Edward I. Koch defending George W. Bush?
The former New York City mayor might better use his time other than to protect a sitting U.S. president from a writer’s pen dipped in the ink of the caricaturist. Yet there was Ed Koch squealing as if he had been caricaturized.
It turns out that the octogenarian ex-mayor was enraptured by the sweet musings of the president’s Second Inaugural speech. Even though the administration is squandering U.S. might, wealth and credibility, the sustained Iraq attack appeals to Koch. Squandering resources was a Koch hallmark. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani once called Koch’s City Hall the most corrupt in recent memory.
During Koch’s dozen years in office, there is no record of him ever filling a single pothole in a city landscape endlessly cratered. No rusting bridge was ever rasped or painted during his tenure. No school ever got upgraded. Ditto with health care, as with homelessness, welfare and transportation — to say nothing of the astronomical crime rate.
What Koch is remembered for, by the few who bother, is as a balding zany wandering the city streets asking everyone he met, “How’m I doing?” Fiddling as the city churned, he complained with the citizenry about the multiplicity of problems, without fulfilling his salaried obligation as mayor to solve them. Oh yes, the mayor did eat out at fancy restaurants, favoring Chinese; he attended movies, complaining about ticket prices; and Mayor Koch wrote letters.
This space received its share of such Koch guano back then. He employed the full measure of City Hall to ring down the curtains on our show. Once, during the saga of Bernhard Goetz, the so-called subway vigilante, the mayor almost succeeded, the niceties of press freedom notwithstanding.
Now, he’s at it again.
In a recent letter to Newsday, Koch calls upon “senior editors” to stand with him against the First Amendment and, as always, against common sense: “I was truly shocked to read his column and language describing the president of the United States.”
What “shocked” this aging Nero was the line: “The president was barely in better voice than Rehnquist, with his simian lips tripping workmanlike over his prose.”
“Simian,” Koch was shocked to discover, after a retreat to his Webster’s, means “relating to, characteristic of, or resembling an ape or monkey.”
Once again the former mayor looks at a molehill and sees a race card. “What if a Newsday columnist had referred to the lips of the Revs. Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in that way? There would have been a flood of complaints, pickets . . . cancellations of subscriptions. Rightly so.”
Koch has tried for two decades to get me to apologize to him — even including one of our debates in one of his books. Now, aha, he demands that I “apologize immediately to the president.” Hizzoner, apparently, cannot fix his face for bliss eternal until he wrings an apology from this uppity upstart; if not for himself, then at least for the sitting U.S. president.
Treatment for the former mayor’s current ailment calls not for an apology but an explanation of stereotypes. Indeed, the description of Revs. Sharpton’s and Jackson’s lips as “simian” would likely constitute a stereotype. Just as importantly, such a description would be inaccurate. In the case of President Bush, it is neither.
A negative stereotype, which Koch misjudges, is an exaggerated belief associated with a targeted group and is used to describe a member of that group. Some stereotypes are partly true (thus the exaggeration) and usually cannot be used interchangeably between even targeted groups. Thus, one group may be stereotyped as stingy, smart and given to sharp business practices. Another may be dismissed as violence-prone, lazy and greatly athletic. Transpose the two sets of stereotypes to the other group and you’ll get confusion if not loud laughter.
At the recent Unity conference, African-American journalists listened with amusement as Asian-American journalists complained heatedly about being stereotyped in the newsroom as highly intelligent, passive and hard-working.
Similarly, since the days of American slavery, the power structure has stereotyped blacks under the weight of, among other nasty spikes, the “simian” slur. There is no record of this biting label being used to oppress, crush and ostracize white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males. “Simian,” describing an individual WASP, Ed Koch, is a simple adjective.
Last week again, during his State of the Union address, President Bush’s simian lips tripped workmanlike over his scripted prose.