A Red Thing Gurgleth

[from 1/20/10]

If you're a green lover, please don't take what I'm going to say personally. I hate green. I think it is the ickiest pure color there is. I hate golf courses for that reason. I would love them if they were a different color, anything but green. So it's a constant source of pain to me that so many people are trying to out-green one another.

Even putting aside my aversion to the color itself, I detest the competition. Can't we all agree to be equally green? To almost quote Merkin Muffley, "I am as green as you are, Dmitri! Don't say that you're more green than I am, because I am capable of being just as green as you are... So we are both green, all right?... All right."

This is why something inside me, a pretty red thing, perhaps, churned and gurgled and tried to spit up, when I read the recent Seattle Times headline, "Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' green agenda wasn't enough." It reminded me that Nickels has always acted as if he could do no wrong, just so long as he redeemed himself at the end of the day by being the greenest mayor in the USA. Or told us he was repeatedly.

Maybe protecting Seattle's greenbelts from homeless people does make you greener than anyone who cares too much for humanity to stoop so low. You shouldn't be so green, I'd say. The Seattle Times, though, never seems able to say that. In fact, a Dec. 31 piece on Nickels' legacy ("Outgoing Mayor Greg Nickels leaves stamp on Seattle") didn't even mention the encampment sweeps. Neither article mentioned anything about homelessness, not in regard to his policies or their impacts, not even to say they weren't significant to his legacy.

All those unsheltered, unhoused, homeless people were and are real, no matter what the Seattle Times or Nickels would have you say. Just as real as the trees and the grass and the golf courses and the greenbelts, and also worth saving, and the Seattle Times can't say so, and Nickels thought their reality shouldn't affect his reelection. Or he would have called off the sweeps, or at least mitigated them. But then, he never asked me how he could win my vote. I guess he figured I'd vote for Mr. Environment because I'm so freaking progressive.

As if consolation for losing the primary, Nickels has been invited to be a Visiting Fellow at Harvard for spring semester, and will lead eight study sessions about politics and public service, at least two about preventing unwelcome climate change. He'll be cashing in on his green-pertise. Maybe one of the other study sessions will be about how to oppress poor people and appease rich developers using green as a cover.

This column has not been as much fun as I wanted it to be. I thought we'd enjoy a rest from the agony of Haiti, only to recall that the forces that impoverished Haiti in the past and led to her vulnerability are also at work here, although not yet for as long.

Here's an uplifting thought, though. McGinn's administration has already eked out some green legacy of its own, as City Attorney Pete Holmes has dropped all pending marijuana possession charges in the city courts. Damn my asthma, now would be just the time to buy me some JD & weed and bliss to The Dead.

I'd like to say that would help solve global warming, given how hungry for carbon dioxide forests of marijuana plants are, but I know that doesn't work 'cause they all just get burned. Still, I can't help but feel we've turned a corner here, away from the kind of green that taxes, fines, jails, and tramples, toward a kind of green that lets people live, too.

Just remember to stay 25 feet away from entrances, exits, windows and vents, especially at the Federal Building.