Jenny Durkan

Ah, Seattle, that environmentally obsessed city where all is decorous, the sidewalks immaculately swept, the parks rigorously trimmed, proverbial for its shimmering lakes and charming rows of variegated tents housing those of no fixed abode — and recently, too, for a municipal government with much the same level of restraint as a bus being driven downhill by the Marx Brothers. Readers may be familiar with the strange phenomenon of a civic treasury that marries heady rhetoric about its prudent stewardship of public money with a cynical disregard for the suckers who actually foot the bills.

Seattle In Max Frisch’s 1953 absurdist play The Fire Raisers, a well-off family in an unnamed town invites a man they suspect of being an arsonist to sleep in their home. A second such guest then appears, and before long the family’s attic is piled high with drums of gasoline. The man of the house gradually realizes that he has two active pyromaniacs under his roof, but believes that by displaying kindness, he will make his house immune to them. In the last scene of the play, the original arsonist asks for a box of matches and, again wishing to appear generous, his host gives him one. You can guess the rest. Somehow I’m put in mind of Frisch’s morality tale when examining the unresisted rise of the 46-year-old Seattle socialist politician Kshama Sawant.

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.