Communities Replaced By Kennels

I know I have high blood pressure, but I often do things that might make it worse. For example, I attended some subcommittee meetings of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. I knew it was bad for my circulation when a speaker, talking about a program to permanently house homeless women, said that it was policy to try and keep the women's partners away (referred to collectively as "the boyfriends") on the grounds that they're "generally" "part of the problem."

I expressed the view that each case should be carefully considered. Human relationships should not be assumed poisonous as a matter of course, I thought. Social agencies should not be so arrogant, I thought, as to suppose that they can re-engineer society by means of a reckless, blind, wholesale destruction of its existing bonds, to replace them by the forced bonds of institutions and the artificial communities that social agencies invariably try to foster. Societies are grown, not manufactured. My caseworker can never be my best friend. The institutions I am thrown into should not force me to only socialize with fellow "clients." A twelve-step program can't be my family. And not every woman who is homeless is homeless because SHE has "a problem."

I tried to express these thoughts in the meeting, at which about 20 representatives of King County social service agencies were in attendance, and not one of them openly agreed with me during the meeting, although a few looked concerned that I might explode and soil their suits with my brains. I stopped going to those meetings about then, and I am quite pleased to report that, soon after, I stopped needing beta-blockers to keep my blood pressure down. So, there was good in the world, for a time.

But the nihilistic, life-rejecting, attitude that was in evidence at that meeting is still all around me, and I may have to take up the atenolol again.

Take the recent school closures. Apparently the idea is that one school is as good as any other. Hey, let's close ALL the existing schools and open up one great big one in a warehouse in SODO! A school's a school!

With all the money we could save by having only one Seattle school, we could pay the projected annual costs for the proposed Seattle municipal jail. Here's another cool idea: We could build the new jail for misdemeanants directly across the street from the one big school, and use part of it to house the kids when they're not in school. There would be no more arguments about who would have to bus to school!

After all, parents and families are part of the problem. Their insistence that "their" children stay with them prevents the city from establishing a convenient citizenry. The kids don't need the parents they have, and they would be far better off with the parents the city assigns them.

In fact, we can contract out the jobs of parenting to the same companies that will supply the new jail with its guards and managers. There isn't much difference between a jailer and a parent anyway, except that a jailer is a professional. One inadvertent advantage of the arrangement would be that when our kids grow up and become the outcasts of our society that we plan them to be, they will feel right at home in the Seattle jail. Because they WILL be home!

Assume the worst of human beings, plan for it, and thereby make it happen. Destroy human bonds and watch the inevitable result, namely a substitution of those bonds by vapid, sterile, institutional arrangements that are only communities in the sense that kennels are. Then, when everyone is reduced to the level of domestic dogs, you can say their dependence proves they needed you, and they needed the collars you thoughtfully provided them, and they needed their leashes. Convince even them, and they'll love you, lick your boots, and swear life itself was "the problem."

Jails Are Seattle's Future

There's been a lot of talk recently about Seattle's need for a municipal jail. But not everything has been said on the subject that could be said. For example, no one has suggested that the new jail could be designed with futuristic sweeping curved lines, stand 600 feet up, be painted orange, and revolve, and so be a lovely tourist attraction and Seattle icon. Even though a new jail would create many new jobs and require new housing and supporting retail, no one has said there should be a street car going there. No one has come up with a good slogan, like "Invest In Your Future -- Invest In Prisons."

[Above: Without one of these, how are people supposed to get there?]

I'm going to say those things and more. I'm going to tell you what no one else at Real Change wants you to hear: We need this new jail!

Real Change doesn't want you to know that jailing people is Seattle's last hope to have a surviving economy and clean empty streets. Real Change doesn't want you to know that scapegoating the poor for the problems of the middle-class pays.

Now, right away, I'm sure that some of you liberal losers are thinking, "Wouldn't it be cheaper to build more traditional shelters, rather than spend all that money on constructing and maintaining a jail complex?" On the surface, that sounds sensible. The city is paying, right now, just about $10 per person per day for shelter and transitional housing, while just the maintenance cost of a new jail is expected to be more than $110 per person per day. But when you scratch deeper it sounds like mairzy doats and dozy doats. Scratch deeper than that, and it takes your arm off.

What did I just tell you in the first paragraph? This is Seattle's chance to create a whole new thriving industry! We've been Jet City. We've been Amazon Central. We've been Latteville. Now we can be Jail Town, USA!

[Left: Jail made Elvis famous. Elvis made the Seattle World's Fair famous. The Seattle World's Fair made Seattle famous. Therefore Jails already have made Seattle famous. Let's cut out the middlemen!]

