NEW YORK CITY—"NO DANCING," reads the sign behind the bar.

No, this is not some kitschy 19th-century relic, like the New Orleans police's "Beware of Pickpockets and Loose Women" signs they sell on Bourbon Street. It's the law in New York City, as revived by now-departing Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Specifically, it's a Prohibition-era cabaret law that bans dancing in bars without a license for it—ostensibly to suppress speakeasies, but particularly aimed at jazz clubs, as it was always easier to get a live-music license for a string quartet than for horns and drums. By the '60s, it was only used against gay bars, and that era ended shortly before closing time on June 27, 1969, when a drag queen called Tammy Novak kicked a cop in the balls during a raid on the Stonewall Inn.

Giuliani—lionized as the mayor who "saved" New York—resurrected the cabaret law. In the summer of 1998, 70 cops invaded Coney Island High, an East Village glam/punk-rock club, to shut down a Saturday night dance party. Neighborhood bars have been fined $1,500 because people were dancing to the jukebox.

So some of us who actually live here have a bit of a problem with the mayor's canonization since September 11. All he did was act like a compassionate human being for a few weeks after the attacks—admittedly, quite a feat for a man who announced his plans for divorce on TV before he told his wife—and people were calling him a hero, the white knight "Sir Rudy," "America's Mayor." Some urged that the city's term-limits law be annulled so he could rule for four more years, and Giuliani himself demanded a three-month term extension after the attacks, as if he were the only one competent to run the city.

A Pattern of Prejudice

"Racist" and "fascist" are not words too strong to describe him. Giuliani refused to meet with any black or Latino elected officials—not the borough presidents of the Bronx or Manhattan, not state Controller Carl McCall, not leading members of the City Council—until after the 41-shot police killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999. He consistently played to the worst stereotypes: City University students are semiliterates only in college by the grace of affirmative action; taxi drivers are unwashed wogs out to bilk tourists, etc.

The no-dancing law was just one of scores of petty-fascist initiatives Giuliani has enforced. A 1995 ordinance makes it a misdemeanor for a group of 20 or more people to be in a city park without a permit—so far, it's only been enforced against witches, rappers, and Lower East Side squatter supporters. He exploded the war on pot-smokers; marijuana arrests increased from 7,000 in 1993 to 70,000 in 2000, more than 80% for possession and more than 80% black or Latino.

And police often almost outnumber protesters at political demonstrations, bringing helicopters and bunches of plastic handcuffs to even the most peaceful rallies.When black supremacist Khalid Muhammad held a march in central Harlem in 1998, Giuliani cut off subway service to the neighborhood for the afternoon.

"Freedom is about authority," Giuliani said in 1994. "Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."

Still, the city's establishment hailed him as the savior who tamed the "ungovernable" city, and Giuliani drew around 70% of the white vote in all three of his mayoral races.

But what the quality-of-life tactics—attacks on pot-smoking, public drinking, the homeless, squeegee men, etc.—did accomplish was to ease white people's perceptions of crime. Many better-off whites seem to lose control of their bowels when they see three black youths together on the street. Others want the homeless off the streets because they're "ugly."

Some of Giuliani's most ardent defenders are the kind of white people who take cabs everywhere rather than ride the subway, although the subway is one of the safest places in the city. (Giuliani's campaign to replace Yankee Stadium was largely based on suburbanites' fear of going to the South Bronx—but you're probably way safer flashing a Rolex on 161st Street than you'd be wearing a Red Sox cap in the Stadium's bleachers.)

Meanwhile, black New Yorkers' opinion was perhaps summed up most succinctly by a teenager at the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn on Labor Day: "Fuck Giuliani," he exulted. "Term limits, motherfucker!"

The map of mayoral voting patterns almost perfectly matches the city's racial map. (With its large Latino and Asian population, New York is less segregated than Washington or Detroit, but racially mixed neighborhoods-especially ones where blacks and whites live together-are rare, and many are falling to the ethnic bleaching of gentrification.) Giuliani got over 80% of the vote in hardcore white areas like Bensonhurst in Brooklyn and Glendale in Queens, less than 15% in most black districts,
and generally around one-third in Latino neighborhoods.

White Giuliani supporters were perfectly content to accept a little police brutality as long as crime was down. Giuliani was easily re-elected in 1997, a year after a rogue Bronx cop strangled Anthony Baez for accidentally hitting his car with a football pass, and less than three months after a Brooklyn officer shoved a broomstick up Abner Louima's ass.

That support cracked slightly after the Diallo killing, and significantly after Patrick Dorismond was shot by another cop in March 2000. Dorismond told an undercover cop who asked him if he was selling any pot something along the lines of "get the fuck out of here," and was killed in the ensuing fight. Giuliani revealed the victim's sealed juvenile record, and declared that he was "no altar boy." He was severely embarrassed when it turned out that although his arrest record indicated a temper, Dorismond really had been an altar boy.

By then, even white New Yorkers seemed weary of Giuliani's pure-bully personal style. He proclaimed himself the patron of "civility," but couldn't disagree with someone without denouncing them as "jerky" or "intellectually dishonest." When City University students protested budget cuts and tuition increases, he said they should go home and learn how to spell. (Some picket signs had called him "Guiliani"—a mistake occasionally made by headline writers at all four of the city's daily newspapers.)

In 1995, he sent a tank in to evict squatters from three abandoned buildings they'd been renovating for a decade. In the fall of 1999, he made it illegal for homeless people to sleep on the streets, and moved to put their children into foster care. "If Giuliani had been mayor of Bethlehem," the Rev. Al Sharpton thundered at a Union Square rally that December, "they would have put the baby Jesus into foster care."

But like most bullies, he didn't stand up to those bigger than he. He refused to argue for more federal and state aid for the city's chronically underfunded public schools; at one point, he actually asked the state for less school aid. The main thing he did about the city's school system was sling insults at its staff.

When the Republicans in state government tried to repeal the state's rent-control laws in 1997, threatening millions of city residents with eviction, Giuliani tiptoed into Albany late on a Friday aftenoon to whisper that he supported rent regulations.

Given his record on housing issues—he named anti-rent-control ideologues to the city Rent Guidelines Board, which sets permissible increases for 1 million of the city's apartments, and took millions in campaign money from landlords—repeal probably would have suited him fine. But especially in an election year, supporting it would have been political suicide. He endorsed the eventual compromise, which basically gutted rent controls on vacant apartments, and settled for using the rent board as a rubber stamp to impose the biggest rent increases possible without causing him political damage.

The result: The city's housing crisis, brewing ever since the greed-is-good speculation of the Reagan economy followed the massive building abandonment of the '70s, is now boiling. In the last four years it's become next to impossible to find an apartment for less than $1,000 a month, outside a few ghetto neighborhoods. People under 35 may be accustomed to seeing the homeless as part of the landscape, but there was little homelessness in New York—or any other American city—until the housing-cost explosion of the '80s.

"Between money and Giuliani, it fucked everything up," laments a Lower East Side rock-club owner.

What next? Giuliani's political stock, once moribund due to his flaunted extramarital affairs and aborted Senate race, now is high. He may well get a law-enforcement or national-security job in the Bush administration. The prospect of Freedom-Is-About-Authority Rudy teaming up with Mullah Ashcroft of the Missouri Taliban to replace the Bill of Rights with a revived Cointelpro is truly scary.

John Ashcroft doesn't believe in dancing either.

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