Seattle as Metaphor

Something has ended out here in Seattle. It’s not quite clear what, but it’s got some nasty metaphoric aspects, whatever.

We built a glorious new baseball stadium. Our best players left, Randy Johnson by involuntary deal-him-while-he’s-still-worth-something trade, Ken Griffey, Jr., to be home with Dad in Cincinnati, A-Rod for a quarter-billion (plus incentives) to bang about in Texas.

We’re building a glorious new football stadium for one of the most playoff-averse teams in the NFL. Had Seahawks owner Paul Allen taken the proceeds from his one-day earnings the last time Microsoft stock split, he could have built two stadiums. Of course, Mr. Allen did fund the special referendum that permitted We the People to finance the facility. He also built 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.

That earthquake rather got our attention.

Our juice is going south. Not so long ago, we worried that a race of barbarians known as “Californicators” would overwhelm us. Now they stay where they are and exact tribute. A couple days after the “Rattle in Seattle,” the Seattle Times ran a letter from San Francisco: “Send more electricity or we send more earthquakes. You have been warned.”

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 ’til Britney Spears draws Medicare. The war was interrupted by a long strike at both papers. The strikers howled unfair, then waited for the popular support that never came. Management and non-strikers put out the papers and gave them away. Mayor Paul Schell, an old 60s protester/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. When city lawyers informed him that would constitute taking sides in a labor dispute, he OK’d discreet liaisons for his staff.

Boeing’s leaving. Just the corporate headquarters for now, although the manufacturing exodus has also started. Minutes after the announcement struck, Paul Schell was on the air, assuring everyone that he’d put a call in to Boeing CEO Phil Condit. “I know him well,” the Mayor said, then added, “Maybe not as well as I thought.”

Then there was WTO, the “Battle in Seattle” and first of the micro-intifadas that have raised their rocks in defiance of globalization and whatever else anyone cared to protest. Things got out of hand because Mayor Schell apparently believed that the “good protesters” could control the crazies better than the cops. This was, of course, before organized labor marched in solidarity with the topless lesbians (or was it the other way round?) and the radical lawyers set up street-corner card tables, recruiting for their class-action lawsuits. Were you brutalized by the police? Do you think you were brutalized? Do you wish you’d been brutalized?

(I covered the fracas by going underground. I posed as Schlep Barocha of the Towhomit Tribe. Schlep Barocha – a Yiddish neologism perhaps best translated, “Mixed Blessing.” And the Towhomit, as in “To Whom It May Concern.” Our tribal motto: “Of course we’re concerned. We’re Towhomit!”)

Microsoft may be busted up. But they’re not leaving . . . not yet. When the verdict came down, Canada – well, some folks in Vancouver – indicated that Mr. Gates would be welcome to relocate. The offer’s still open.

There was rioting in Pioneer Square during Mardi Gras, including one death. The police did nothing for several hours. Mayor Schell defended the inaction. Local TV played videos of black gangs attacking whites. A group of black clergy protested the broadcasts as racist, then awaited the popular support that never came.

How badly has the dot.com meltdown, including that of the local Mother Dot, Amazon, hurt? We won’t know for sure until the Chardonnay consumption reports come out. For the moment, suffice it to say that the local media are reporting the real estate market still solid, the “price reduced” signs are going up here and there, and you can now occasionally find spaces at the more fashionable Park & Rides.

To help restore Pioneer Square, Mayor Schell has instituted free parking on Saturdays.

Paul Schell’s running for re-election.

And the list could go on, but let’s just cut to the Metaphor. Something has changed, and it goes beyond mere recognition of this latest iteration of Seattle’s traditional boom & bust cycle. Nor is it just realization that man does not live on IPOs alone, that the earth sometimes quakes, and that crowds tend to behave like crowds and gangs like gangs. It’s more diffuse.

The 1990s were good to Seattle. But we made two mistakes. First, we did successful things. After a while, we began to think that things would succeed because we did them. Bad juju, when the times start changing. Second, we became a city no longer little, yet ignorant of how to be big. We did not understand that when you’re ignorant of how to be big and not everybody loves you, ignorance invites trouble.

What could go wrong? The Federales won’t take on Microsoft. They wouldn’t dare. Terrorists blow up the Space Needle? Why would they? This is such a nice place. Old Man Boeing would rise from his grave if his successors ever dreamt of leaving. Riots and murders in the streets? We’re much too civil for that. And away with the crabbed old notion that to succeed in business you have to do something that turns a profit. This is the Information Age and We’re the Information.

Yes, the 90s were good to Seattle. But we’re beginning to wonder, in a dim, annoying, 3:00 AM sort of way, that maybe, just maybe, what we built is turning out to be less than the sum of its parts, and that perhaps someday historians will describe those good years as “The Wasted Nineties.” Stars leave; stuff happens. The old liberal pieties no longer seem so affordable, the tactics and insults no longer so availing. Some one (Plato, I think) once defined courage as “endurance of the soul.” How much endurance will be needed soon? And from what kind of soul will it come?

And perhaps Americans are starting to wonder the same, about and for the nation as a whole. Was it in fact the Wasted Nineties? How much endurance will be needed now? And from what kind of soul will it come?

Meanwhile, it seems we’ve had too much good weather these last few years. Governor Gary Locke has declared an official drought. Water ain’t going over the hydro dams like it once did. Come summer, we may not have enough juice to pay tribute to the barbarians.

More earthquakes?

Philip Gold is a senior fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.