Not exactly the ideal social space for a radical Johnny Appleseed to plant his dream beans. Early on in “It Didn’t Happen Here,” Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks quote historian Richard Hofstadter: “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” And late in the game the authors speak for themselves: “A culture can be conceived as a series of loaded dice” in which “past throws” constrain the present. By then they’ve comparison-shopped the labor-left all over the world; consulted everybody from Trotsky and Gramsci to Irving Howe and Ira Katznelson; and outlined, rehearsed, staged, critiqued, summarized, reiterated, rewound, rerun and Mobius-looped every conceivable scenario. The odds, they conclude, were so steeply stacked against socialism in America that its defeat was “overdetermined.”

Lipset professes public policy at George Mason University and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Marks professes political science at the University of North Carolina and directs its Center for European Studies. They are fair-minded, open-handed, flat-footed and lily-livered (that is, value neutral). They aren’t saying that socialism deserved to flunk our litmus test because there’s something wrong with it. Nor are they saying there’s anything right about it, either, unless its washout would help explain why we happen to be the only Western democracy without a comprehensive healthcare system, the only one that doesn’t provide child support to all of its families and the worst offender on economic inequality, with a greater gap between rich and poor than any other industrialized nation, double the differential of the next worst down the list. What they do say is that almost everything distinctive and exceptional about America made socialism a harder sell here than in, say, Australia. And that the pigheaded behavior of American Socialists only compounded the problem.

Be warned that Lipset and Marks say these things over and over again, after which they repeat them, in the approved reverse-gear style of academic monographs whose feet, like those of the legendary Mikea Pygmies of Madagascar, point backward to confuse their enemy trackers. And yet I can’t think of any crime scene they haven’t dusted, nor any suspect they haven’t cuffed.

The big picture is that, from the get-go, our “core values” glowed in the dark like Three Mile Island: an ethos of individualism, a Weltanschauung of anti-statism and a blank check from God. We sprang full-blown from John Locke’s higher brow, a natural-born hegemony of the bourgeois money-grubbers — unscathed by medieval feudalism (with its fixed classes of aristocracy and forelock-tugging peasants); exempt from 19th century Europe’s ideological power-sharing fratricides (by virtue of early white male suffrage, lots of land, waves of immigrants to assume the lousiest jobs while the native-born upwardly mobilized themselves and a ragtag diversity that undermined nascent class consciousness while permitting the merchant princelings to play workers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds against one another in a status scramble); and insulated from revolting developments — insurgencies, mutinies, Jacqueries, even mugwumps and goo-goos — by a political system so partial to the status quo that it’s almost arteriosclerotic (a winner-take-all presidency, a fragmenting federalism, a bought judiciary and a two-party Incumbent Protection Society).

So everybody is measured by his or her ability to produce wealth, those who die with the most toys win, anyone who fails to prosper is morally condemned and a vote for Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, John Anderson, George Wallace, Henry Wallace or Robert La Follette — not even to mention Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs — is considered to be a waste of franchise.

To be sure, we have had more than our fair share of labor violence. Otherwise, we would never have needed Pinkertons. One recalls, at random, the Haymarket riot, the Homestead strike and the Ludlow massacre; Harlan County and Coeur d’Alene; steelworkers in Chicago and Detroit, textile workers in Lawrence and Paterson, dockworkers in San Francisco, rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, and gravediggers in New Jersey; Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Tom Mooney, Mother Jones; Molly Maguires and Wobblies. But the most depressing chapters in “It Didn’t Happen Here” are devoted to a labor movement that had already internalized the all-American ethos of anti-statist individualism before the first left-wing agitator explicated the first contradiction — a working class needing to lose lots more than its chains. “I’m all right, Jack” and “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” don’t add up to “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Thus the whole idea of a labor party here, anything like those that developed in European nations, Canada and Australia, seems chimerical when we read how radicals such as the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World — more anarcho-syndicalist than socialist or Marxist — disdained reform politics every bit as much as conservative craft unionists in the American Federation of Labor. The AFL in its turn worked just as hard to protect the skilled jobs of its white native-born membership from a lumpenproletariat of African-Americans and immigrants as it did to wring concessions from rapacious employers. (Until the Great Depression, the AFL actually opposed minimum-wage legislation, state provision of old-age pensions, compulsory health insurance and limitations on the manly workweek. Nor should we ever forget a 1902 pamphlet that Samuel Gompers wrote himself: “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood vs. Asiatic Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?”)

Or when we read how the Socialist Party, as fetishistic about doctrine as any Protestant sect, refused to join in coalitions with allies like the North Dakota Non-Partisan League, the Minneosta Farmer-Labor Party, the Commonwealth Federations of Washington and Oregon, the Working Class Union in Oklahoma or Upton Sinclair’s Campaign to End Poverty in California — and in many localities went so far as to expel, for “opportunism,” members who joined a union or, even worse, ran for office on a coalition ticket and won a municipal election. (Inconstant Debs, a five-time candidate for president on the Socialist line, was quoted famously: “There was a time in my life, before I became a Socialist, when I permitted myself to be elected to a state legislature, and I have been trying to live it down ever since. I am as much ashamed of that as I am of having gone to jail.”)

Or when we read how the Depression-born alternative to the AFL, the more-inclusive Congress of Industrial Organizations, alert to the possibilities of pro-labor legislation, nevertheless rushed into the co-opting embrace of Franklin Roosevelt so quickly and uncritically as to compromise its subsequent leverage on the Democratic Party, even after it was obedient enough to purge its own left wing in the late 1940s. (How prescient old Socialist Norman Thomas seems now, having warned back then that the New Deal was “an elaborate scheme for stabilizing capitalism through associations of industries that could regulate production in order to maintain profits.”)

So much for solidarity. In fact, only once in this century did organized labor desert the Democratic Party — after its nomination of anti-labor John Davis in 1924. Which is also the only national election year when the Socialists made common cause with another party, the Progressives. And so La Follette got 16.6 percent of the vote. And so the Democrats, learning their lesson, made sure to nominate a pro-labor Al Smith the next time around. And yet how soon the left forgot about the practical payoffs that can sometimes accrue from rejecting the “lesser evil” thesis.

And so now organized labor and disorganized labor, too, are both on the wrong side of the candy store window, looking in from the Dumpster as megamerging downsizers, flyboy bond traders and multinational vulture capitalists eat the truffles and sodomize the clerks. The typical chief executive of a big company earns 170 times as much as the typical worker. One-third of the labor force earns less than $15,000 a year. The average hourly wage adjusted for inflation is lower today than it was in 1973. The very definition of inflation has been helpfully “adjusted” to exclude food and energy. And politicians of both bought parties are in thrall to a Clairvoyant Master of the Temple Karnak, a High Priest of the Hermetic Secrets of the Sacred Science of the Pharaohs, the Gnome of the Fed: Alan (Chuckles) Greenspan.

But socialism had other difficulties. For one, while we tend to think of immigration as a tide that brought us the socialist Germans of Milwaukee, the socialist Finns of Minneapolis and the socialist Jews of New York, never mind the socialist Dutch of Reading, Pa. — and how one cheers their radical initiatives of rural cooperatives and credit banks; of state-owned terminal elevators, flour mills, packinghouses and cold-storage plants; of city-owned coal yards, ice plants, stone quarries and electric utilities; of cooperative housing, hot-lunch programs in elementary schools and direct election of school board members; of civil service standards for the police and fire departments, public works for the unemployed and free medical care — that same tide brought in the far more numerous potato-famine Irish and southern Italians, most of them Roman Catholics inclined to obey the priests of a church whose anathematizing of godless socialism had been codified in two different papal encyclicals. And the militia of Christ had more money to spend than was ever discovered in a Wobbly strike fund.

