New York Press on Hillary/Mike Moran/Concert for New York

The best speech given during Saturday's "Concert for the City of New York" was by firefighter Mike Moran. Moran was allowed to read off a list of some of his fallen comrades, and before some nerdy p.a. could hustle him off the stage Moran bellowed, "And this is to Osama bin Laden: You can kiss my Royal Irish ass!" The civil servants in the front rows went wild. Moran then ripped off his firefighter dress cap, stuck his beefy Irish face into the camera, and with a wicked working class outer-borough accent said, "And I'm Mike Moran and I live in Rockaway, bitch!"

I fell off my chair cheering for Moran. So much else about this concert—for all its good intentions—didn't really give a voice to the cops, firemen, EMT workers and the families of the victims. Celebrities and other fugazi dignitaries ruled the stage until Moran seized the moment. And good for him. He said something that needed to be said.

I'll concede that some of the music was right on the money. It was great to hear Bowie's “Heroes.” Even though the Who looked like drunken old men, they played the hell out of “Baba O'Reilly” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” But did we really need lightweights like Hilary Swank talking with her arms around an EMT worker while the poor guy shuffled uncomfortably? Swank was treating him like a pet monkey. After a while it became painful to watch as they trotted up orphans and widows to stare into the camera like deer until one of them was allowed to say what the next act was. Why not let them speak? Who really cares what Richard Gere has to say about anything?

Hillary Clinton proved why she is such a hateful person. She took the stage to boos and instead of pausing and saying something heartfelt about the victims—which would have stopped or at least quieted the booing—she bellowed right through her lines and got the hell out of there. Her husband came on later to a lukewarm reception, but Slick Willie knows how to work a crowd. He grabbed a firefighter hat and thanked the boys for always doing right by him. He left to cheers—and probably to a cold reception from Hillary for upstaging her once again.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who almost wept with joy upon opening up the Drudge Report last night and reading that Hillary Clinton had been viciously booed, jeered and imprecated by the cops and the firemen who packed Madison Square Garden for the all-star benefit concert on Saturday night. How just that this wretch should be treated thus in public. This was as close as we’ll come these days to tarring and feathering a villain, propping her up backwards on a jackass and running her out of town.

It does occur to me, however, that this current cultural moment—this moment during which the best, coolest thing you can be in New York is a burly firemen, or else one of the prole cops whom, as recently as early September in some of the more ideologically refined neighborhoods, it was customary to despise—isn’t going to last much longer. Today’s New York Post reports: “Wild applause shook Madison Square Garden when Michael Moran, 38, delivered his in-your-face patriotic message to the terror chief: ‘Kiss my royal Irish ass!’” (Moran, the Post explains, lost his brother, also a firemen, on Sept. 11.) The Post subsequently asked Moran what he’d do if he encountered bin Laden in an alley. “I’d put my hands around his throat and bite off his nose,” the fireman replied.

It’s going to be interesting to see how long the New York City ruling class puts up with this sort of thing: firemen running around using salty dialect in public and threatening men of color with violence from the Madison Square Garden stage; Irish proletarian behemoths acting all uppity about themselves, swaggering from their traditional reservations in Staten Island and the Yankee Stadium bleachers to impose themselves on the genteel consciousness; working-class cops getting photographed for Vanity Fair and laid every time they walk into a bar. Had Moran threatened to corporally punish bin Laden on Sept. 10, Hillary Clinton would have denounced him, in her Midwestern drone, as a genocidal racist, Mark Green would have suggested prosecuting him in accordance with federal hate-crimes statutes and a deputation of the more freethinking bourgeoisie would have picketed his firehouse and screamed insults at him every time he rolled out of the station on his truck. He might have been forced to attend a course in sensitivity training.

How long can this inversion of the New York social order—the cops are more beloved than Hillary Clinton, and get to swear at her; the firemen are onstage with Michael J. Fox—last in New York? Barring another disaster in which the NYPD and FDNY once again prove indispensable (and obviously such a disaster is a real possibility), probably not much longer. Come January, Mayor Green slithers into Gracie Mansion and a more familiar social reality reasserts itself. Open contempt for the working-class mopes of the police force will once again become appropriate among the haute bourgeoisie, and kids in some of the more forlorn neighborhoods will resume heaving cinderblocks at firemen from the tenement rooftops. The white proletariat will retreat back to the margins, and we’ll hear little about it, except when it misbehaves, or when one of its members needs to be sacrificed to the racial arsonists. It might become clear that firefighter Michael Moran was pushing his luck all along—was, when he mouthed off onstage at Madison Square Garden, just a minute shy of overstaying his welcome.

