If I had a black son, I would chain him to the bathroom sink until this senate race blows over. Giuliani's combination of hubris and paranoia is a classic cocktail recipe for terror in the streets. A friend of mine is a black guy from the projects in the Bronx who works construction full time. This is a good guy -- an utterly reformed car thief who hasn't seen the inside of a cell for years. The only problem with him is he's very black and he wears gold jewelry and baggy clothes and he speaks with the accent and slang of a black person from the projects in the Bronx.

You wouldn't think these were good reasons for removing all of his civil liberties, but the other day he was drinking a beer in a paper bag on his stoop and a couple of New York's finest drove up and started yelling at him. He yelled back (it was, after all, his home), and they slammed him up against the car hood and took him to jail for three months on a wholly imaginary parole violation. It was a really shocking degree of harassment, but we were just happy the cops didn't shoot him. One friend commented that NATO really needs to come in and mediate between Giuliani and the African-American people.

Last week, a lovely, well-spoken, white girlfriend of mine with a good corporate job and an MFA was smoking a joint on the street with some friends. This, believe it or not, used to be perfectly OK in New York; the cops had better things to do, they would "not see" you. Everyone knew the pot laws were cryptic fiscal nonsense and the legal layover of assorted zealous right-wing anxieties, and the cops would mostly leave you alone, unless you were really obnoxious about it. Anyway, my friend was caught smoking pot. She was handcuffed, taken to the Tombs, strip-searched twice and left in a cell with no food but two apples, no water and no phone call for 18 hours. Since it is not actually legal for cops to take you to jail and detain you over less than half a joint, the charges were dropped, but this is apparently a new routine NYPD tactic -- you can't prosecute the police for misconduct unless you want to open your own case back up, which in today's ridiculously fundamentalist devil-purging atmosphere is tantamount to job suicide. It turns out that quite a few people in my extended social strata have had similar episodes.

It depresses me that the forces of Importance and Power in the world have utterly lost contact with any soul or resonance; the icon is worshipped above and instead of the Holy Idea, the tits are revered above and instead of the talent. I am so sick of America's weird, puritanical hypocrisy and the hysteria it generates. I am so sick of the corpse-sucking human voles that use this hysteria to get seats in the Senate.

Come see my Giuliani campaign poster -- it's like one of those billowing totalitarian Mao banners, but it's more like a Pietà, in that it is a bright, loving portrait of Rudy and his own mother, naked, and she is giving him what the shit-sex fetish underground refers to as a "Cleveland Steamer." It's art, baby. Real art.

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