For another, while Lipset and Marks consider our electoral system more or less a wash, neither inhibiting nor encouraging socialism or any other third-party alternative, they arrive at this conclusion by an apples-and-oranges analogy. The logic of a primary and party convention system, they inform us, “is fundamentally similar to [the] two-ballot system” in so many European countries: “Party factions, which in a two-ballot system would be separate parties, can contest primaries and then coalesce with other factions in the general election, or run independently as third candidates.”

This is so much static, obscuring the fact that what our primaries do is aggrandize the two-party system at the expense of outgunned, outmanned, out-soft-monied Greens, Trots, Flat Earthers and Right-to-Lifers. To vote at all in a primary, I must be registered in one or another party and choose only among its competing candidates. In France, on the other hand, any registered voter can vote for any party in the first round. All those parties receiving one-eighth of the vote advance to the second round, with time off between to form coalitions with like-minded partners. Even the smallest of parties has a chance to advance during both these rounds.

In France besides, on a local level, half of all elected officials must now be women. More wondrous still, the passionate particularities of a party vote for the European Parliament will be reflected in their exact proportion to the total count, whether that proportion constitutes a majority, a plurality, a handful or merely a single deputy. It’s a mosaic instead of a duochrome; the grand theory accommodates and approximates its noisy fractals.

For a third, the American Socialist Party opposed the First World War. Many socialists, after all, had voted for Woodrow Wilson when he promised to keep us out of it. But he lied. And while socialists all over Europe rallied to the slaughter under their respective flags, the American party stuck to its principles, for which it was repressed — and not only with the usual firings of teachers, shutting down of newspapers, breaking up of meetings and arrests on suspicion but with the infamous Palmer raids, the refusal to seat duly elected representatives in Congress and state legislatures and the jailing of Eugene Debs.

Never mind that the American party was right (a point that seems not to have occurred to Lipset and Marks). So severely was it punished for opposing a criminally stupid bloodbath that the party never recovered. The authors insist that only the native-born component of the movement suffered unto extinction, mostly out west; that the big-city ethnic enclaves hunkered down and kept on trucking. But American socialism lost its shock troops, its assembly-line and Deep South labor organizers, its youth brigades and whatever ilan it might have mustered for the long struggle against not only metastasizing capitalism but also serial-killing Stalinism.

Because, of course, it was the Stalinists who took over the left-wing organizing during the Popular Front period, even as they lied about themselves and their ultimate loyalties. And when they, too, succumbed to Cold War paranoia and McCarthyite repression, there was nobody left to pick up the sticks and do any stitching. “We were, most of us, fleeing the reality that man is alone upon this earth,” wrote Murray Kempton in his elegy for ’30s radicalism. “We ran from a fact of solitude to a myth of community. That myth failed us because the moments of test come most often when we are alone and far from home and even the illusion of community is not there to sustain us.”

I would like to feel the way Nadine Gordimer felt when Susan Sontag asked her, several years ago on public television, whether she didn’t agree that the old categories of left and right were now outmoded. Gordimer smiled sweetly: “Well, Susan, I still believe with Jean-Paul Sartre — that socialism is the horizon of the world.” But I am persuaded otherwise. Obviously, the utopianism I concocted for myself in high school in the ’50s — equal parts of John Dos Passos, the fitful memories of an old Wobbly I met on the Pike in Long Beach, Calif., and the bad dreams of a United Auto Workers area rep who let me follow him around to local union halls while he popped Antabuse to keep from drinking himself to death because he felt guilty for surviving the CIO’s left-wing purge — was all a bagpipe dream.

How lonely the literature seems where I have made my makeshift home. How full of hopelessness are Melville in “Benito Sereno,” Twain in “Pudd’nhead Wilson” and Richard Wright in “Native Son.” How problematic our romance with money in the gangster novels of Bellow, Doctorow and William Kennedy. How improbably often the characters in our canonical fiction are on the run, like Ahab and Huck, or Neal Cassady and Rabbit Angstrom. How deeply weird, morbid and perverse is our fascination with the iconology of the filthy rich: the famous Steichen portrait of J.P. Morgan with a paring knife and an endangered apple; the Spruce Goose of Howard Hughes; the Rosebud sled of “Citizen Kane”; the death in the saddle of Nelson A. (for Attica) Rockefeller; the severed ear of a kidnapped Getty; John Jacob Astor, who slaughtered all the otters in Hawaii before deciding to build us a library; Daniel Guggenheim, who cut a silver deal with Porfirio Dmaz in Mexico and helped out King Leopold II of Belgium with a spot of trouble in his Congo before endowing us a museum; Andrew Carnegie, who, before he gave us a music hall, also brought us the Homestead strike …

In “Tell Me a Riddle,” Tillie Olsen asked: “Oh why do I have to feel it happens to me?” And: “Why is it like this?” And: “Why do I have to care?” In Harvey Swados’ novel “Standing Fast,” a character explains: “One way or another, we tried to keep an idea alive. There weren’t enough of us, there never are. We were ridiculously wrong about a lot of things but who wasn’t? And what idea did they keep alive, the others?”

We have seen the future and it’s selfish. Lottery! Globocop! It seems to me that Lipset and Marks should be sadder than they sound, but then they, too, are all right, Jack. I leave you with Hawthorne, whose poet in “The Blithesdale Romance” permits himself this wistfulness: “Whatever else I may repent of, therefore let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny.”

Everywhere that Putnam looks, he sees a rising tide of apathy and a downward trajectory to “malaise.” In this unbrave new Malaisia, it’s not just that we are a third less likely to attend town meetings and donate blood than Americans were in the ’60s, or that we give a smaller percentage of our income to charity — that we are less Masonic, less Jaycee and less in league with women voters. If formal religious worship has fallen only 10 percent, participation in the social life of the church or the synagogue, from Bible studies to potluck picnics, has dropped by a third since the ’60s and a half since the ’50s. The figures are likewise down, by 10 to 20 percent in the past two decades, for fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, jogging, swimming, tennis, softball, football and volleyball. All the women playing sports (after Title IX) and all the children playing soccer (now that there are college scholarships), all the 12-steppers and all the New Age encounter groupies, don’t make up for huge defections elsewhere in the culture. More than twice as many adults have dropped out of league bowling in the past 20 years than have ever been in all of the self-help programs combined, including Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous.

While the gross numbers may be up for memberships in professional societies, the proportions are down, considering how many more professionals there are now. (For instance, the ratio of lawyers to the rest of us has doubled since 1970, maybe because the rest of us no longer trust anybody unless we have a legal contract plus our personal pit bull. But the American Bar Association’s “market share” of this excess fell a third in the same three decades.) The picture’s even bleaker if we look for members who do more than merely pay their dues. And don’t tell me that you’re a card-carrying member of the ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. So am I. And neither of us has gone to a single meeting of any of these organizations. Instead, we’ve written a check for a lobbying group with a professional staff in Washington or New York. We could be living right next door to each other and not know that we are “members” of the same interest group. We are, instead, “consumers” of a direct-mail cause.

