Let Them Eat Editors

I've avoided talking about the flap over Capehart. I thought I had nothing new to add to the topic.

I was thinking this week I would instead talk about brain-eating amoeba. There are few concerns I have that are more pressing to me than my concern that brain-eating amoeba not invade my nostrils and eat my brain, starting with my olfactory nerve.

Ordinarily what I write here at most mildly amuses a few people for four or five minutes and then gets forgotten and ignored. For example, if I say the Iraq War is illegal, unjust, and immoral, no one notices. I could get more action out of people if I reproduced a page from Silas Marner than if I told you all what causes homelessness and the simple steps that would end it. But I am sure if I told you how to avoid having your brains eaten by mutant brain-eating amoeba from Australia, you would listen up.

[Above right: Some brain-eaters save the brains for dessert.]

But evidently I was wrong to think that I had nothing new to say about Capehart. Last week the P-I ran an editorial in which they wrote, "We did have some concerns, however, about access to shops and transportation. For example, the nearest bus stop we could find was close to a mile away and basic drugstore supplies required a trip of more than two miles." Members of the city council said basically the same thing, that the housing was inappropriate for housing the homeless, so the plan to demolish it should therefore go forward.

I have two things to say about the inappropriateness of that "therefore."

First of all, homeless activists were never saying that the Capehart housing should be used for housing people who are currently homeless or at immediate risk of it. What we were saying was that the loss of middle class housing, in the current market, would force people who could have afforded it, and who had their own transportation, to compete for less expensive housing that could have gone to people with lower incomes, and that a loss of 66 units of housing at the lower middle class range, such as at Capehart, would ultimately either subtract 66 units from very low income housing, or those with cars would move away from Seattle altogether, and you could kiss their tax dollars goodbye.

If you really think that demolishing middle class housing doesn't hurt the homeless, try this thought experiment: Get rid of all of it. Bulldoze all the single family dwellings in all the nearly 100 neighborhoods of Seattle. Now picture where those people are all going to live if they are to stay in Seattle. When you finally see how that would put a few hundred thousand more people on the street who weren't there before, next visualize what would happen if instead of sticking around all the middle class people whose homes were bulldozed moved to Phoenix. Answer: Phoenix is the new Seattle, and Seattle is the new New Orleans.

OK, so that wasn't anything that hasn't already been said. Other homeless activists have said the same thing essentially, minus the thought experiment. [Above left: Our hero, Mr. Thought Experiment himself.]

I am now going to astonish you by saying something utterly original about the Capehart housing. Something that no one else has said and that even the brilliant editors of the intelligent Seattle Post-Intelligencer were incapable of thinking of.

Yes. The nearest bus stop to Capehart is almost a mile away. But: Metro has bus stop signs to spare!

You have to be utterly brain dead already not to be able to think that if people lacking cars and legs were living in Capehart that Metro could not be induced to extend Route 33 that far.

Have all of you forgotten that bus companies are run by human beings and do the bidding of human beings?

This country has lost its imagination and its humanity with it.

We can save ourselves from the brain-eating amoebas. Feed them P-I editorialists, and they'll all die of starvation.

[Above: In case you wondered why investors aren't much interested in a property bordering a big beautiful park.]

Boys Will Be Boys

Let's talk about raining death upon our enemies!

I first realized that I had enemies when I was about 3 years old and some 4-year-olds stopped me on the sidewalk and threatened to beat me up. I began to carry a big stick around with me to fend off vicious 4 year olds. But for some reason at that time the idea of raining death upon them did not even cross my mind.

Then I started hearing Bible stories that ended with the Lord smiting here and there. Still, the idea of personally raining death was slow in forming. In second grade I remember wanting lightning to strike both Helen (a girl who couldn't stop kicking me because she loved me too much) and my teacher (who wouldn't let me kick Helen back because she was a girl.) Preferably at the same time. But I saw the whole lightning striking thing as belonging to the Act of God category, not something that I might control on my own.

Perhaps I was behind in my development, in need of a Piaget breakthrough. Or maybe I didn't have enough positive death-raining models to emulate. My parents never let me read Conan the Barbarian books. There was nuclear war, but that was all so abstract and hazy, with talk about so many millions dead at a time, when what you really want is to smite selectively. You just want to take out your stupid neighbor, your stupid relatives, your stupid principal, stuff like that, not all of Wisconsin.

I would be interested in hearing other people's experience in this regard. In my own case, it was during 5th grade that I first remember fantasizing about smiting my enemies one-at-a-time. When my English homework was due and I didn't have it, what better solution than to turn into a wild man-killing wolf-dog beast and snap Miss Larson's neck and drink briefly of her hot blood before hurtling away to leave the rest of her to the worms and to seek fresher game at gym class?

Unfortunately I was unable to master the whole boy-wolf-boy transition.

My next idea was to become invisible for short periods of time, just long enough to garrote each target, presumably with an invisible garrote. This also did not pan out. Not that I would have garroted anybody actually, we're still talking fantasy here, but I would have liked having the option, thank you.

Then, sometime around age thirteen I started to get more realistic. I dreamed of death rays fired from remote controlled robot planes. On the day of the big English test a small plane could be seen circling Asa Mercer Middle School if only the guilty knew where to look. But they wouldn't look up – the plane would be inaudible at that altitude, and there would be nothing to alert the doomed teacher to its presence in the sky above. A mile away a boy genius sitting at a console in his basement would be operating the plane's controls. A miniature TV camera on the plane equipped with a powerful telescopic lens would relay target images to the boy who would wait for just the right moment to push the button that would instantly fry the unsuspecting English teacher. Hah! So much for Silas Marner.

The neat thing about death rays is that they don't require bullets. If they did, then someone who was smarter than you could invent a ray gun that would shoot the bullets. But you can't shoot rays with rays. Everyone knows that.

If any of you think that ray guns shooting bullets are unrealistic, you haven't heard of the Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser MTHEL (I think we should pronounce that like "missile" with a lisp.) The other day the MTHEL successfully took out two artillery shells on-the-fly. OK, it's too big to be a personal death ray, but they're working on shrinking it.

Meanwhile, all of you must have heard about the alleged terrorists who were assassinated by a Hellfire missile shot from a remote controlled robot plane.

Are you putting all this together? Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Are you thinking that our national security is in the hands of men who think like adolescent boys?