Not many people stop to ponder the plight of the fag hag, the forlorn heterosexual woman who finds the company of gay men preferable. But for those who do, Charlie LeDuff’s article in the Sunday New York Times “City” section about a woman who, according to the title, “likes firemen,” ought to provide a strange cross-cultural connection. In the article, LeDuff writes of Leah Gray, whose brother-in-law disappeared at the World Trade Center on 9/11, attending a reception celebrating his life. According to LeDuff, Gray “possesses those qualities that firemen say they desire in a woman: a coltish streak, an ear for good conversation, a biting sense of humor... She is a musician, an actress and single... She likes whiskey... There was something more than physical beauty that attracted them [the firemen]: a solidity, a sympathy and a spine.”

Would we think any less of the firemen if it all came down to a pussy and a pulse? I mean no disrespect to Gray or the firemen; they were simply going about their lives when a reporter chose to mythologize them in a highly manipulative manner more akin to puff pieces on rock stars and professional athletes. Do these men need to be mythologized at all, especially by a media that didn’t seem to care all that much about them before all this?

About the most encouraging media reference to firemen I’ve seen in the past few months was simply the sight of so many of them rocking out and having a ball in the front rows of Saturday night’s “Concert for New York” at Madison Square Garden. Something tells me they needed that after endless days of scouring rubble, where the highlight was finding a body part, and the loss of so many coworkers, friends and acquaintances. Their simple duty, to put their lives on the line on a regular basis to save others, is honorable in and of itself. It’s their job, and I suspect that the rest of their lives are like ours: messy, complicated and unfulfilled.

Throw in a literal life-and-death stress factor that makes most of our office problems look mundane, and it’s perfectly understandable that firemen’s lives must not be easy, even if they can’t envision themselves doing anything else. LeDuff alludes to this later in the article while describing why the firemen confide in Gray: “These are confidences that the men do not share with one another. Instead, some go home late in the evening and lock the door and take out their rage on the bathroom wall.” So Gray is this magical single woman (and a real looker to boot—the picture with the article doesn’t lie) who serves as this asexual confessional figure who will understand problems they can’t or won’t share with wives, children, friends or family? Does one get the impression here that LeDuff got caught up in the moment and chose to paint this picture himself rather than recognizing the reality of the situation—that Gray, as her brother-in-law was a fireman, has probably been around fireman culture for a while now and simply feels comfortable in firemen’s presence, as they do in hers? The article feels like some bad country song with its implication that there must be something wrong with you if you don’t acknowledge the emotion you’re being beat over the head with. The closing: “After a few drinks, they are able to say it. ‘Leah, you’re a good woman.’” I’d like to hear what they said after the seventh pint and that nosy bastard from the Times wandered off to file his story.

And the beginning: “Leah Gray’s sister looks at her these days and says, ‘Never fall in love.’” A better idea might be to never let reporters record your private feelings and use them for ulterior motives.

Leah, I encourage you: fall in love. With me, for instance. People tell me I look like an off-duty cop/fireman all the time. Unlike the firemen in the article, I will not tell you to go back to your life and your cat in Manhattan. And while I share the same slimy bastard profession as LeDuff, I can recognize the difference between reality and my perceptions—a quality that would do any fireman proud.

I got a little misty last night. It was around 9 p.m. and I was approaching the Lincoln Tunnel in my truck when "Longer Boats" came in over the radio. Cat Stevens was a demi-god back in the old neighborhood. He was there for all that me-at-six stuff. Tall grass, moon-in-the-belly, goose-the-babysitter—his reedy histrionics a soundtrack to all those incipient carnal pangs, all that lost-innocence shit.