In other words, like a bunch of hippies, we are dropping out. Unless, that is, we happen to have been born between 1910 and 1940 — in which case we belong to Putnam’s “long civic generation” and can be counted on to do a lot more good than those narcissistic baby boomers, who, when they aren’t pushing money through their modems, are probably watching soft porn on cable television. When handing out blame for our antisocial funk, Putnam assigns the biggest chunk to self-involved boomers, the next biggest to time-stealing television and smaller percentiles to mobility and urban sprawl (relocation, the lonely commute), financial anxiety (fear of falling, downsized syndrome), workplace blues (what we used to call the alienation of labor), working mothers (there goes the PTA) and a general agnosticism or paranoia about reality itself. He sees little evidence that the behavior of government, the decline of the traditional family or the advent of rap music and the Internet has much to do with it. He should at least have mentioned the designated hitter in American League baseball.

Of course, Putnam is guessing. And so will I.

It’s always fun to beat up on boomers with a stick. And they will certainly be sorry. They’ll be sorry, first of all, because joining a group is good for everybody. “Civic virtues,” Putnam notes, tend to “cluster.” If you belong to a service club, you’re more likely to volunteer in a meals-on-wheels or reading program, contribute to a library building fund and vote for a school or sewer bond. Thus, as if by shrewd investment, a single act of wandering into a “domain of sociability” multiplies to help create the social capital that trickles down to benefit education, health, seniors, children and the lonely, needy and strange. (My favorite odd datum in this fact-filled book is that people who listen to lots of classical music are more likely to attend Cubs games than people who don’t.)

The boomers will be even sorrier, second of all, because joining is better for body and soul. Medical studies suggest it’s healthier to get out of the house: “As a rough rule of thumb,” Putnam tells us, “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it’s a tossup statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining.”

Otherwise, move to North Dakota (for reasons I won’t go into, although Putnam does at length, North Dakota is a social-capital exception to the sullen rule of Malaisia) and wait for a revival of something like the Progressive movement that saved us from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age almost exactly a century ago. (E-mail and Web bulletin boards could help if they encouraged us to meet face to face with like-minded strangers and raise some political hell.)

Rather touchingly, Putnam suggests that the goals of such a revival would be campaign finance reform and citizens who voted as if they were fans; reduction of the criminal discrepancy between rich and poor; a more family-friendly and community-congenial workplace; fewer cars and more pedestrians in our neighborhoods and public spaces; less television in our wired caves and more singalongs, theater festivals and break dancing in our streets. While he’s at it, I would like my Volkswagen bug back, the one with the daisies on it.

Thus ends the synopsis. Now begins the rant.

Let me say this about crybaby boomers. The reason they weep is that all that they wanted in the idealistic ’60s was social justice, racial harmony, peaceable kingdoms, multiple orgasms and Joan Baez. What they got, besides assassinations and the tantrums of the cadres, was Richard Nixon and AIDS.

Let me say this about television. Yes, the same people who own it also own everything else. And they commune with their mystical parts by the medium of ad agencies whose hypnotherapeutic practice is, as Barbara Ehrenreich once explained, to sell us cars by promising adventure and to sell us beer by promising friendship. And it is obviously not in the best commercial interests of such ownership to devote a lot of time to bad-news programs about declining cities, the race war, foreign-policy adventurism, indeterminate sexuality, corporate predation or anything else that readers of Putnam or Salon can be counted on to care about.

But the surprise is, if you actually watch television, it’s not as bad as it ought to be, and certainly not as bad as people like Putnam say it is. I’m not just talking about the remedial seriousness of public-television series like “Frontline” and “P.O.V.,” Bill Moyers on Iran-contra, Frederick Wiseman on public housing, Ofra Bickel on the satanic ritual abuse hysteria, “Tongues Untied” and “Eyes on the Prize.” Nor do I speak of C-Span’s pair of citizen bands, its basilisk eye on Congress and its book-chat programs. Nor Discovery’s remarkable miniseries on the CIA, David Halberstam’s History Channel account of the 1950s, Neal Gabler’s A&E meditation on Jews, movies and the American Dream, John Frankenheimer’s films for HBO and TNT on Attica and George Wallace, the development on premium cable of documentary units like HBO’s “America Uncovered” (capital punishment and homophobia) and Cinemax’s “Reel Life” (war crimes against Muslim women in Bosnia and the rape of Ecuador’s rain forest by American oil companies) and not even our very good fortune that distributorless movies like Anjelica Huston’s “Bastard Out of Carolina” and Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita” show up on Showtime.

Never mind any of this, and the Lifetime Women’s Film Festival, and Bravo’s exposis of journalists on junkets, and cable movies that take the risky sort of chances from which networks and public TV flinch. The fact remains that, in spite of Jerry Springer, commercial television, in its movies, its dramatic series and even its sitcoms, has more to tell us about common decency, civil discourse and social justice than big-screen Hollywood, big-time magazine journalism and most book publishers.

Seeking to please or distract as many people as possible, to assemble and divert multitudes, TV is famously inclusive, with a huge stake in consensus. Of course, brokering social and political gridlock, it softens lines and edges to make a prettier picture. But it is also weirdly democratic, multicultural, Utopian, quixotic and rather more welcoming of difference and diversity than the audience watching it. It has been overwhelmingly pro-gun control and anti-death penalty; sympathetic to the homeless and the ecosystem; alert to alcoholism, child abuse, spouse battering, sexual discrimination and harassment, date rape and medical malpractice. It was worried about AIDS as early as 1983 in an episode of “St. Elsewhere,” 10 years before Tom Hanks appeared in “Philadelphia.” And television — where the ad cult meets the melting pot to stipulate a colorblind consumer — may be the only American institution outside of the public schools to still believe in and celebrate integration of the races.

Until Harvard can explain why the nation got so mean while TV was telling us to be nicer to women, children, minorities, immigrants, poor people, sick people, old people, odd people and strangers, one of its professors shouldn’t say that “prevailing television coverage of problems such as poverty leads viewers to attribute those problems to individual rather than societal failings and thus to shirk our own responsibility for helping to solve them” — because it isn’t true.

And let me say this about bowling. In fact, even now, hardly anybody bowls alone. Bowling as we know it derives from an ancient Polynesian ritual called ula maika, in which stones were hurled at standing objects from a distance of 60 feet. Nobody knows why, but 60 feet it remains today. And since bowling got gentrified, with boys replaced by automatic pinsetters, alleys renamed “lanes” and the availability of slim-line plastic contour chairs in multiple pastel hues and compressed-air blowers to cool the warriors’ sweaty palms, it has become, as Putnam tells us, “the most popular competitive sport in America.”

Bowlers outnumber joggers and golfers by two to one, soccer players by three to one and tennis players by four to one. Ninety-one million of us bowled in 1996, 25 percent more of us than voted in the 1998 congressional elections. What pains Putnam is that fewer of us bowl as members of a team, in a league, in a domain of sociability where “cohorts” develop cooperative habits and skills. While the total number of bowlers in America increased 10 percent between 1980 and 1993, league bowling fell by more than 40 percent.

