Mayor David Dinkins asks NYC public - 9 August 1991

I don't know if you've noticed, or perhaps I should say had my experience of reading a book or a newspaper one day and finding a little later, next day, that what you remember most vividly is not the substance of what you read, but a single image, a picture of a person which from then on will be the key to whatever you retain of the book, the piece, the story.

This past week, wallowing in a busman's holiday, I read, not one but, four newspapers every morning and boned up on Yugoslavia and Gorbachev's military opponents, and the new regime in India, and the captain of the sinking cruise ship, and Secretary Baker's ceaseless jetting between Israel and the Arabs, and the 15-year-old golf prodigy, the little black boy, who swears he'll become the best in history. And so on and so forth.

After several days of this feeding frenzy, I stopped the newspapers and drove down the peninsula from San Francisco, a mere 14 miles, and played golf in a fog bank. Padding along with another ghost of a man between whiteness and high black cypresses. When I got back to the hotel, I took a mountainous pile of newspapers and dumped them in my wastebasket.

And then I encountered the phenomenon I mentioned at the beginning. All that emerged from thousands and thousand of words on many topics was two pictures of two lonely men, far apart, more than 2,000 miles apart, who, together, symbolised, or spanned a gamut of human anxiety. Each in his way trying to do something about the thing that professionally troubles him most.

One man was Mr David Dinkins, the major of New York City. The other, 2,500 miles south and west was one Dr. Tom Gehrels, a professor at the University of Arizona. What troubles Mr Dinkins all day and every day is the condition of New York City. Human, economic, social, physical, spiritual. Like the major of almost every big city in the country, Mr Dinkins cannot arrive at a workable budget without cutting to the bone the running expenses, such things as the fire brigade, the police force, schoolteachers, libraries, park maintenance, garbage, sewage. The last, charming, I remember reading when I left New York was that the sewage inspection staff was going to be reduced so brutally that the city could expect by next summer a million more rats.

I sometimes wonder if Mr Dinkins ever guessed, a couple of years ago, what he was getting into when he proudly announced that he was running for the second most powerful executive office in the United States. So it is. One of the more painfully obvious differences between the ordeal of Mr Dinkins and the life of Mr Bush is that looking over the nightmare economics of New York City, Mr Dinkins cannot pack his bags and fly off to Moscow or London or Amman to promise to take care of their problems.

Well a week or so ago, the mayor invited any New Yorker with a bright idea that might ease the city's troubles to come on Monday 5th August and, as he put it in the vernacular: "Put in your two cents worth about how the city isn't working or how it could work better." I've never known a mayor, governor, senator, president, prime minister, do this. Have you? Of course, they'll all protest that they're willing, eager, grateful to anyone who wants to propose a good idea through the MP, congressman/woman, whoever, but I don't remember the big man or woman, the chief executive, saying: "Come on to my house, come one, come all!"

Well, over 2,000, 2,200 was the police count, lined up outside City Hall on Monday. The first to arrive on the first cool morning anyone could remember, was there at 5.30 and understandably she was, after an hour or so's wait, she was the first to see the mayor. You must picture this 42-year-old housewife from Brooklyn being led into the mayor's office – it's always a shock to come on it as an elegant 18th century room– and confronting, for the first time in her life, the mayor of her city. And remember Mr Dinkins. A short, very compact, dapper man, with a handsome face of fine bone carved, as it might be, out of mahogany. Mr Dinkins took the hand of Mrs Corrine Brown and asked her what was her bright idea.

It turned out, as with so many other bright ideas, that she had no magic cure for the city. What she had was a personal complaint. A broken city sewer line leaked sewage into her basement. The city hadn't offered to help. I don't know if Mr Dinkins improved on the city's negligence, all Mrs Brown said afterwards was: "I walked into the office and he took my hand. He held my hand for a long time. It felt good. I started to cry." I'm sure the mayor will remember that first humble petitioner. Obviously nothing like 2,200 citizens got to have their hand held or even to talk to the mayor. He did his best. He took a short break for lunch but stayed there listening from early morning till 5.30 in the evening.