Stevens, thankfully, is also his own antidote to soft-focus sentimentality. I needed only to recall his tacit endorsement of the 1989 Islamic Fatwa against Salman Rushdie and dry went the tear ducts. Still, that song left me thinking that maybe the pop-star-turned-devout-Muslim-hermit (aka Yusuf Islam) had something clarifying to say about recent events. So I did a quick search and turned up two major statements. The first appears to have been made, of all places, in the New York Post’s 9/13 Web forum. It begins: “I wish to express my heartfelt horror at the indiscriminate terrorist attacks committed against the innocent people of the United States yesterday...” It’s a sincere condolence, short and sweet, and out of place next to the many "Kill All Ay-Rab Cockroach Motherfuckers!"-type rhapsodies that surround it.

His other major statement was published on 9/24 in Al-Hewar Magazine. Under the title "A Home of Tolerance, Not Fanaticism," Stevens declares: “Orchestrated acts of incomprehensible carnage have nothing to do with the beliefs of most Muslims.” That’s a familiar refrain and one I’ll gladly take at face value. Unfortunately, his subsequent plea—that the West, in its reprisals, not hurt innocent Muslims—is plaited with strands of denial that are both troubling to its essential validity and troublingly familiar. Says Stevens/Islam, “The Koran that our young people learn is full of stories and lessons from the history of humanity as a whole. The Gospels and the Torah are referred to; Jesus and Abraham are mentioned. In fact there is more mention in the Koran of the prophet Moses than of any other. It acknowledges the coexistence of other faiths, and in doing so acknowledges that other cultures can live together in peace... Moderation is part of faith, so those who accuse Muslim schools of fostering fanaticism should learn a bit more about Islam.”

Fine. But for two things. One, Stevens is speaking for all Muslims ("Our young people"). As we know from many a recent scold, world Islam is vast and fragmented and therefore excused from the requirement that it speak/act with one voice or govern itself from the center. In that regard plural possessives, even those used by erstwhile pop icons, are neither allowable nor feasible. Moreover, in light of the bin Laden worship and of the anti-Western hatred that is bedrock pedagogy in even moderate cities throughout the Arab world, Stevens’ statement is alarmingly off the mark. But then, of course it is. He’s parsing.

An example of not parsing was to be found in a hopeful segment on last night’s 60 Minutes. There, a number of Pakistani plutocrats did their own bit of representing, but on behalf of the moderate "silent Muslim majority." These doctors, factory owners and businesspeople, many of them women, spoke in very definite terms, named names, accused Muslim fundamentalists of blatant distortion of the Koran and came very close to uttering what seems to be the only abiding truth of this whole mess: that in this world, at this time, reality must trump religion. It was refreshing. Stevens is medieval by contrast. He offers only casuistic references to the Koran’s chapter on Consultation. He concludes with bromides and for-the-sake-of-the-children appeals that, hard audited, look like veils.

As the National Guardsman waved me into the Lincoln Tunnel, it occurred to me how interesting it would be if Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam were to come out as a kind of spiritual/intellectual broker for understanding between the non-fascist Muslim majority and Westerners who, though embarrassingly late to the party, are sincerely trying to understand the faith. But to expect that of some early 70s pop star? I can be a harlequin sometimes, a real fucking nabob.

This was as close as we’ll come these days to tarring and feathering a villain, propping her up backwards on a jackass and running her out of town.

Just a slight change editorial change:

This was as close as we’ll come these days to tarring and feathering a villain, propping her up backwards on a her husband and running them out of town.

Mike Moran just said when x42 was on stage some people in the crowd started a chant "This is your fault. This is your fault"

I asked the host if they could rebroadcast his interview with Mike Moran on the website, kdka.com Mike Pintek, the radio program host, just stated that the station's policy did not permit for the rebroadcast on their website. Don't know why.......stupid rule. Maybe if enough people email them they will change it.

Open contempt for the working-class mopes of the police force will once again become appropriate among the haute bourgeoisie...

Which is why there ought to be a massive attack of "blue flu" (or is it "blue anthrax?") the moment Green tries to pull ANYTHING. I have never understood why cops and firemen put up with all that crap from hate-filled Democratic leaders. They have the only bargaining chip that matters: Their feet. If the Democrats walk all over you, you walk out the door. The city government would be forced to capitulate within hours.

Is Mike Moran a Freeper too? Just wondering.

I don't know, but he should be!

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