Wolfgang von Skeptik

TRAIN-WRECK UGLY TRUTH ABOUT SEATTLE

I’M OFTEN SURPRISED BY what prompts reader response, and seattleslew's scornfully accusatory retort to “Thinking Behind An Abscessed Tooth” (see below) is no exception. My toothache-rant was vaguely intended to be a parody on itself, an “I-might-live-despite-everything” expression of gallows humor and hyperbole, but obviously Seattleites are as vindictively thin-skinned as ever.

Hence, instead of the promised essay (a wholly arbitrary delay for which I sincerely apologize), here is a rejoinder that began as a few caustic lines in the “comment” matrix and then exploded into a full-fledged discussion of the Puget Sound area’s ever-worsening regional transportation crisis – nearly every bit of it the result of Seattle’s breathtakingly hypocritical policy of methodically obstructing rapid transit even as the city claims to be America’s most environmentally enlightened metropolis.

Apparently Sesl is profoundly in denial about the Seattle establishment's small but powerful clique of venomously anti-rail xenophobes and its four-decade history of frustratingly successful efforts to sabotage construction of both local rail transit and any regional commuter-rail system. The xeno-clique's tactics have even included agitating minorities enraged by welfare reform to demand – successfully – that a Seattle light-rail project be turned into a huge giveaway program, thereby betraying (and infuriating) voters who thought they were approving a public transport system – not an extension of the dole.

And then there's the spitefully self-protective opposition of Seattle's Metro Transit bureaucracy, which is so empire-builder greedy, its antagonism to the mere notion of an independent "regional transit authority" was the death of State Sen. Ted Haleys’s much larger, far more intelligently structured and far less expensive regional high-speed- rail proposal some 24 years ago – a death inflicted via typically Machiavellian maneuvers in the legislature – an outrage the Seattle media deliberately suppressed and most of the rest of the local press corps were too inept to expose.

Bottom line – and with but few exceptions – it will be mainly slow, stinky, uncomfortable (and above all slow slow slow) bus-transport-only here in Pugetopolis for many years to come, and the primary reason we are so cursed is the disproportionately powerful Seattle xeno-clique's reflexive, "we-don-wanna-be-like-Jew-York" hatred of any form of mass transit that runs on rails.

The resultant traffic congestion (not only on I-5 but on all the primary and secondary arterials in the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia metropolitan corridor) is described – depending on the source – as the worst, the second-worst or the third-worst in the nation.

These descriptions are probably not exaggerations. Admittedly I have spent very little time in California, and none of that time in Los Angeles, but I saw nothing around San Francisco, Marin County or Oakland that compares with the gridlock I encounter here nearly every day. Ditto for Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon. Speaking from the experience of my 10 adult years in New York City and its environs, the congestion in Pugetopolis is far worse – and many times more frustrating – than anything in the way of the traffic-jams I encountered anywhere in the NYC/New Jersey metropolitan area.

Fact is, New York City’s public transport is truly effective – so much so that even with its many and chronic problems, it reduces the privately owned automobile to exactly what it should be: an unnecessary luxury rather than the vital component of what – beyond Gotham – is the most painfully expensive transportation system on the planet: a system that is infinitely regressive and thus viciously discriminatory against everyone save the wealthy.

It is savagely weighted against old people too. If Sesl has never been stuck behind an elderly, defiantly stubborn Pacific Northwesterner conducting his own version of a Lesser-Seattle-Society protest by driving 40 miles-per-hour in a 65-mph Interstate-5 fast lane, I am forced to suspect Sesl has never been on the real I-5. The situation I described is so commonplace it has been a staple of local humor at least since the 1970s.

And 70 mile-per-hour traffic through Seattle at rush hour? That's not just impossible fantasy -- it’s clinically delusional.

Or maybe (to give Sesl the benefit of the doubt), Sesl's speedometer is broken, and in the interminable I-5 delays, Sesl dozes off and dreams of swift passage...thereby further obstructing the traffic that has given the "I" in "I-5" a new meaning: "impassable."

As for Seattle's nasty xenophobia – more malevolent (and, yes, far more violent too) than any standoffishness toward outlanders I have encountered anywhere else – Google "Seattle Sucks" and browse accordingly. Seattle is probably the only place in the United States where out-of-state license plates are genuine hate-magnets: notes left on your car telling you, "we don't want you here; go back where you came from" -- and all too often your tires slashed as well.

Or if you want more authoritative documentation, read the section on Seattle in the seminal study entitled Cultural Regions of the United States (Raymond D. Gastil, University of Washington Press: 1975), in which Seattle's own Battelle Corporation suggests Seattle's hatred of people and ideas from elsewhere is the worst and most intense xenophobia in America.

By the way, and to set the record straight on all counts, I love the Pacific Northwest with a passion that has fetched me back every time I tried to leave: I love its forests and its waters, I love how its mountains plunge to its seacoasts, I love its climate – including its seven-month winter monsoon. Most of all, I love its light: the eerily moonlit quality of summer shade in the backwoods groves of ancient alders, the slow blue lingering twilight of summer evenings – “in just such realms” (as I say in a poem I am writing) “are Higher Powers seen.”

But every Eden must needs contain its serpent, every Camelot its villain, and for me the Modred-snake is Seattle. For the very reasons I cited above, I despise Seattle, and I admit it freely.

I lived in Seattle during the middle 1970s, was active at the city’s cultural hub, and have never in all my life known such a frigidly exclusionary domain, a place where even those who were my peers and potential colleagues remained forever remote, covertly malicious if not overtly belligerent. The very few Washingtonians who were exceptions to this dismal and loneliness-breeding rule were people who grew up outside of Seattle; the handful of others with whom I became close were all outlanders like myself – people whose experiences were in fact exactly parallel to my own.

Indeed, I have heard native-born (and otherwise seemingly intelligent) Seattle Caucasians actually boast, “you could live here 40 years and if you were born somewhere else, we’d still reject you as an interloper.”

Which is precisely why I moved to Tacoma, where I lived for five years during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and precisely why I choose to live in Tacoma now: it is as friendly as any city in America, it is more pleasant than many cities, it is attractive and affordable, it has the best public park system on the West Coast (in park acreage, second nationally only to New York City), and it offers virtually the same cultural advantages as Seattle with none of Seattle’s xenophobic bigotry and snooty pretentiousness.

Moreover my best friends live in Tacoma – three people with whom I have been brother-and-sister close for at least three decades.

Just to show Sesl that Tacoma knows how to get things done, I should point out that the Tacoma portion of the Sounder light rail system is already up and running – within budget and on schedule – even as Seattle remains the One Big Obstruction, a bureaucratic train-wreck, a bottomless money-pit, an outrage that threatens to turn all of Pugetopolis into grid-lock dystopia.

And by the way, Sesl – thank you so much for wishing me a speedy return to good health.

Posted by Loren at December 2, 2004 05:04 AM