Then, of course, the people who didn't make it were sad, or mad, or sarcastic, saying the whole idea was a publicity stunt. Of course, some of the waiting people were small groups, not with a new idea, but with an old protest. Like five residents of the East Village, way downtown, who want to have their local small park, which has been closed because of its nuisance status as a haven for drug pushers and drunks, who want it to be reopened as a housing park for the homeless. The mayor has been into this heatedly. And many times. And is against it.

In all, over 50 petitioners spent five minutes or more with the mayor and offered a range of ideas. But from all I could gather, there was a disappointing shortage of possible workable solutions. Several people reiterated a popular idea of repealing a law that puts strict limits on the city's power to give contracts to private concerns. Another cure-all to some protesters is lumping the firemen and the police and the paramedics into one department. There was a man who thought the city could make a fortune from holding a World's Fair for children. Think that over for a moment! By way of expense, chaperonage, doctors, day and night care, security, languages. I can find no report of the mayor's enthusiasm for that one.

The idea the mayor seemed to be most grateful for came from a man, a bond broker, who proposed that the city, instead of offering only $5,000 bonds should market $250 bonds which many thousands of New Yorkers could afford. One idea the mayor heard sympathetically, on which he did not positively commit himself, came from a cowboy. It was to have cowboys ride into the slums of the city and in between rope tricks teach the children about AIDS.

There was one lady with a fascinating proposal but she never got past the entrance to City Hall. Her name is Tasia Figueroa. She runs a sideshow at Coney Island, which by the way is a shabby rundown parody of what once was. Miss Figueroa's partner in her act is a python from Burma. She went to City Hall last Monday to beg the mayor to be more generous with licences for photographers, press photographers I guess she meant, at Coney Island. She had the python – Shorty she called him – along with her, all 11 feet of him, snugly encircling, several times, her waist. But the cops wouldn't let her in. She was properly disgusted. A case, she thought, of discrimination.

I think this experiment was well worth trying out. It must at any rate, have reassured the mayor, if he labours under the guilty suspicion that there are splendid political solutions out there among the people whom the professional politicians never hear from. The experiment confirmed me in my belief, which took some years to arrive at, that on the whole, professional politicians are superior, as knowledgeable people able to govern. Superior to the people they represent. Well, so much for the anxieties of a troubled mayor.

How about the anxieties of the other lonely man, far off there in the Arizona desert? What's troubling him? Professor Tom Gehrels. He's a professor of lunar and planetary science at the University of Arizona, and he's the head man of an anxious team which, night and day, scans the heavens as watchfully and as ceaselessly as the satellites that peer across the Bering Strait or did, for the approach of Soviet missiles.

This Arizona team searches for asteroids which, if it's slipped your mind the dictionary will remind you are the small planets revolving round the Sun, mainly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That sounds alright. But Dr. Gehrel's concern is a killer asteroid. What his cheerful team calls the "doomsday rock." The experts are agreed on two things. One, judging from craters on the moon and from surveys done of asteroids that cross the Earth's path, a big asteroid crashes into our planet once every, well between 300,000 and a million years. Two, that there is such a killer asteroid somewhere out there and it is, at this moment, hurtling towards us, the Earth, at the rate of 6,700 miles an hour, or 16 miles a second.

The biggest asteroid Dr. Gehrel's knows of to be nearest the Earth is just over six miles in diameter. And eventually, he says, it's going to hit and, quote: "The explosion would be a billion times as powerful as the bomb on Hiroshima." It would, he says, severely disrupt life on Earth. What's he mean by disrupt? Well, all agriculture would wither, most human and animal life, and civilisation, of course, as we know it. Some time, any time in the next 50 years, one chance in about 60,000. Look out for it! If you sight it, don't call the BBC's duty officer, even though he's on duty, night and day.

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