What he neglects to mention is that many of us who used to go bowling with our families, or on dates, were driven out of the game in the 1970s by the very leagues he celebrates (who monopolized most of the lanes) and the very teams whose dismemberment he mourns (who sneered at civilians). About these teams you should know that their principal business, in green Shantung jackets with Aztec serpent totems and bulging purple stretch pants, was to topple themselves with as many beers as soon as possible. As composer Frank Zappa once observed:

Consumption of beer leads to military behavior. One day you’re going to read about some scientist discovering that hops, in conjunction with certain strains of “yeast creatures,” has a mysterious effect on some newly discovered region of the brain, making people want to kill — but only in groups. With whisky, you might want to murder your girlfriend — but beer makes you want to do it with your buddies watching.

I am inclined to think that such groups have about as much civic virtue as, say, gangbangers, the Ku Klux Klan and the Michigan and Montana militias — all equally blotto on bottled bile. Putnam himself has observed that religious fundamentalists in general, and Operation Rescue activists in particular, are exceptions to the general trend toward Malaisian noninvolvement. Some of us are actually relieved that the annual membership renewal rate of the National Rifle Association is only 25 percent, that the Promise Keepers can no longer fill a football stadium and that the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority are as much mail-order consumer causes as the National Audubon Society and the L.L. Bean catalog. Some of us moved to big cities in the first place to escape small-town book burners.

Anyway, with the ebbing of the leagues, those of us who have tried once more to bowl find to our astonishment that we are required to relinquish one of our own street shoes before we will be allowed to borrow, for a price, a pair of ratty rentals. They don’t trust us. Imagine that.

And so I come to my last big qualm about this fascinating and meticulous scorecard on “bonding” and “bridging,” machers and schmoozers, the rise of rap and the decline of newspapers, these 24 chapters, three appendixes, a hundred charts, a thousand footnotes, this encyclopedia of industrial averages of a market for meaning so bearish that the suicide rate for our youngsters has almost tripled. I wonder if some of our suspicion — of institutions, of groups and of strangers — hasn’t been thrust upon us like a lousy credit rating.

There is the insurance agency finding a reason to refuse our claim, the HMO deciding we have the wrong disease, the bank-owned credit card company compounding its own interest and the employer who listens in on our phone calls and voice mail, reads our e-mail and computer files, videotapes our workstation and sucks our blood to test for drugs. There is the corporate branding of our commons, the spin-doctor scripting of our public life and the malign neglect of our public schools. There is soft money, hate radio, the gated communities that instruct us what flowers to plant and which colors to paint our gingerbread houses, the malls that abolish our First Amendment right to free speech and assembly and, wherever we look, urban spaces increasingly militarized — what Mike Davis in “City of Quartz” called “the architectural policing of social boundaries” and “the totalitarian semiotics of ramparts and battlements.”

So determined was Los Angeles, you’ll remember, to make sure that its upscale downtown merchants would be forever safe from another Watts riot that, starting in the ’70s, it became a fortress, with corporate citadels and surveillance towers, elevated “pedways” and subterranean concourses, “tourist bubble” parks and panopticonic shopping strips, residential enclaves like hardened missile silos and libraries like dry-docked dreadnoughts. Add to this a pacification of the human-landfill poor in strategic-hamlet housing projects, urban Bantustans and Bedouin encampments on barricaded streets in inner-city neighborhoods bereft of public toilets (“crime scenes”) and zoned against cellphones and whistling, with barrel-shaped bus benches to make sure you can’t sleep on them, caged cash registers in convenience stores, bulletproof acrylic turnstiles in fast-food joints, metal detectors in hospitals, lockdowns in elementary schools and curfews that outlaw groups of more than two juveniles from “associating in public view” in their own front yards.

And, as Davis reported in his sequel to “City of Quartz,” “Ecology of Fear,” it worked. No sooner had Simi Valley acquitted the cops who rioted all over Rodney King than “sentient” buildings with mainframe brains went into prevent mode. Steel gates rolled down over entrances to the great bank towers, escalators froze, electronic locks sealed off pedestrian passages and a financial district prophylacticked against sans-culottes went on happily recycling Japan’s trade surplus into Southland turf and surf. Too bad about the Koreans. Too late for the rest of us.

Community for whom? It smells like team spirit. I look at what they have done to us and I am reminded of an old English proverb: “They agree like bells; they want nothing but hanging.”

According to futurist Jeremy Rifkin, who in previous books has viewed with alarm everything from the decline of cattle culture (“Beyond Beef”) to robotic factories (“The End of Work”) to genetic engineering (“The Biotech Century”), those of us who aren’t angels or accessories in the new economy are “nodes embedded … in a wired world of pure process and sheer temporality,” a “surrogate social sphere tucked inside a commercial wrap” — where consumerism supersedes citizenship; where access counts more than ownership; where corporate capitalism has dematerialized into webs of mutual interest and networks of strategic alliances; where the usual greedheads have an option to buy our airwaves, waterways, mineral veins and gene pools; where a handful of megalomedia monopolies socialize and spin-cycle virtual Americans; and where life itself is available by subscription only, a paid-for Gibsonian sim-stim zap to the synaptic cleft.

And that’s the good news. The bad news is that all this is at the expense of the other four-fifths of the non-North American, non-European world. Rifkin may be a futurist but he’s not an idiot. He has heard of the digital divide. He is aware of an underworld of the propertyless outside this “new and totalizing social space.” He knows that while Nike, with revenues of more than $4 billion in 1998, owns no factories, machines or real estate to speak of, and may even be said to lease Michael Jordan on behalf of Swoosh, the 450,000 Asian sweatshop workers who produce Nike shoe lines don’t make enough of a daily wage to buy their daily bread. That 65 percent of the human population has never made a telephone call, and 40 percent don’t have electricity. That Americans spend more money every year on cosmetics ($8 billion), and Europeans on ice cream ($11 billion), than it would cost to provide basic education, clean water and rudimentary sanitation for the 2 billion people — most of them south of us — who currently go without schools or toilets.

But these people don’t buy books that view with alarm. Neither, in fact, do the rest of us unless the alarmism is hyperbolic. Thus, it’s not enough that Rifkin should tell us what we have already been told by Neal Gabler, Robert McChesney and Naomi Klein about the long-term shift from industrial to cultural production; the outsourcing of jobs to anywhere safe from collective bargaining; the trillion-dollar-a-year marketing of movies, music, television, tourism, theme parks, “destination entertainment centers,” wellness, fashion, cuisine and the virtual worlds of cyberspace; the commodification of every kind of play (sports, arts, gambling, fraternal activity, social movements and civic rituals) into “customized cultural experiences” (like Club Med) and “mass commercial spectacles” (like the Steroid Bowl); the franchising of everything from blood on buns to managed healthcare to retirement communities to prisons; the leasing of everything from the cars we drive to time shares in our condos to the Microsoftware in our stained-glass Windows; and the licensing of everything from the seeds we’ve planted to the germ plasm of our livestock to our personal DNA.

