Tales of the City: Mayoral madness

One of the most infamous acts of civic despotism in living memory was perpetrated earlier this month, not by the looters in Baghdad, nor by the nicotine-hating mayor of Manhattan, nor even by the myrmidons of Ken Livingstone. It happened in Chicago, and has gone wholly unreported in the British press. The Windy City's mayor, Richard M Daley (son of the Richard Daley whom all the radicalised hippies hated in the late Sixties), has long had his eyes on a small but popular airport called Meigs Field, on the Lake Michigan waterfront, beside the city centre. Daley Jnr has tried many times to turn it into a public park; but has been thwarted for six years by m'learned friends of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

So, two weeks ago, he plumped for direct action. Under cover of darkness, and without telling anyone in advance, he sent in earth-moving equipment and bulldozers to tear up the runway and carve X-shaped trenches in the concrete. It resulted in the stranding of 16 parked aircraft and a lot of consternation among pilots flying into Meigs Field who'd received no notification that it was shut.

Pressed to explain what the hell he thought he was doing, Daley explained that it was a "homeland security" measure, designed to stop locally hijacked planes flying into Chicago's huge skyscrapers. He didn't explain why, if he was all that worried by the terrorist threat, he didn't close down O'Hare and Midway, the city's major airports, from which much bigger planes could fly into the Sears Tower. Nor why he sent in the tanks – sorry, bulldozers – like a mugger, in the middle of the night and without the sanction of his city hall or state governor. The words "coup d'état" come to mind, along with "putsch" and "land-grab" and "arrogant bastard". Since the city woke up to find its jewel-like lakeside airfield resembling Basra International, the mayor's critics have tried some form of legal redress; but amazingly, they've failed. It seems that Daley had the authority to close down the airport as a security measure if he felt like it, whatever public opinion might say.

It's tempting to think that this kind of licensed vandalism, the whim of a local politician, could happen only in America, but it wouldn't be true. Such a thing could easily happen in Eastern Europe (though not, strangely enough, Moscow, where the mayor was recently restrained from turning a common into a Mikhail Bulgakov Theme Park) or Indonesia, or almost any place where the will of the people counts for nothing.

One can only speculate what will happen if the London Mayoralty begins getting such ideas in its head. Will we wake up one morning to find that St James's Park lake and duckpond has been drained, concreted over and painted green, "in case Middle Eastern frogmen launch a sub-aquatic night attack on Buckingham Palace"? Will we discover, on checking our watches on the Embankment, that the hands and faces of Big Ben have been replaced by a flashing digital LED display "because the old numerals were too confusing for foreign travellers, who might be incited to acts of violence"?

Let us pray that his honour Mr Livingstone curbs his mayoral folie de grandeur for a bit longer...

Saving soles

The Archbishop of Canterbury plans to wash the feet of the poor in his Maundy Thursday church service at Canterbury tomorrow, the first time the ritual will have been done in a C of E church since the Reformation. Leaving aside the practical problem of finding 12 poor people in Canterbury in 2003, it is a shrewd move by the PR-savvy divine. The washing ritual derives from the gospel story of Jesus laving the feet of his mortified Apostles shortly before he was crucified, and it's a powerful visual symbol – spiritual cleansing, the humbling of the great, the elevation of the wretched. It's also an excruciating spectacle fraught with danger. I know because I saw it close up when serving at Mass aged nine (the Catholic church kept up the ritual long after the Anglican church dropped it).

I had my feet washed at one Maundy Thursday by the irascible Father Bennett. There was a metal bowl, soap, towels, everything bar conditioning shampoo and pour homme exfoliant. The priest had six altar-servers to wash, and didn't stand any nonsense. Though the point of the performance was to reveal the humility of the holy man in bringing hygiene to the great unwashed, there was no chance of our being in need of cleaning. "I want every one of you to wash your feet very thoroughly and put on clean socks before leaving the house," we were told. "Do you understand? I mean very thoroughly. I am not having dirty little boys with disgusting black bits between their toes in my church."

We did as he said – all except Gerry Doyle, who arrived with disgusting socks and feet, just to see how the priest would react when "going live" before a congregation of 200. Fr Bennett didn't falter. He seized Gerry's pongy foot, plunged it in the warm water and, with a murderous gesture, extracted from his pocket a hard little nailbrush, with which he scrubbed Gerry's toes. The boy couldn't yell with pain on the altar in front of everyone, so we watched him writhing in silence for a full minute.

I'm sure Dr Williams won't be faced with such subversive behaviour. As you watch him plying the unhygienic with Wright's coal tar soap, remember that the chances of his coming upon a verruca, a fungal infection or any human imperfection are very small indeed.

'What, this huge bas-relief? No, it's not Shalmaneser's; it's been in the family for years'

Lots of reasons have been offered for why the citizens of Baghdad should want to loot shops, offices and government buildings – when you've had nothing for 20 years, you grab a slice of anything you can get, just for the sensation of possessing something. What I can't understand is how the looters are going to incorporate what they've nicked into their ordinary lives.

The bloke stealing a single, outsized Jeep tyre – will he have to go on umpteen future lootings in search of three identical tyres? Or drive his car very lopsidedly for a few months and hope it looks cool and, you know, liberated?

Or the chap who was seen walking down the street with a colossal gold vase, five or six feet high – will it ever fit on the mantelpiece in his living room? And won't even the longest-stemmed chrysanthemums just disappear down inside it?

As for the priceless artefacts stolen from the Iraq Museum last weekend, what's the motivation behind that? Can even the cheekiest robber, even the most plausible, silver-tongued villain, go on the Iraqi equivalent of the Antiques Roadshow and pretend that the huge stone bas-relief from the Throne of Shalmaneser III that he's offering for valuation has been in his granny's parlour for, oooh, years? When friends come round for dinner with the opportunistic, middle-class looter I saw driving away from the museum last Sunday, will they say politely, "That's a nice third-millennium-BC solid-gold Sumerian harp – is that new?" And who in God's name could have pinched the tablets of clay (c3,100 BC) that contained Hammurabi's Code, one of the first pieces of writing and therefore a kind of preserved foetus of human communication? I expect, when the war is over, it'll end up on a coffee table somewhere, with its owner saying, "It's five thousand years old, you know. Those marks on it, they're actually the earliest evidence of written language. It's a conversation piece, you see", and his friend replying, "Mmmm... yeah," and thinking, "If only I'd pinched the Babylonian fertility dagger when I had the chance..."