The local TV news here in New York City never changes. A typical newscast leads with one of three stories: a sexual or drug-related abuse of power by a low-ranking school official; a shooting death, either of a highly-decorated member of the police force or of a cherubic child; or the latest stupidity perpetrated by one of the Gottis on the taxpayer dime. The WB affiliate follows the crime scene du jour with a puff piece on one of the WB teens, while the other affiliates muse soberly on the effect of a tragedy elsewhere in the world on the expatriate community of that country here in New York, meaning that if, say, Fidel Castro comes down with a cold, whichever poor bastard drew the short straw in the newsroom has to troop out to a Cuban restaurant in Far Rockaway and interview the patrons. After the commercial break comes a scarifying report on the health hazards of heretofore-innocuous household devices, and the ability of the anchors to deliver, with straight faces, absurd copy like “how your washing machine could become – A HIDDEN DEATH TRAP” and “the macramÈ wall-hanging you don’t know – COULD KILL YOU” never ceases to amaze and delight. Next up: the riddled-with-awful-puns sports segment, and the weather report, nearly Delphic in the vagueness of its predictions. The broadcast ends with a “wacky” video clip, usually of an area pet misbehaving, and the anchors crack up dutifully despite the fact that the “Laughter: The Best Medicine” page of a 1967 Reader’s Digest contains more hilarity.

On occasion, though, a single story dominates the newscast – the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Floyd on New Jersey, for example, or Rudy Giuliani‘s latest fit of pique. For a man in charge of the biggest and most fractious city in the country, Giuliani has an awful lot of free time to devote to non-issues like jaywalking, pretzel vendors, and painting with blobs of elephant poo on them. As I said before, nothing about the local news changes, and that includes Giuliani; throughout my childhood, Bill Beutel delivered the top stories for the ABC affiliate, and he still does. Throughout my childhood, Frank Field and his son Storm kept an eye on approaching thunderstorms, and Storm still does. And throughout my childhood, Rudy Giuliani – the US Attorney for the District of New York at that time – held press conferences and fulminated in the general direction of crime, and he still does. Unfortunately, he does it from the mayor’s office now, and just as unfortunately, his definition of “crime” has expanded from “acts in violation of the law” to include “acts with which he disagrees in principle.” Giuliani’s most recent target: the Brooklyn Museum of Art‘s “Sensation” exhibit, which among other works contains a portrait of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung and a cow suspended in formaldehyde. The mayor found these pieces disgusting and offensive, and he did not believe they qualified as art, so he set out to revoke the BMA’s city funding and to ensure that the BMA lost its city charter and its state and federal funding as well.

“Giuliani Versus The Art World” has commanded headlines for well over a week now. Giuliani gets big laughs with his “if I can do it, it isn’t art” line at Republican fund-raisers, while his opponents draw nods of self-righteous approval from the ACLU crowd by thundering that the mayor’s actions constitute a clear violation of the First Amendment. I personally find Giuliani’s bully tactics ignorant, short-sighted, and overly theatrical. It offends me that an elected official has seen fit to waste his time and my tax dollars on what amounts to little more than a pissing contest, when more than a few children in the city do not have school textbooks and hot lunches. It annoys me that, after half a dozen years in office, the mayor still has not learned to pick his battles, or to lose the occasional one gracefully. Moreover, Giuliani knows from art criticism like I know from sub-nuclear physics. Based on the homely woolly comb-over and the cheap-ass shiny suits I’ve seen him sporting since the beginning of time, I wouldn’t put that guy in charge of curating himself, but I have to listen to him slinging a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit about morality and art, and it sickens me. The man needs medication, and he needs to shut up.

But.

Much though it pains me to defend the mayor, Giuliani’s attempts to shut down the BMA don’t technically put him afoul of the First Amendment. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Of course, the drafters of the Constitution intended for the provisions in the Bill Of Rights to extend to state and municipal government as well, but still Giuliani has not acted unconstitutionally. Neither Congress, nor the state assembly of New York, nor the New York city council has passed any law or measure prohibiting “Sensation” from appearing, or preventing patrons from viewing the exhibit, or barring the press from discussing the exhibit or reproducing the works therein. (Giuliani’s haranguing has naturally had the opposite of its intended effect. Hordes of people attended the show over the weekend, and everyone else in the city has seen the offending works on the news dozens of times by now.) Strictly speaking, the BMA has not suffered a violation or suspension of its constitutional rights. The difference between expressly prohibiting the BMA from showing “Sensation” (or, more radically, closing the museum down altogether) and refusing to allocate the government funds that the BMA relies on to show “Sensation” might seem like a semantic quibble. After all, the two things may well have the same result; stopping the grants that allow BAM to survive might force the museum to close. Again, though, the government has the right to do that. The government may legally cut off a museum’s fiscal air supply as long as it does not interfere directly with the artist or the disportment of the show and you’d better believe that Giuliani knows exactly what he can get away with. Remember, he used to make his living as a lawyer, and if anyone knows precisely how far to take weaselly behavior without breaking any laws, a lawyer does.

On the other hand, Giuliani now makes his living as a politician. An effective politician understands that he must avoid the appearance of impropriety as scrupulously as he avoids the improprieties themselves. Giuliani, however, obstinately refuses to concern himself with appearances. Expressing his opinion, and imbuing it with the force of his office, matters far more to him than the views of his constituents, and he doesn’t seem to mind behaving like an utter jackass if he thinks he’ll get his way. Most of the time, we just shake our heads and wait for him to get his knickers in a twist about something else, which he inevitably does, but this time, he has a more unattractive agenda than his customary psychotic nitpicking. As Salon columnist Bruce Shapiro pointed out, Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph “Piss Christ” is on display at the Whitney Museum Of American Art. Why hasn’t Giuliani denounced the Whitney for mounting the same photo that threw Jesse Helms into such an anti-NEA tizzy? It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the chairman of the Whitney’s board contributes a great deal of money to Giuliani’s Senate campaign, could it? Of course it could, and of course it does. Giuliani didn’t want to offend a major donor, so he did what he thought he had to do to court the prurient-fascist vote while simultaneously avoiding a blanket indictment of all offensive works of art.

I know how politics, and politicians, work. I didn’t just tumble off the back of the turnip truck or anything. But I must say, strange as it sounds, that I expected better of Giuliani. I regret voting for the guy, I strongly dislike him, and he is absolutely guilty of arrogance, defensiveness, grandstanding, micromanaging, and just about every other abrasive personality trait ever ascribed to him, plus a few that he probably saves for his wife. But before the BMA battle, I never doubted his sincerity. I thought he needed extensive anger-management therapy, and possibly a dosage schedule of Thorazine, and he would get his dander up over crap so insignificant that even I wouldn’t bother bitching about it, but at least I believed him. I believed he genuinely despised jaywalking. I believed he felt honestly offended by the fruit-cart guys. The Dudley Do-Right vibe got on my nerves, not to mention his need to take credit for successes he himself hadn’t achieved, but I also believed that he probably suffered from paranoid delusions, so I couldn’t hold him entirely responsible for his operatic freak-outs. But Giuliani’s anti-BMA crusade has made it all too clear that he does recognize the effects of his behavior, but he’s elected not to care, and as a result he doesn’t have any mitigating factors left. The mayor isn’t a pitiable tantrum-throwing mutant after all – he’s an out-and-out asshole just like the rest of them, and the contrived and cynical shit coming out of his mouth smells far worse than anything on the BMA’s walls.

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