None of this is enough. He must also insist on a paradigm shift — without which futurology is mere journalism. Thus, everything that he’s just told us means the end not only of class war and of the right-left dynamic (though Rifkin does admit “the nagging question of who should control the means of production”) but of property itself (“mine and thine”). “A world structured around access relationships,” we are told, “is likely to produce a very different kind of human being.” To wit: “Our codes of conduct, our civic values, indeed our deepest sense of who we are” are “cast adrift in a new, less material, less boundaried, more intangible world of commodified services” where we must “rethink the social contract from beginning to end” and come up with a brand-new “archetype.” It’s not merely that “everything we know is suddenly passi”; more grim, we are plunged into a “change so vast in scale that we are barely able to fathom its ultimate impact,” which change “could spell a death sentence for civilization as we know it.”

Happily or not, none of this is true. Leasing deals — as innocent as Hertz and Avis or as invidious as tenant farming — have been around since ancient Mesopotamia. (See Karl August Wittfogel on hydraulic civilizations and “the Asiatic mode of production.”) Service relationships that differ not a jot from those we have long suffered with our stockbroker and our insurance agent do not require the rethinking of a social contract that nobody ever thought about the first time, except six 18th century philosophers who immediately reached an adjournment of minds (even if an anthropological inquiry into the stock exchange as a form of superstitious magic is greatly overdue, with Alan Greenspan as a Magus or a Fisher King).

Property hasn’t gone away just because some people rent more of it and different kinds of it to others. Property has just expanded its vampire definition of itself, to make proprietary claims on speech, thought, the visual field and the double helix; to stake out ideas as if they were beachfront views; to buy up patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets as if they were shares in the Great Chain of Being. (In fact, fewer and fewer deregulated fat cats sit on more and more property every year. Don’t you hate it when a left-wing grinch reminds you that the richest 10 percent of American families own more than two-thirds of this country’s wealth? That Bill Gates, as Rifkin himself observes, is now richer than half of the American people combined?)

Nor is there any discernible rush on indivduals’ part to divest themselves of anything at all, not when homeownership is the highest it has ever been, not when the goodies include cellphones, laptops and jet-propelled sneakers. (Just because corporations are selling us their brand doesn’t mean they aren’t also selling us their products. It only means they’re selling more products, updated, with a shorter and shorter shelf life.)

Which isn’t to say that Rifkin is as off-base here as he was in “The End of Work.” (Boy, didn’t work make a comeback between bestsellers?) His heart is in the right place, and so are his worrywarts. When he gets up a full head of steam (as he does, for instance, in going after gated communities, Third World sweatshops and biotech giants like DuPont), when he’s explaining how Monsanto tried to rip off Indian farmers with self-sterilizing seeds, when he’s down with the blood proteins, the spleen tissues and the stem cells, he raises blisters. And when he suggests that the very model of a service relationship is the HMO, he’s downright scary.

He doesn’t need the futurist apocalyptics. He needn’t have tried to explain postmodernism and communications theory (such potted pricis!). Or have felt he had to quote so many Freds (Hegel, Schiller, Jameson) to make up for the market babble of the business school professors. Or have talked himself into a corner by going on far too long about the profound importance of “kinship, ethnicity, geography, and shared spiritual visions,” until an editor must have reminded him that all this sounds a bit too much like the blood and soil of the fascists and he had better cover his tracks. Nor should he have risked a generalization like this one, brought on like the elephants in Aida very early in the book, and then repeated in paraphrase much later:

From the beginning of human civilization to now, culture has always preceded markets. People create shared meaning and values and build social trust in the form of social capital. Only when social trust and social exchange are well developed do communities engage in commerce and trade. The point is, the commercial sphere always has been derivative of and dependent on the cultural sphere.

This isn’t true, either of New York or of Los Angeles, to name two communities. Speaking only for New York, I’ll say that we have from the beginning been all about money; culture was an afterthought that only occurred to us when it seemed likely to grub a buck, too. All this vaporing just gets in the way of where Rifkin’s straightforward reporting ought to take us, which is to a genuine politics of resistance requiring a coalition even bigger than the one that rendered Seattle sleepless.

Finally, I’m agnostic about whether the theme-parking of the known globe differs all that radically from the ideological proselytizing of the great religions. (Suppose we were to think of cathedrals as Christianity’s home office, the parish church as a franchise, the soul as property, the Passion play as a sim-stim and hell as the fall into debt? In which case, the revealed Word is a software program and downloading is Eucharistic.)

And I am not in the least persuaded that the modern feeling of weightlessness, the unbearable lightness of American being, owes any more to the new economy than it does to a larger confusion of psychic realms in which buying, selling, leasing and renting are merely a component. We are insecure and negligent in our parenting and citizenship, caught between a public sphere (corporations, officialdom) that feels hollow and a private circle (family) that feels besieged. We are no longer safe on the tribal streets; we are equally weightless in orbit and cyberspace; balloonlike in exile or migration; tiddlywinks on a credit grid; fled abroad like jobs and capital; missing like runaway children; bugged, tapped, videotaped, downsized, hijacked, organ-donored, gene-spliced, lite-beered, vacuum-sealed, overdrawn, nonrefundable, void where prohibited and stealthed. Not to mention those problematic dislocations caused by sleep paralysis, temporal lobe lesions, overmedication, bad-trip designer drugs, frequent flying, seasonal affective disorder, bad workplace ergonomics, anorexia and liposuction.

As Karl Marx explained in his infamous “Manifesto”: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”

He was talking of course about hypercapitalism in the 19th century, which would cause, in the 20th century, two world wars, at least as many revolutions, overproduction, forced consumption and the blues.

Nevertheless, and even though we were very wet, we worried more about the mayor than we did about ourselves, or even Chicago, while he was gone. To say that Rudolph Giuliani is a control freak is to say that Attila the Hun was antsy. There was reason to fear for his mental stability out there in the wild West, in the painted-desert whereabouts of Kit Carson and Zane Grey. Suppose they didn’t give him a whirlybird to napalm Thelma and Louise? Suppose those Navajos refused to convert their kivas into condos? Suppose Geronimo demanded more than his fair share of TV face time? What if Grand Canyon mules insisted on crossing at the wrong midtown intersection?

Imagine our relief when Rudy returned to his bunker without conniption. His very first day back, he threatened to defund New York City’s Campaign Finance Board because it proposed giving $4 for each one raised privately by candidates for a City Council election next month, if those candidates forswear corporate donations. Although this proposal had been endorsed by a coalition of the League of Women Voters, the Citizens Union, the City Bar Association, the New York Times and Common Cause, the mayor accused them all of “stubbornness,” “arrogance” and “intellectual dishonesty.” It’s the tone he takes not only with critics but with any Chicken Little or Tiny Tim who thinks out loud without his permission — with judges who say that the voters, instead of Rudy, should decide if the Yankees play baseball in Manhattan or the Bronx; with members of the City Council who override his vetoes; with journalists who want information on how “workfare” is playing out; with the comptroller, the public advocate and the Independent Budget Office, who all had to sue to force him to give them the facts and figures they needed to do their jobs; with City University of New York students who seek in lawful assembly to protest tuition hikes.

