41 MERICA
Green Mayor's Nest
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
NEW York welcomed Mayor John Lindsay by collapsing at his feet. Ten minutes after be assumed command, the Transportation Workers Union struck the subways and the buses; The old order of petty, intermittent disasters had passed; and the approach of terminal catastrophe greeted the new one.
The Mayor began then as one of the great Comic Book Heroes. He walked the seventy blocks from his hotel to City Hall; he laid a special Puritan scorn upon the reference 'un- lawful' strike; he flew in his helicopter over hecatombs of stalled automobiles and dipped low to salute those New Yorkers who trudged across Brooklyn Bridge.
He thanked those last particularly for waving back to him. But it was impossible not to think, for that first day at least, that they were both grateful and surprised. The endurance of the urban catastrophe is the special glory of our otherwise squalid destiny; we are its combat troops and now, at last, in our skies our captain Mr. Lindsay was the great outsider, as all his predecessors survived because they managed to be the great insiders. The leader of the strikers was Michael J. Quill, a valued retainer of the old establishment and a willing participant in its conspiracies, which have always begun with the threat of the worst and ended with the acceptance of the merely bad. But the super-hero is innocent or he is nothing; before Mr. Quill opted for the worst, the Mayor had a chance to reason with him and used it only to remind him of the boys in Vietnam. Sophisticated persons were appalled; they did not even know by now that most New Yorkers would ask Mike Quill to remember Viet- nam if they had just one chance to tell him any- thing. Mayor Lindsay represented them and their sense of the swindle at having been ruled by a generation of fixers; to say something which sounds childish to Michael J. Quill is, by our lights, to have proved oneself innocent of all prior conspiracy.
There was no sign, in his first days as super-hero, that Mayor Lindsay was doing anything to settle the strike, let alone entertain propositions for a fix. Instead. he was with the citizens, everywhere on the outside, broadcasting traffic reports from his helicopter, sleeping on a cot in his office, lead- ing. guiding and inspiriting us, his brother victims. To live in New York is to be guaranteed some- thing dreadful every two months; no politician before Mayor Lindsay had had the wit to remind us that disasters can be fun. Disasters can, he sug- gested, have their rew ards too, Puritan ones, of course. For the first two days the city walked in the hope of an end, all together, sore-footed but balmed at the sight of the stoning of a sinner.
The Supreme Court of the State of New York gave the proper response to Mayor Lindsay's posture, if not his express command, by ordering Quill and his fellow Transport Union officers to prison on the fourth day of the strike. It was, for Quill, the moment Archie Rice plays the Roy al Shakespeare Company. He looked at the reporters and the cameramen and the talkers squatting down and imploring him with their microphones and he smiled and said: 'If it wasn't for them who have gone to jail, half of you would be on home relief. If the Sheriff or his lackey wishes to pick us up at eleven o'clock, he's welcome to it.'
He sat thereafter to wait and `to be dragged from the bargaining table- at eleven o'clock; he had to wait for fifteen minutes while the Sheriff's car was tied up in traffic and the cameramen fought and cursed for places in the squalid pit before him. But he came out at last to the steps of the Hotel Americana and the crowd outside on Sixth Avenue. and Mike Qutll's final sight of the working man of New York was of beasts howling
'Get Quill' and hope you die there' and such like, and he lifted his grey hat and bowed and laughed; but they did not stop and a horrid old rummy kept squawking 'Commie rat' and, as Mike Quill got into the Sheriff's car, a dreadful old woman spat upon it.
And so we had our shared adventure on Monday and our Puritan public pillorying on Tuesday; and then everyone awoke Wednesday to find the day drizzling and dismal, and the thing was a nuisance turning into a bore. The Mayor put away his batmobile and his words of cheer and uplift came less often over the radio; he was trying to negotiate with the union; there were to be no more distractions of theatre; we lan- guished alone and with that feeling of desertion which had always attended our former disasters.
The Mayor had functioned marvellously as politician, a worthy occupation; now he had to function as problem-solver, a crucial one. We had what we had wanted so long—the punish- ment of a miscreant—and things were just as they had always been. The Mayor sat alone, dealing with restless, bitter men, on strike for the first time in their lives and seeming ready to stay out day after worsening day. We are in the tenth day at this writing; Mayor Lindsay has just declared that this is an unlawful strike and he will not capitulate. That is what he had said ten days ago; and the city seems to have rejoiced to hear him just as much now as it did then. Things would never again be managed in New York in the old, corrupt accommodating fashion they had been for so many years. Yet no one seemed to know how they would be managed; the Mayor seemed unable either to fight or to capitulate. We were enduring in the old patient American way —so busy talking about people that it seemed a breach of morality to suggest talking to them.
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