Resistance Is Futile

A lot of people believe Greg Nickels is Absolute Ruler of Seattle, maybe because he makes policies without consulting the rest of our alleged government or us, or because he nevertheless uses the royal "we" constantly. But no! It isn't true because sometimes he doesn't immediately get his way. It can take up to a year.

For example, Seattle was put on track to charge 20 cents per plastic grocery bag by the start of this year. But the American Chemistry Council stopped it with a petition. Turns out there was no shortage of people who didn't want to pay a tax without any prior public discussion.

So at this writing the Seattle City Council is poised to vote to let voters vote on whether the plastic grocery bag tax will happen, so that the voters will have the opportunity to bow to Greg Nickels' will on this issue, so that he can get more creds for being the nation's greenest mayor, and so maybe get a bigger plaque. Or maybe he could land a job in Washington, D.C., coming up with better ways to manage their waste -- not a bad outcome.

Meanwhile, it doesn't work that way. That is, if the city council votes to not have a vote, or if they have the vote and the voters say no to the proposed tax, the tax will happen anyway, because it's already been decided. The fact is, Mayor Nickels is going to get his creds if he has to get on his knees to beg Paul Allen to buy an election for him.

The opinion just asserted, that the fix is in, that it's always in, can neither be proved nor disproved, because nobody in or out of Seattle's government really knows what goes on there. This is not entirely because information isn't public, or the dog ate it. It's because you can't access it unless you know whom to ask, the one thing nobody in government can ever tell you.

It's as if you have a hundred experts and one simple question, like, "¿Dónde está el baño?", and you have to go down the line asking one after another, because there's no one designated "expert expert" to tell you which expert has the answer. And then he says his dog ate it.

After minutes of hard thinking I have come up with two insights regarding this matter.

I got this insight while riding on a bus: If our government had an expert expert, or a central office to direct questions about the workings of our government, that would look at first like an addition to the bureaucracy, which you might think would slow government down. But actually, how cool would it be if all the city's departments and agencies could know what each other was doing? It would in fact save us all sorts of false starts, and speed things up!

It would also save time for the rest of us. For instance, we might ask the question, "Who are our true masters?" The expert expert could direct us to an official able to tell us that, since 1962, Seattle has been a ruled by an advance army of the Fat Faced Fungal Hordes from Crab Nebula. Then we could locate one of their representatives, learn that they wish us to pay the tax, and that if we did not we would be incinerated. Knowing that resistance is futile would be a huge time saver, and we could get back to doing what we really enjoy, trying to figure out which celebrity is most totally sexy.

My other insight is that, meanwhile, I have a lot of leeway describing what goes on around here.

As an example, did you know about the plan to raise the $64 million needed to fund the Mercer Street Project? To do it, they're going to sell Magnolia back to the Duwamish, who will use economic stimulus funds from the Obama Administration. Sounds like a win-win-win to me!