The last five years in New York have been less about government than they’ve been about obedience training. Rudy’s a guy with a built-in balcony, from which he barks our marching orders. Lawful assembly, and such free-speechifying as may attend its occasion, are particularly sore points around here. Before he was even elected the first time, in October 1993, candidate Rudy opposed letting Louis Farrakhan speak at Yankee Stadium. In March 1995, a wall of cops surrounded City Hall, with horses, scooters, nightsticks, riot gear, barricades and Mace, to keep 20,000 high school and college students from marching on Wall Street. That June, Rudy kicked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center. The following May, he would use armored cars against homeless squatters. The first official act of his second term, last New Year’s Day, was to close his own inauguration to the public, after which he directed the Metropolitan Transit Authority to remove from buses and subways a New York magazine ad that took his name in vain, which was followed by checkpoints and roadblocks in Greenwich Village against anarcho-syndicalists and other rowdies, and video surveillance cameras in Washington Square Park.

When cabbies last spring objected to a new set of onerous regulations, they were met with ridicule by Rudy, an accusation by his police commissioner that a proposed convoy of protesters constituted a “terrorist threat” (wonderfully coded, since many cabbies are Middle Eastern), a deployment of livery drivers as scabs (later ruled unlawful by an appellate court) and an army of cops with tow trucks who closed the East River bridges to any taxi without a fare, forcing angry drivers to walk from Queens and Brooklyn to Manhattan. “They know we broke their strike — destroyed it really,” Rudy boasted. “Nobody showed up today. And that didn’t happen just because we allowed business to go on as usual. That happened because we had a plan to stop them from doing it.”

In May, when street artists whom he’d hounded from the city sidewalks tried to heckle his appearance at Cooper Union, they were arrested. In September, the city refused a permit to Khallid Abdul Muhammad for his Million Youth March, suggesting that he agitate instead on Randall’s Island. And when Muhammad won won his right in court to gather on Malcolm X Boulevard, the cops closed all the subway stations and cross streets so nobody could join in along the route. In December, demonstrators seeking to observe World AIDS Day and mourn the 77,000 New Yorkers who’ve died of the disease were likewise denied a permit to rally in City Hall Park, and likewise went to court to win their case. Then, when 150 of them showed up, they had to pass through motorcycle cops and metal detectors before they arrived at a parking lot surrounded by a brand-new eight-foot chain-link penitentiary fence and looked down upon by sharpshooters.

Nor was it an accident that the organizer of the rally, Housing Works, had already seen its $6.5 million worth of contracts with the city canceled. Why should a thrift-shop sponsor of drug treatment, job training and employment programs for homeless people with HIV expect anything better from Rudy than, say, the City Council, whose time-servers till a couple of weeks ago were forbidden to stage photo ops on the steps of City Hall because maybe they were closet Montana militiamen. Or Repohistory, denied permission by the Department of Transportation to put up posters commemorating famous civil-liberties cases. Or Bill Weinberg, the radical journalist who spent a night in the Tombs and the following Saturday cleaning up dogshit in Tompkins Square for pasting a “GIULIANI IS A JERK” sticker on a lamppost. It’s not as if any of these people were baseball players or astronauts or Disney puppets or Columbus Day Italians.

I am reminded of another great leader, who complained in Moscow in 1920: “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?” This was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

- – - – - – - – - -

Meanwhile, our Rudy, who began by threatening to abolish the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Civil Rights Division, to sell off public hospitals and East River bridges, to cancel the city’s contract with Legal Aid; who’d subsequently propose uniforms for teachers, a casino on Governor’s Island, a $15 million bomb-proof bunker for himself in the World Trade Center and turning the homeless out of city shelters after 90 days (which proved to be illegal); who has dumped every police commissioner, superintendent of schools and any other vassal who got more ink or air time than their feudal liege; who has belittled his predecessors and ridiculed his own task force on police brutality and won’t even talk to the black community (“They’re going to have to learn to discipline themselves in the way they speak”); who has declared Holy War on squeegee men (“drug-addicted psychopaths”), licensed street vendors (350 banned during daylight hours from Midtown and the Financial District), bicycle messengers and delivery boys (mostly immigrants), hookers and sex clubs, underage drinkers, aggressive panhandlers, Fourth of July Mafia fireworks, Chinese New Year’s celebrations, salsa music on Amsterdam Avenue and boom boxes everywhere — meanwhile, this Rudy has been busy on a dozen other Draconian fronts:

He has abolished remedial classes at City University. He has tried to eliminate subway and bus passes for schoolchildren. He has closed libraries while expanding the Museum of Modern Art. He’s cut every social service for the poor, from medical assistance to foster care to food stamps to heating for the elderly, and slashed the budget for parks and recreation, hospital workers and after-school sports and enrichment programs, while offering zoning variances, tax abatements and customized incentives to First Boston, Depository Trust, Viacom and the Stock Exchange. He has bulldozed the community gardens of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to make room for yuppie condos, forced single-mother welfare recipients onto “workfare” even if they can’t find child care, ordained that the disabled show up in downtown municipal offices to prove that they are indeed disabled, abolished the methadone program and unleashed a gleeful police force to do whatever it chooses in the Mussolini meantime, from invading mosques to no-knock wrong-address raids on black and Latino homes. While it might not be true that the cops in the 70th Precinct stationhouse who raped Abner Louima with a toilet plunger actually advised him that “It’s Giuliani time!” the spirit is accurate enough. The city also stands to lose as much as $1 billion in damages from 53,000 illegal, pre-arraignment strip searches of “misdemeanants” arrested in 1996 and 1997 for such minor offenses as scalping a ticket, driving with a suspended license or selling a pair of sneakers on the sidewalk without a vending license. (But who cares about the Fourth Amendment when you’ve got a police commissioner who wants a DNA specimen from anybody ever arrested in the imperial city, including subway turnstile-jumpers?)

I am reminded of the late Donald Barthelme, who wrote, “We have rots, blights and rusts capable of attacking the enemy’s alphabet,” plus “real-time online computer-controlled wish evaporations.” Barthelme went on to add: “There are flowers all over the city because the mayor doesn’t know where his mother is buried.” I am also reminded of Kafka’s Castle, Potemkin’s Village and Godard’s Alphaville. According to the Community Service Society’s July 1997 report on poverty, 1.5 million New Yorkers had a standard of living equivalent to that of a family of four getting by on less than $12,000 a year. When another 100,000 lost their food stamps in August of that year, the number of soup kitchens and food pantries increased from 800 to 1,000, serving 60 million meals per annum, but turning away 2,600 people every day.

How mean is Rudy? So mean, to wrench a Molly Ivins quote from context, “He wouldn’t spit in your ear if your brains were on fire.” Which is why the municipal unions are so scared of him that leaders of District 37 — the city’s largest municipal union, representing everybody from social workers to crossing guards — fraudulently rigged a 1996 vote to ratify a wage freeze contract. More than six weeks after the votes of all the other locals had been tabulated, rejecting this contract, clerical workers Local 1459 suddenly reported an amazing 10-2 margin of approval, putting the wage freeze over the top. District 37 is now in trusteeship and its leaders have resigned in disgrace, while Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau tries to decide whom to indict first.

This is what happens when you elect a former prosecutor. With concrete, he barricades his own City Hall. He thinks of himself as Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick or E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, but he’s a lot more like William Blake’s Urizen, “self-enclos’d, all repelling” — “Dark, revolving in silent activity,/Unseen in tormenting passions,/An activity unknown and horrible,/A self-contemplating shadow,/In enormous labors occupied.” One almost wishes that the widespread rumors of romantic hanky-panky with his press secretary, Christyne Lategano, were spot on — especially if you’ve ever seen Rudy’s wife, Donna Hanover, pushing a bit too hard on the perky pedal at the harmonium of her cable TV recipe show on the Food Network, between interviews with a meat-thermometer salesman and a flack for “The Great Fluff Off” at the Year of the Marshmallow festival. Talk about your Miracle Whip.

