Seattle As Metaphor
GOLD, PHILIP
Seattle As Metaphor The battle, the rattle, and now the skedaddle. BY PHILIP GOLD Seattle SOMETHING HAS ENDED out here. It's not quite clear what, but it'S got some nasty metaphoriC aspects. We...
...And from what kind of soul will it come...
...Our best players left— Randy Johnson by involuntary deal-him-while-he's-still-worth-some-thing trade, Ken Griffey Jr...
...First, we did successful things...
...Governor Gary Locke has declared an official drought...
...Riots and murders in the streets...
...This is such a nice place...
...And our juice is going south...
...But we're beginning to wonder, in a dim, annoying, 3:00 a.m...
...It's more diffuse...
...Management and non-strikers put out the papers and gave them away...
...Was it in fact the Wasted Nineties...
...Water ain't going over the hydro dams like it once did...
...Stars leave...
...Second, we became a city no longer little, yet ignorant of how to be big...
...Paul Schell is running for reelection...
...Meanwhile, it seems we've had too much good weather these last few years...
...To help restore Pioneer Square, Mayor Schell has instituted free parking on Saturdays...
...How much endurance will be needed now...
...Come summer, we may not have enough juice to pay tribute to the barbarians...
...Our tribal motto: "Of course we're concerned...
...We celebrated Mardi Gras this year with rioting in Pioneer Square, including one death...
...When the verdict came down, Canada— well, some folks in Vancouver—indicated that Bill Gates would be welcome to move north...
...to be home with Dad in Cincinnati, A-Rod for a quarter-billion (plus incentives) j to bang about in Texas...
...Were you brutalized by the police...
...stuff happens...
...You have been warned...
...But no...
...sort of way, whether maybe, just maybe, what we built is turning out to be less than the sum of its parts, and whether historians will someday describe those good years as "The Wasted Nineties...
...Local TV played videos of black gangs attacking whites...
...Things got out of hand because Mayor Schell apparently believed that the "good protesters" could control the crazies better than the cops...
...Now Boeing's leaving...
...Something has changed here...
...After a while, we began to think that things would succeed because we did them...
...This is the Information Age, and We're the Information...
...But we made two mistakes...
...After all, what could go wrong...
...When city lawyers informed him that would constitute taking sides in a labor dispute, he okayed discreet liaisons between his staff and the press...
...The old liberal pieties no longer seem so affordable, the tactics and insults no longer so availing...
...A group of black clergy protested the broadcasts as racist, then awaited the popular support that never came...
...We're much too civil for that...
...The Federales won't take on Microsoft...
...A couple of days after the "Rattle in Seattle," the Seattle Times ran a letter from San Francisco: "Send more electricity or we send more earthquakes...
...And perhaps Americans are starting to wonder the same, about and for the nation as a whole...
...Now they stay where they are and exact tribute in the form of electricity...
...Speaking of local newspapers, we've got two in the morning, allegedly engaged in an old-fashioned newspaper war . . . although under an old joint operating agreement, the Post-Intelligencer could vanish tomorrow and continue making money for the Hearst chain till Britney Spears draws Medicare...
...Terrorists blow up the Space Needle...
...And away with the crabbed old notion that to succeed in business you have to do something that turns a profit...
...And it goes beyond the overdue realization that man does not live by IPOs alone, that the earth sometimes quakes, and that crowds tend to behave like crowds and gangs like gangs...
...We did not understand that when you're ignorant of how to be big and not everybody loves you, trouble ensues...
...I posed as a member of the Towhomit Tribe, as in "To Whom It May Concern...
...It's been more than a year now since the World Trade Organization riots, the "Battle in Seattle," the first of the micro-intifadas in defiance of globalization and whatever else anyone cared to protest...
...More earthquakes...
...Mayor Schell defended the inaction...
...I know him well," the mayor said, then added, "Maybe not as well as I thought...
...and the radical lawyers set up street-corner cardtables, recruiting for their class-action lawsuits...
...How much endurance will be needed soon...
...And the list could go on, but let's just cut to the Metaphor...
...Mayor Paul Schell, an old '60s protester and state-of-the-art imperious liberal, refused to grant or let his staff grant interviews because he felt that would constitute crossing a picket line...
...That big earthquake last month rather got our attention...
...Old Man Boeing would rise from his grave if his successors ever dreamt of leaving...
...But they're not leaving...
...For the moment, the local media are reporting that the real estate market is still solid, but the "Price Reduced" signs are going up here and there, and you can now find spaces at the more fashionable Park & Rides...
...This was, of course, before organized labor marched in solidarity with the topless lesbians (or was it the other way round...
...Someone (Plato, I think) once defined courage as "endurance of the soul...
...The 1990s were good to Seattle...
...Minutes after the announcement, Mayor Schell was on the air, assuring everyone that he'd put a call in to Boeing CEO Phil Condit...
...The offer's still open...
...Things have been going this way for awhile...
...The police did nothing for several hours...
...Yes, the '90s were good to Seattle...
...not yet...
...ball stadium for one of the most playoff-averse teams in the NFL...
...And from what kind of soul will it come...
...We built a glorious new baseball stadium...
...he just funded the special referendum that permitted We the People to finance the facility...
...Do you think you were brutalized...
...We won't know for sure until the Chardonnay consumption reports come out...
...Had Seahawks owner Paul Allen taken the proceeds from his one-day earnings the last time Microsoft's stock split, he could have built two stadiums...
...This is more than the latest iteration of Seattle's traditional boom and bust cycle...
...Microsoft may be busted up...
...We're Towhomit...
...The war was interrupted by a long strike at both papers...
...We're building a glorious new footPhilip Gold is a senior fellow at the Seattle- ; based Discovery Institute...
...How badly has the dot-com meltdown, including that of the local Mother Dot, Amazon, hurt...
...Why would they...
...The strikers howled unfair, then waited for the popular support that never came...
...Not so long ago, we worried that a race of barbarians known as "Californicators" would overwhelm us...
...They wouldn't dare...
...Just the corporate headquarters, although the manufacturing exodus has also started...
...I covered the fracas by going underground...
...Bad juju, when the times start changing...
...Do you wish you'd been brutalized...
...He saved his money to build the Experience Music Project, his tribute to Jimi Hendrix, a building in the shape of a broken guitar, down near the Space Needle that Ahmed Ressam wanted to blow up last Y2K Eve...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 29
