Seattle

Back in April 1971, a large billboard appeared by a freeway near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. “Will The Last Person Leaving Seattle Turn Out The Lights?” A reference to the Boeing company’s decision to lay off 40,000 local employees, and the ensuing rapid downturn in the area’s economy. Among other problems, the aircraft manufacturer had suffered a crippling blow when the US Senate rejected further funding for its proposed SST supersonic jet, Boeing’s would-be competitor to Concorde. I was reminded of the 1971 slogan just last month, when Seattle’s newly-elected mayor Katie Wilson told a university audience that she was “really, really excited” about the recent passage of a 9.

Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.

There are probably better ways to start your fifteen-hour work shift than to hear the words: “Fire at the Renton Avenue gas station. Pump still leaking fuel. Possible injuries. Attend scene immediately.”  That was the stark dispatch that came over the radio of the King County Sheriff’s car driven by thirty-two-year-old Deputy Cy Brame, one of 720 law enforcement officers who serve the needs of half a million people living in the sprawling unincorporated areas around Seattle. I recently joined him on a characteristically drizzly early March afternoon on his beat behind the wheel of a black Ford Interceptor SUV. “You’re lucky,” said Deputy Brame, with a thin smile. “The last ride-along I had was here all day without an emergency.

I stood across the street from Seattle’s City Hall, next to a long line of tents. There were more than fifteen of them, no more than a few feet apart. In between the tents, furniture and trash was piled high. The encampment took up the entire sidewalk, forcing pedestrians to walk in the street and triggering nonstop honking from passing cars. In a parking lot on the corner, people from a local mutual aid group stood at a booth, handing out food and water. They had signs making clear their views: “Stop the Sweeps,” “You sweep we strike,” “Fuck Capitalism,” “Equity now!” and “Smash Fascism.” This particular aid group were self-identified anarchists.

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 — From Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to the Supreme Court’s late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many Americans have tried to address inequality in the nation’s justice system. Now Washington State’s part-time legislators believe they have discovered a new way. Later in January, Washington’s state assembly will debate House Bill 1692. If passed, the law would significantly reduce the criminal penalties for the drive-by shootings that have become something of a boom industry here in the Northwest, where violent assaults are up 80 percent on five years ago. It would do so by prohibiting state prosecutors from adding the word “aggravated” to any murder charge involving a perpetrator in a moving vehicle.

For nearly a month last summer a violent insurrection claimed control of Capitol Hill — in Seattle, that is, not Washington DC. The insurrectionists were leftists who proclaimed the six or so city blocks under their power to be a new state-within-a-state, the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’, or CHAZ. Multiple shootings, murders and acts of arson took place before police finally restored legal authority on July 1. This insurrection, and the many other lethal incursions against the rule of law that took place last summer, have not occasioned much soul-searching or anger from progressives and liberals in the commentariat. The contrast with their fury over the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 of this year could not be more striking.

When you’re averse to the administration’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on illegal immigration and are invited to occupy the Senate Office Building to signify your displeasure, do you, as an elected US representative, agree to do so? When asked to join 398 of your House colleagues in passing a motion decrying any prejudicial treatment of Israel, specifically affirming the right of all US citizens to free speech, do you boldly side with the 16 dissidents who oppose this ideal?

It is two o’clock on an unusually mild December afternoon here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting on my back porch smoking marijuana.Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this lapse, but smoking nonetheless. Since 2012, when the voters of Washington State chose to decriminalize it, my part of town has been especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot. A thick haze of the stuff lingers long in the air these quiet lockdown days.

SeattleI have seen the future, and it looks much like Washington State.But let’s get there by steps. The Pacific Northwest, for much of its history dominated by the logging and fishing industries, has an aggressive blue-collar tradition. Radical groups like the Industrial Workers of the World — or so-called Wobblies — used to congregate there. Sometimes on a Saturday night in downtown Seattle old anarchists can still be found singing their ballads of longshoremen’s revolts. The place has been called 'the hideout capital of the USA’, a far-flung outpost where generations of the nation’s failed, fed-up, and felonious have gone to disappear.

SeattleWhen the time comes to consider the question of America’s worst governors, it seems we’re somewhat spoilt for choice. From the swivel-eyed Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to New York’s ubiquitous Andrew Cuomo and his never-ending victory lap for having overseen just 33,000 deaths — a reported 6,692 of them in his state’s nursing homes — media posturing would seem to be the rule, and sustained periods of selfless public duty the exception. But for sheer myopic self-regard, it would be hard to top 69-year-old Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington since 2013, who barring a political earthquake is almost certain to be reelected in next month’s election.

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.

Though Joe Biden has now accepted that violence is occurring in many major American cities and has started blaming Donald Trump for it, many of his supporters haven't gotten the memo. A new trend among some high-profile left-wingers is to gaslight Americans by posting daytime photos of well-to-do areas of cities undamaged by the riots as proof that the riots aren't real. Meanwhile, tear gas and fires engulf entire blocks at nighttime. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and CNN contributor, kicked off the trend by tweeting September 1: 'Good morning from wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the ground. I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.

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.

SeattleSo the revolution devours its children. On Tuesday, Seattle’s police chief Carmen Best announced her retirement just hours after the city council had voted to strip her department of roughly 130 of its 1,400 officers, with more such cuts promised in the future. Best, 54, was Seattle’s first black police chief. She had served in the department for 28 years. Announcing her departure, Best remarked: ‘It’s not about the money. And it’s not about the demonstrations in our city. Be real. I have a lot thicker skin than that.’‘It’s really about the overreaching lack of respect for the men and women who work so hard, day in and day out,’ Best added.