Puerto Rican Day Follies

It could have been worse. One imagines how the Puerto Rican Day parade events would have played themselves out, say, 10 years ago. Ruth Messinger and other politicians would have insisted that the fellows who'd assaulted women in Central Park on Puerto Rican Day were being?naturally?railroaded. The New York Times would have called for "healing," while the criminals themselves would have been invited to speak at commencements. The phrase "The Central Park Uprising" would have circulated among Manhattanites of political virtue.

So perhaps we've got little to complain about. In fact, the media response to the outrageous events that transpired on Puerto Rican Day was at first heartening. It was with surprise that we awoke on the morning of June 14 to find the Times' lead editorial bearing the headline, "The Outrage in Central Park." What, we wondered, had so upset the Times editorial board? Maybe the Park View at the Boathouse had run out of steamed milk, or a "Sunday Styles" reporter had been jostled by a Reagan Democrat while parenting near the 72nd St. Transverse? But in fact the Times editors were actually exercised by?of all things?an act of brutality committed by a rabble, and went so far as to use such words as "mob," "savage" and "horrifying." It had perhaps become, in 2000, possible not only to decry a crime committed by people other than working-class whites, but also to tell the truth about that disgusting parade itself.

Our optimism, however, was misplaced. Weirdly, as The Wall Street Journal explained in a June 15 editorial, the story quickly transformed itself into one about how the police acted insufficiently brutal. Thus the Times, to give only one example, elsewhere in the editorial cited above opined that the NYPD must "punish any [cops] who violated the public trust by ignoring pleas for help."

In the end, this is less a tale of hypocrisy than about a breakdown in political culture?about what happens when dominant political strains become so stale as to not offer reasonable political vocabularies in which to address such sensitive events as the Puerto Rican Day parade crimes. For all that its force has been blunted, urban liberalism persists as one pole of local political discourse. And as the parade events proved, urban liberalism will resort to its most natural reflex: tossing white working-class filth like the cops to the wolves when it's necessary. On the other hand, there's Giuliani's punitive, bullying, authoritarian conservatism, with its shabby appeals to parochial-school morality, its forays into middlebrow esthetics, its stupid machismo, its insistence that cops are near-mystical beings, always and unimpeachably righteous.

A theme in this space has been the Giuliani administration's squandered opportunities, and so we ask again: What would have been possible had the Mayor, in his great success several years ago, humbled himself to listen to the groups he'd vanquished? If he had met with the minority-group leaders he (often justifiably) despised? Doing so would have been no more undignified or dishonest than any of hundreds of other acts he's committed, and that didn't have the virtue of paying a dividend in civic peace. It's possible that nothing would have come of such attempts. But it's also possible that channels of communication might have been established that would have precluded a current situation in which discourse is polarized between two corrupt camps: a defensive, embittered, woodheaded conservatism, and the traditional smarmy Upper West Side creed of hypocrisy we've come to know so well.