero tolerance is. My husband says that one of the side-effects of this lower
crime rate is that police are arresting fewer people because so many criminals
are already locked up. But promotions are based on the number of arrests, so
the cops are under increased pressure to arrest people-and sometimes that
pressure causes them to try to escalate a misdemeanor into a felony. My friend
who was arrested, for example, was not charged with the thing she was jumped
for-drug dealing, which she was completely innocent of-but of resisting arrest.
She did resist arrest, by the way; the cop was in plainclothes, and she had no
idea he even was a cop, so she bit him.
I feel bad about East Timor, a place I had never heard of. These things
happen: You see the headline, and you think, please let this go away, please
don't make me have to learn about yet another place I have never heard of, and
then it doesn't. It took me weeks before I realized that Kosovo wasn't exactly
Bosnia. I am glad to talk about it if you insist. You first, though.
Meanwhile, here's a truly disturbing trend: Waiters in restaurants have now
taken to not writing down your order. Is this yet another plot to make those of
us with short-term memory loss feel bad about it? Or is it just another bad
development in restaurant life, like those horrible little designs made of
chocolate syrup on the dessert plate?
