Crossing Allies

Last Thursday some Real Change people and friends camped out at the City Hall Plaza in the second such effort to draw Mayor Greg Nickels' royal attention to our call for an end to his inhumane and illegal sweeps of homeless encampments. I could go on and on about the fact that Greg Nickels gave every appearance of not giving a damn, and how that means we'll be back, and probably back again, and again, but there will be plenty of time for that later. What I want to do now is talk about cross-class sleeping.


[Above: A portion of the tents on the plaza that night. Photo stolen from catherd Doug McKeehan by way of a post on Apesma's Lament.]

My first experience with cross-class sleeping was the rebound whose Father owned a multi-million dollar chain of laundromats back East. Daddy gave her a red Corvette for her graduation present. She owned so many clothes she had to buy her own commercial size clothes rack. Her clothes rack was bigger than my whole apartment. We didn't get along very well. I came to believe that cross-class sleeping would not bring classes together, politically.

I now realize how wrong I have been. There are ways to make cross-class sleeping work. Those ways involve insomnia, coffee, and wet tents.

Get people together to try to sleep in wet tents! They will not be able to sleep! They will then be forced to talk amongst themselves, causing social glues to exude from their pores, sticking them to each other! It worked last Thursday between myself and a bunch of strangers. If I can bond to a bunch of strangers so can almost anyone.

The classes I have bonded with so far include various intern-classes and legal-aide-classes. In the future I hope to bond to other kinds of classes.

One very promising class is the class of clergy. I came literally within inches of bonding with representatives of the clerical class during the camp out. I actually felt their silky vestments! How many of you readers have ever come so close to bonding with clergy that you felt their silky vestments? (Just a raise of hands will do. Details aren't necessary.)

It turns out these clergy were mostly morning people, so my plans to invade their tents and bond more thoroughly did not pan out. But I can plan better for the next camp out. I am looking forward to a night, three months from now, of cross-class alliance-ing with at least three ministers simultaneously. My plan makes room for a very early pillow fight. With proper timing, I should be able to get in, bond, and get out again in time to bond with some night people elsewhere. Lawyers or bartenders, conceivably.

Even the little bit of bonding I was able to do with the clergy at last week's camp out taught me a very important lesson about them. Clergy are human too. They have the same needs that we do. Some of them eat lasagna.

Another class I look forward to bonding to is the class of Seattle City Council Members. I only saw one city council member Thursday, new guy Tim Burgess, and he didn't join in the camp out. Next time I want to see all nine in tents of their own. I'm sure they all love camping, why else live and do politics in the Pacific Northwest? I'll bet Mr. Burgess skis, even.

Further into the future I foresee opportunities to ally cross-class-ly to all sorts of classes I now rarely have occasion to think about. The class consisting mainly of retired television repairmen. Whatever class acupuncturists belong to. The class of jewelers who are also former tugboat workers. The class of Times and/or P-I reporters.

Who knew that Times and/or P-I reporters valued their evenings so much that none of them could swing by after rush hour to see it? The lesson: If there isn't a riot or a conflagration going on, Seattle's mainstream reporters are going to stay home to watch Lost.

After socially allying with mainstream reporters, I may be ready for mayors.

[Below: High priority for mainstream reporters everywhere.]

Seattle's Not From Here

The Last Demonstration Zone

© Dr. Wes Browning

Welcome to the Last Demonstration Zone,

Step right up, take your megaphone, set permanently on mute.

The American Protest Theme Park greets you,

bring your quaint belief in what’s true, they take it for cute.

Remember, don’t mention Mickey Mouse.

You’ll get thrown out of the house, you’ll pay a fine.

Anyone in America can speak out.

Take a number, don’t shout, wait in line.

Welcome to the Last Free Speech hole in the ground.

You may now speak freely to whoever’s around, nobody cares here.

Step behind the rope, dope, nobody cares here.

Is anyone besides me aware that all inauguration ceremonies are propaganda? And that propaganda is government speech? And that therefore if Pennsylvania Ave. is a designated Demonstration Free Zone, then there can’t be an inauguration there either? Is it just me who thinks Demonstration Zones are the worst things that have happened to this country since war rations? What next? Talking Zones? Thinking Zones?

They can’t even hide behind state’s rights on this. We’re talking about the District of Columbia, where all the law is Congressional law. That bit about “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech” has full force in D. C.

Meanwhile our own mayor Schell wants to define Tent City as a political act, apparently because in the past he’s had some success forcing political acts to go away. In connection with the trials of Tent City a word has cropped up often: transient.

transient adj. 1. not lasting, enduring, or permanent; transitory 2. lasting only a short time; existing briefly; temporary -- n. a person or thing that is transient.

Mayor Schell would clearly like to see to it that Tent City is transient. But more importantly, there is the notion that the people who make up Tent City are not deserving of Seattle’s concern, because they are transient, they are only here in Seattle for a while, they are no natives.

I have heard the following statistic quoted: half of all Seattle’s homeless are not from here.

I’ve got news for you all: as of the last twenty years at least, anyone who is from Seattle isn’t a normal Seattleite.

I don’t have to go back to the pioneer days to establish the fact, but I will, just because I can’t resist mentioning that Chief Noah Seattle was born on Kitsap. Or that Denny came from Indiana, or that Doc Maynard came all the way from Vermont.

Do I have to tell anyone that John W. Nordstrom was born in Sweden? That William Boeing grew up in Detroit and didn’t move to this city until he was thirty?

I don’t have to go back that far. I can look at... I don’t know, let’s see now... the Mayor! Paul Schell, born in Fort Dodge, Iowa? So Schell once really did get out of Dodge?

City Council-person Margaret Pageler was born in CHINA for crying out loud. Jim Compton came here by way of Portland Oregon. Jan Drago and Heidi Wills are from another planet.

The Stranger was born in Chicago. More than nine-tenth’s of the Burke Museum was born in British Columbia or the Great Plains. The Pike Place Market got its start in Morocco. The Space Needle was shipped here in a box from the set of the Jetsons.

Surveys have been done that have shown that considerably more than fifty percent of us aren’t from here.

Does that make the majority of Seattle transient? Sounds fair to me.