There are only two things we have to do to guarantee our preeminence as the world's greatest jailers, and we are well our way to accomplishing both of them.

First, we need lots more misdemeanants. This is being arranged. Our mayor is finding new ways to enforce bad laws. Using methods that were pioneered in the Deep South during the Reconstruction, Mayor Nickels has been finding innovative ways to make the inescapable conditions of homelessness illegal. Meanwhile, our president and congress have done us the favor of ensuring that we will have an ever-increasing number of homeless people to convict. It has been estimated that by the end of 2012 every formerly housed single man, woman, and child in Seattle who does not have a high-level government job will have been foreclosed upon, or be a barista.

We need to make more drugs and herbs illegal. I recommend aspirin, tylenol, and ibuprofen; that will make it more illegal than ever to hurt. We need to expand the no-smoking ordinance to prohibit smoking anywhere within 25 feet of a hard surface, and we need to enforce it with jail time, and add a three-strikes provision.

Second, we need funding for it. We need funding to build it, funding to keep it going, and extra funding to line the pockets of the lobbyists for it, to make it worth their while.

We can do this, too, Seattle! We just have to think big! We have to become the experts on jailing that the world comes to see and learn from! We have make Seattle synonymous not with gray skies, but with gray bars.

Let's get Rem Koolhaus to design it. Let's build a world-class park around it, and charge for tours. Let's build a new college to train incarceration professionals and to teach politicians how to write laws that can't fail to be broken.

Century 21 has been used. Let's call it Century 22, and dazzle America and the rest of the World with our vision, our innovation, and the experience we will have achieved.

Epidemic of More Hair

Here's a quote I find fascinating. It was in an opinion piece for Indymedia in San Francisco, attributed to an unnamed reader of Mortgage News Daily. "If we don't do something [about the foreclosure crisis] we are going to have an epidemic of homeless people who are fed up and commit crimes this winter begging to be housed in Jail."

First of all, it's good to see that we are now capitalizing Jail, just like we have learned to capitalize Mother, God, and the Right Honorable So-and-So. If you incarcerate a higher percentage of your population than any other country in the world, it's time to start paying Jail some respect, in the sort of way Germans respect Himmel and Heimat. We capitalize White House and only one family lives there, and all it means is "white house." More than one in a hundred of our adults live in Jail; that counts for something. I'm also in favor of capitalizing Toilet, for the same reason.

The thing that really fascinates me about the quote is the notion that as soon as good law-abiding citizen homeowners become homeless they will immediately give up on all that and start breaking laws, loving Jail and the lawlessness that gets them there. This view does not describe my own bouts with homelessness.

I was homeless for an accumulated total of three and a half years before I started to think breaking laws would be a fun change of pace. For the whole time up until that I was actually, amazingly, the same fastidious, conscientious, law-abiding person I had been in all my previous (by that time) 45 years.

When I finally did consider breaking a law, it wasn't me that had changed; it was the law. It had become against the law to sit down on a sidewalk no matter how tired you were.

But maybe today's homeless people are different. Today's homeless people were born into a different world than we were. They haven't had Eisenhower to ground them and give their lives meaning. They smoke better weed. They have more hair and faster reflexes.

I was thinking about all this when I found a story in an online Florida newspaper titled "Homeless man charged with exposure of sexual organs." Actually the man, "Jimmy," was drunk and had an extremely full bladder, and therefore it wasn't his sexual organs, per se, that he exposed, it was his bladder-relieving organs, properly speaking.

Jimmy's real crime, it turns out, was not sexual in nature, but being so drunk he thought the New England Cafe in Jensen Beach was the Toilet.

So, how drunk were the owners of the New England Cafe of Jensen Beach, Florida, when they decided they were in New England?

Next, how drunk was the reader of Mortgage News Daily, to think that having your house foreclosed will make you want to live in Jail and do all the things it takes to get there?

Whenever people use terms like "epidemic" or "chronic" in connection with homelessness they reinforce the idea that it's a disease you catch. It's no wonder, with the government using such language all the time, that housed drunks, like that reader, would think that if you catch homeless cooties your personality will change and all your principles will atrophy and fall off after one cold night in a doorway.

It never occurs to housed drunks that the Jimmies out there who are now homeless drunks pissing on cafe tables in Florida were once housed drunks just like themselves, pissing on the coffee table in their living rooms just before passing out on the living room floor, and just hours after writing a stupid letter about homelessness to a newspaper.

Exercises For Advance Credit

How drunk was the writer when he wrote this column?

Which of the following comes closest to the writers point? a) "We're all just people, everywhere," b) "We're all drunks, under the skin," or c) "I need to lie down."