But crime is down, unless you count police brutality. And so is the caseload of parasitic welfare cheats, although after three years of slave-wage workfare the Giuliani administration refuses to tell us how many have graduated to real jobs, or whether those jobs used to belong to someone else, once unionized, since downsized. And so is the number of hospital workers, especially in the cafeteria food services, which will teach that union what happens when you don’t endorse the mayor. And thus the city is safer for all those delirious professionals who venture out at night in their yupscale neighborhoods, sun-dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume a minimalist bistro meal of cilantro leaves, goat-cheese medallions and half a scallop on a bed of eurodollars, tethered by their red suspenders to gaudy balloons of avarice and ego. Oh, the quality of My So-Called Life! Like Bombay, we have a huge low-wage work force and a filthy-rich managerial class and produce products consumed elsewhere. As in Singapore, we’re caned for littering.

Once upon a time, the whole idea of New York was to derive from our rainbow mosaic an energizing principle; to find, in diversity, our jumping beans. And once upon a time, the idea of government involved taking care of the young, the old, the odd, the powerless and strangers. But that was before we decided to measure everyone by his or her ability to produce wealth — and to morally condemn or punish anybody who failed to prosper. Look into Rudy’s prosecutorial eyes. He is evicting patients from a state-run psychiatric clinic in Brooklyn in order to punish a city councilman who crossed him with a homeless shelter no one needs. He is dispatching our garbage on scows to New Jersey, not having bothered to ask New Jersey in advance, like some sort of Flying Dutch DeLillo Cleanser. Wouldn’t he have been much happier back in the heyday of the sci-fi Cold War squelching Triffids, Pods, Blobs and Body Snatchers? Man-eating dandelions! Meteoric slimeballs! Bloodsucking carrots! Collectivized Bolshevik killer ants!

I am reminded of Fox Mulder and the Unabomber. Of Max Headroom, and Mark Pauline’s robot scorpion. Of the Vampire of Dusseldorf, the Silesian Bluebeard, Jack the Ripper and Brian De Palma, who explained: “I don’t particularly want to chop up women, but it seems to work.” I am reminded of Gabriel García Márquez’s autumnal patriarch, and “the solitary vice of power.” Scariest of all, I am reminded of another poor-boy-made-good lawyer out of synch — of Richard Nixon, alone in a darkened wing of the White House, as if Watergate had been a play by Samuel Beckett, listening on tape either to himself or maybe Elvis.

Nevertheless, and even though we were very wet, we worried more about the mayor than we did about ourselves, or even Chicago, while he was gone. To say that Rudolph Giuliani is a control freak is to say that Attila the Hun was antsy. There was reason to fear for his mental stability out there in the wild West, in the painted-desert whereabouts of Kit Carson and Zane Grey. Suppose they didn’t give him a whirlybird to napalm Thelma and Louise? Suppose those Navajos refused to convert their kivas into condos? Suppose Geronimo demanded more than his fair share of TV face time? What if Grand Canyon mules insisted on crossing at the wrong midtown intersection?

Imagine our relief when Rudy returned to his bunker without conniption. His very first day back, he threatened to defund New York City’s Campaign Finance Board because it proposed giving $4 for each one raised privately by candidates for a City Council election next month, if those candidates forswear corporate donations. Although this proposal had been endorsed by a coalition of the League of Women Voters, the Citizens Union, the City Bar Association, the New York Times and Common Cause, the mayor accused them all of “stubbornness,” “arrogance” and “intellectual dishonesty.” It’s the tone he takes not only with critics but with any Chicken Little or Tiny Tim who thinks out loud without his permission — with judges who say that the voters, instead of Rudy, should decide if the Yankees play baseball in Manhattan or the Bronx; with members of the City Council who override his vetoes; with journalists who want information on how “workfare” is playing out; with the comptroller, the public advocate and the Independent Budget Office, who all had to sue to force him to give them the facts and figures they needed to do their jobs; with City University of New York students who seek in lawful assembly to protest tuition hikes.

The last five years in New York have been less about government than they’ve been about obedience training. Rudy’s a guy with a built-in balcony, from which he barks our marching orders. Lawful assembly, and such free-speechifying as may attend its occasion, are particularly sore points around here. Before he was even elected the first time, in October 1993, candidate Rudy opposed letting Louis Farrakhan speak at Yankee Stadium. In March 1995, a wall of cops surrounded City Hall, with horses, scooters, nightsticks, riot gear, barricades and Mace, to keep 20,000 high school and college students from marching on Wall Street. That June, Rudy kicked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center. The following May, he would use armored cars against homeless squatters. The first official act of his second term, last New Year’s Day, was to close his own inauguration to the public, after which he directed the Metropolitan Transit Authority to remove from buses and subways a New York magazine ad that took his name in vain, which was followed by checkpoints and roadblocks in Greenwich Village against anarcho-syndicalists and other rowdies, and video surveillance cameras in Washington Square Park.

When cabbies last spring objected to a new set of onerous regulations, they were met with ridicule by Rudy, an accusation by his police commissioner that a proposed convoy of protesters constituted a “terrorist threat” (wonderfully coded, since many cabbies are Middle Eastern), a deployment of livery drivers as scabs (later ruled unlawful by an appellate court) and an army of cops with tow trucks who closed the East River bridges to any taxi without a fare, forcing angry drivers to walk from Queens and Brooklyn to Manhattan. “They know we broke their strike — destroyed it really,” Rudy boasted. “Nobody showed up today. And that didn’t happen just because we allowed business to go on as usual. That happened because we had a plan to stop them from doing it.”

In May, when street artists whom he’d hounded from the city sidewalks tried to heckle his appearance at Cooper Union, they were arrested. In September, the city refused a permit to Khallid Abdul Muhammad for his Million Youth March, suggesting that he agitate instead on Randall’s Island. And when Muhammad won won his right in court to gather on Malcolm X Boulevard, the cops closed all the subway stations and cross streets so nobody could join in along the route. In December, demonstrators seeking to observe World AIDS Day and mourn the 77,000 New Yorkers who’ve died of the disease were likewise denied a permit to rally in City Hall Park, and likewise went to court to win their case. Then, when 150 of them showed up, they had to pass through motorcycle cops and metal detectors before they arrived at a parking lot surrounded by a brand-new eight-foot chain-link penitentiary fence and looked down upon by sharpshooters.

Nor was it an accident that the organizer of the rally, Housing Works, had already seen its $6.5 million worth of contracts with the city canceled. Why should a thrift-shop sponsor of drug treatment, job training and employment programs for homeless people with HIV expect anything better from Rudy than, say, the City Council, whose time-servers till a couple of weeks ago were forbidden to stage photo ops on the steps of City Hall because maybe they were closet Montana militiamen. Or Repohistory, denied permission by the Department of Transportation to put up posters commemorating famous civil-liberties cases. Or Bill Weinberg, the radical journalist who spent a night in the Tombs and the following Saturday cleaning up dogshit in Tompkins Square for pasting a “GIULIANI IS A JERK” sticker on a lamppost. It’s not as if any of these people were baseball players or astronauts or Disney puppets or Columbus Day Italians.

