The Dung Flies in Brooklyn
I would like to change the subject to elephant dung. Big surprise that a
federal judge flung some (metaphorically) at Mayor Giuliani and ordered him to
stop harassing the Brooklyn Museum's fabulous exhibit of body parts and other
really important art. I only wish this strong defense of the museum's First
Amendment rights had come a little earlier, before the whole issue got muddied
up by the disclosure that museum officials were bankrolling the elephant-dung
virgin, et al., by soliciting money from people who stand to profit by its
display. At least I think that's what the museum did; the financial shenanigans
are getting as hard to follow as Whitewater.
In any case, the main thing that the whole flap settled for me was this
question: Who should I vote for in next year's Senate race? I was waffling, you
know, even though I consider myself a good Democrat, because the Clintons, et
al., have become such tasteless parodies of politicians that I was doubting
whether I could pull the lever for Hill. (I call her Hill, because she clearly
wants to be my best friend, what with moving to a New York City suburb to show
that she's just like me and all.) I almost could have seen myself voting for
Giuliani, sending him to Washington where within a week he would get all the
homeless people off the streets, start a nationwide campaign to ticket (or
perhaps cane?) jaywalkers in front of the Smithsonian, and assign the Capitol
security guards to walk neighborhood beats to build up, uh, empathy for the
citizens they encounter.
But then he pulls this: trying to yank a museum's funding because he doesn't
like a picture that's going to be hung on the wall. Here is a man who is
running for the job of lawmaker who clearly has not read one single law ever
written in this country. Con-sti-tu-tion. Sound it out, man. Here is a Senate
candidate who relishes the act of taking patently illegal and morally repulsive
stands. Would this not embarrass me and the other voters from this great state
of New York? I can just see him trying to pass laws requiring men to have crew
cuts (or whatever nutty thing he wants to impose on the world next). I would
like to think that his nutty museum stunt was past of his Senate campaign, an
attempt to appeal to the ... I don't know, the pro-censorship vote? That's
probably a huge demographic. But don't they have enough candidates to choose
among already?
