We don’t ordinarily aim to be a political blog here at AHNY, unless the discussion turns somehow to NYC history, culture, or politics.
Given Rudy Giuliani’s special relationship to the city, then, I feel more than justified in saying something about his rabid-attack-doggery last night. In case you couldn’t bring yourself to watch it or read the full transcript, here’s the bit I’m interested in, which came close to the end. It’s from his defense of that extraordinarily experienced executive, Palin. Rudy claims she’s
already had more executive experience than the entire
Democratic ticket combined. (Cheers, applause.) She’s been a mayor.
(Laughter, cheers, applause.) I love that. (Cheers, applause.) I’m
sorry — I’m sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn’t
cosmopolitan enough. (Laughter.)
See, it’s his use of “cosmopolitan” as a pejorative that jumped out at me, probably because one of the biggest arguments Cyrus and I make about NYC — along with historians and commentators like Tom Bender and Marshall Berman — is that NYC offers Americans a model for civil society that’s unique and uniquely appealing precisely because of the possibilities it affords for cosmopolitanism.
For Bender, NYC’s cosmopolitanism is an appealing alternative to national origin myths founded in Puritanism or Jeffersonian agrarianism, which both tend toward xenophobia. For the ever optimistic Berman, even in the face of Giuliani’s Disneyfication of the city, all the corporations in the world won’t be able to eliminate entirely the “complex practice of sharing space,” which is what he believes “gives people ideas, new ideas about how to look and how to move, ideas about being free and being oneself and being with one another.” This is, essentially, the force behind cosmopolitanism, and why such an idea and experience matter to the world we live in.
What it means for this anti-cosmopolitanism to come from a former mayor of New York, then, is that we (meaning Waterman and Patell, but you, too) need to remember to keep the city’s countercosmopolitan moments in view as part of the histories we’re creating. There are lessons to be learned from the history of petty tyrants like Giuliani, who often did seem like a small-town mayor, more concerned about banning ferrets than in taking care of the total citizenry of his cosmopolitan city.
Click here to see a YouTube video of Giuliani’s anti-cosmopolitan crack. The video was shot from behind, giving making Giuliani look even more like a troglodyte than he did on the television broadcast.
The comment was ad-libbed. It doesn’t appear in the transcript that was circulated in advance. It puts me in mind of a comment that Thomas Frank makes in What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004):
In the heat of the moment, desperate to appeal to an overwhelmingly white crowd that has eagerly embraced the small-town values embodied by Sarah Palin, Giuliani disavows his connection to New York City and indeed all of urban America. He transforms “cosmopolitan” into a scare-word. His next comment, which Bryan omitted, serves as an appositive:
“Cosmopolitan,” which signifies toleration, appreciation for difference, respect for humanity, is reduced to “flashy.” The comment suggests that Giulani has never really understood what makes New York special.
Maybe he was pandering. Or maybe the comment came from the heart. As Bryan suggests, there was always something “small-town” about Giuliani, even when he was the mayor of one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.
I’m going to be lecturing on Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism on Monday in my “Conversations of the West” class. For their discussion-section meetings this week, I asked the students to read Tom Bender’s article “New York as a Center of Difference.” So how can I resist showing the clip of Giuliani to illustrate the force of Bender’s argument?
And though he disavowed being “flashy,” Giuliani did enjoy basking in the limelight: he ran thirteen minutes over his allotted, forcing the convention’s producers to cut the video biography of Palin that they were planning show. One of the analysts on CNN or MSNBC (they’re all starting to seem the same to me) commented on how effective the Republican’s staging was in having Palin come out right after Giuliani’s speech with no dilly-dallying. So she has two reasons to thank Giuliani for his asides.