I am reminded of another great leader, who complained in Moscow in 1920: “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?” This was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

- – - – - – - – - -

Meanwhile, our Rudy, who began by threatening to abolish the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Civil Rights Division, to sell off public hospitals and East River bridges, to cancel the city’s contract with Legal Aid; who’d subsequently propose uniforms for teachers, a casino on Governor’s Island, a $15 million bomb-proof bunker for himself in the World Trade Center and turning the homeless out of city shelters after 90 days (which proved to be illegal); who has dumped every police commissioner, superintendent of schools and any other vassal who got more ink or air time than their feudal liege; who has belittled his predecessors and ridiculed his own task force on police brutality and won’t even talk to the black community (“They’re going to have to learn to discipline themselves in the way they speak”); who has declared Holy War on squeegee men (“drug-addicted psychopaths”), licensed street vendors (350 banned during daylight hours from Midtown and the Financial District), bicycle messengers and delivery boys (mostly immigrants), hookers and sex clubs, underage drinkers, aggressive panhandlers, Fourth of July Mafia fireworks, Chinese New Year’s celebrations, salsa music on Amsterdam Avenue and boom boxes everywhere — meanwhile, this Rudy has been busy on a dozen other Draconian fronts:

He has abolished remedial classes at City University. He has tried to eliminate subway and bus passes for schoolchildren. He has closed libraries while expanding the Museum of Modern Art. He’s cut every social service for the poor, from medical assistance to foster care to food stamps to heating for the elderly, and slashed the budget for parks and recreation, hospital workers and after-school sports and enrichment programs, while offering zoning variances, tax abatements and customized incentives to First Boston, Depository Trust, Viacom and the Stock Exchange. He has bulldozed the community gardens of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to make room for yuppie condos, forced single-mother welfare recipients onto “workfare” even if they can’t find child care, ordained that the disabled show up in downtown municipal offices to prove that they are indeed disabled, abolished the methadone program and unleashed a gleeful police force to do whatever it chooses in the Mussolini meantime, from invading mosques to no-knock wrong-address raids on black and Latino homes. While it might not be true that the cops in the 70th Precinct stationhouse who raped Abner Louima with a toilet plunger actually advised him that “It’s Giuliani time!” the spirit is accurate enough. The city also stands to lose as much as $1 billion in damages from 53,000 illegal, pre-arraignment strip searches of “misdemeanants” arrested in 1996 and 1997 for such minor offenses as scalping a ticket, driving with a suspended license or selling a pair of sneakers on the sidewalk without a vending license. (But who cares about the Fourth Amendment when you’ve got a police commissioner who wants a DNA specimen from anybody ever arrested in the imperial city, including subway turnstile-jumpers?)

I am reminded of the late Donald Barthelme, who wrote, “We have rots, blights and rusts capable of attacking the enemy’s alphabet,” plus “real-time online computer-controlled wish evaporations.” Barthelme went on to add: “There are flowers all over the city because the mayor doesn’t know where his mother is buried.” I am also reminded of Kafka’s Castle, Potemkin’s Village and Godard’s Alphaville. According to the Community Service Society’s July 1997 report on poverty, 1.5 million New Yorkers had a standard of living equivalent to that of a family of four getting by on less than $12,000 a year. When another 100,000 lost their food stamps in August of that year, the number of soup kitchens and food pantries increased from 800 to 1,000, serving 60 million meals per annum, but turning away 2,600 people every day.

How mean is Rudy? So mean, to wrench a Molly Ivins quote from context, “He wouldn’t spit in your ear if your brains were on fire.” Which is why the municipal unions are so scared of him that leaders of District 37 — the city’s largest municipal union, representing everybody from social workers to crossing guards — fraudulently rigged a 1996 vote to ratify a wage freeze contract. More than six weeks after the votes of all the other locals had been tabulated, rejecting this contract, clerical workers Local 1459 suddenly reported an amazing 10-2 margin of approval, putting the wage freeze over the top. District 37 is now in trusteeship and its leaders have resigned in disgrace, while Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau tries to decide whom to indict first.

This is what happens when you elect a former prosecutor. With concrete, he barricades his own City Hall. He thinks of himself as Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick or E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, but he’s a lot more like William Blake’s Urizen, “self-enclos’d, all repelling” — “Dark, revolving in silent activity,/Unseen in tormenting passions,/An activity unknown and horrible,/A self-contemplating shadow,/In enormous labors occupied.” One almost wishes that the widespread rumors of romantic hanky-panky with his press secretary, Christyne Lategano, were spot on — especially if you’ve ever seen Rudy’s wife, Donna Hanover, pushing a bit too hard on the perky pedal at the harmonium of her cable TV recipe show on the Food Network, between interviews with a meat-thermometer salesman and a flack for “The Great Fluff Off” at the Year of the Marshmallow festival. Talk about your Miracle Whip.

But crime is down, unless you count police brutality. And so is the caseload of parasitic welfare cheats, although after three years of slave-wage workfare the Giuliani administration refuses to tell us how many have graduated to real jobs, or whether those jobs used to belong to someone else, once unionized, since downsized. And so is the number of hospital workers, especially in the cafeteria food services, which will teach that union what happens when you don’t endorse the mayor. And thus the city is safer for all those delirious professionals who venture out at night in their yupscale neighborhoods, sun-dried as if in extra-virgin olive oil, crouched to consume a minimalist bistro meal of cilantro leaves, goat-cheese medallions and half a scallop on a bed of eurodollars, tethered by their red suspenders to gaudy balloons of avarice and ego. Oh, the quality of My So-Called Life! Like Bombay, we have a huge low-wage work force and a filthy-rich managerial class and produce products consumed elsewhere. As in Singapore, we’re caned for littering.

Once upon a time, the whole idea of New York was to derive from our rainbow mosaic an energizing principle; to find, in diversity, our jumping beans. And once upon a time, the idea of government involved taking care of the young, the old, the odd, the powerless and strangers. But that was before we decided to measure everyone by his or her ability to produce wealth — and to morally condemn or punish anybody who failed to prosper. Look into Rudy’s prosecutorial eyes. He is evicting patients from a state-run psychiatric clinic in Brooklyn in order to punish a city councilman who crossed him with a homeless shelter no one needs. He is dispatching our garbage on scows to New Jersey, not having bothered to ask New Jersey in advance, like some sort of Flying Dutch DeLillo Cleanser. Wouldn’t he have been much happier back in the heyday of the sci-fi Cold War squelching Triffids, Pods, Blobs and Body Snatchers? Man-eating dandelions! Meteoric slimeballs! Bloodsucking carrots! Collectivized Bolshevik killer ants!

I am reminded of Fox Mulder and the Unabomber. Of Max Headroom, and Mark Pauline’s robot scorpion. Of the Vampire of Dusseldorf, the Silesian Bluebeard, Jack the Ripper and Brian De Palma, who explained: “I don’t particularly want to chop up women, but it seems to work.” I am reminded of Gabriel García Márquez’s autumnal patriarch, and “the solitary vice of power.” Scariest of all, I am reminded of another poor-boy-made-good lawyer out of synch — of Richard Nixon, alone in a darkened wing of the White House, as if Watergate had been a play by Samuel Beckett, listening on tape either to himself or maybe Elvis.