The Extinction Game

Recently Philip Mangano, National Homelessness Czar, was in Salem, Massachusetts, promoting his lame ideas about how you can end homelessness by saying you are ending it, and said he hoped Salem would one day have a Museum of Homelessness. What we guess he was going for is that Salem already has a Witch museum but no witches (at least not the bad kind of witches) so, by analogy, wouldn't it be nifty if they had a Homelessness Museum but no homeless people?

Think of it, you could have animatrons of homeless guys greet you at the entrance. "Hello. My. Name. Is. Steve. Got. A. Quarter?" There could be tableaux of typical homeless scenes behind glass. Life-sized depictions of sleeping under bridges, in shelters. Maybe visitors could be allowed to actually sit in a homeless camp, or study the contents of a homeless woman's cart, all neatly laid out and labeled.

Mangano lets museums evoke extinction. If something is found everywhere you don't need a museum for it. You need the museum to preserve memories of what has become non-existent. This is not a bad idea. It suggests a new game for me to play. I can dream up all sorts of things I'd like to see in a museum besides homeless people.

I'd like to see a Seattle Museum of Bad-Government Artifacts. Over a year ago I was walking downtown and passed the then brand new signs featuring maps of Seattle and of the City Hall area. I noticed the latter maps were wrong. They omitted James Street. More precisely, it was there but labeled as Cherry. Cherry was labeled as Columbia. I contacted the city and pointed out the errors. I was told in October 2006 the maps would soon be replaced. I'm still waiting.

Besides those signs the museum would also house one of those space-age toilets that are supposed to clean themselves and instead clean out the city's budget.

I'd also expect to see one of the new Big Belly Solar Trash Compactors the city has now installed. These things are going to be great for saving money and fuel in the short run. Fewer trash pickups. But wait till they start needing repairs and the city learns there are only two authorized Big Belly Solar Trash Compactor repairmen in the Pacific Time Zone. Or that compacted garbage takes less space initially but since it needs a few additional millennia to decompose, because oxygen can't get into it, it will stack up more in the long run.

The first time I tried to use a Big Belly Solar Trash Compactor it wouldn't open for me. I know better now than to ask the city why.

I'd like to see a Museum of Social Service Paternalism. This year I had the experience of hearing, from someone who works with the Downtown Emergency Service Center, that when housing homeless women it is best "as a matter of policy" to try to pry them away from their boyfriends, because the boyfriends are "usually" "part of the problem." I heard this in a subcommittee of more than 20 participants in King County's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. I was the only one in the room who exhibited outrage. The museum would depict earnest social workers solving human problems by destroying human connections without examination. It would be next door to the Museum of Bloodletting.

Top of the list, I'd like to see a Museum of Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness. People could pay $7.50, $4.50 for seniors, to wander through exhibits depicting the silly plans to end homelessness that everyone was into back in the 20-Ohs. You could see mock-ups of actual ineffectual committee meetings. They would be peopled by wax social service honchos and wax local government big-shots. The exhibits would be accurate in every detail down to wax figures of homeless and formerly homeless tokens permitted to sit at the tables and nod their heads approvingly when the important people speak.