Insolence Abroad

Let’s talk about unmitigated effrontery or impudence!

Whether you call it gall, balls, chutzpah, or just plain bad manners, you have to admit unmitigated effrontery or impudence is continually entertaining. That’s why people watch sitcoms and the Today Show.

But we don’t have to leave Seattle to be entertained; we amuse ourselves!

A beautiful set of cojones was exhibited by convicted local lawyer A. Mark Vanderveen who cut off his court-ordered ankle bracelet 6 hours ahead of schedule “to go on a bike ride.” In admiration of his “flagrant, notorious, in-your-face attitude” toward the court the judge gave Vanderveen another 30 days of home confinement. Question: Why was I was not surprised to read that this tool was once an Assistant Seattle City Attorney? Answer: He had to learn it somewhere.

The other day a bunch of Seattle strip clubs revealed a survey they had commissioned that purported to show that strip clubs are not the magnets for crime that the city claims they are. The city then turned right around and showed they know what T-bagging is all about by saying 1) they had not studied the survey and 2) the survey is biased.

"It kind of reminds me of the tobacco industry hiring consultants to say tobacco was good for you," said Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis. “It would remind me of that too, Deputy Mayor, if I thought you had ever done any research of your own on the subject, and weren’t just repeating the prejudices of the least informed of the electorate in order to store up political points,” said me, just now.

For the record, I do not have any personal interest in seeing strip clubs overcome the four-foot rule in November. I’m a do-it-yourselfer: I do all my own stripping and lap dancing, at home. I also don’t really know what T-bagging is, I just heard John Waters say it on TV and I liked the way it sounded. Also, I don’t want strange nubile women to undulate their naked bodies in front of me and aim their private parts at my face.

How was that for ironic?

My next example is Ken Bounds. Ken Bounds is the chief of the Seattle Parks Department. That’s Seattle, as in City of. That means he works for the City of Seattle. But he doesn’t think his continued employment should be subject to review by the Seattle City Council. You might think that’s why I am going to cite him for unmitigated effrontery or impudence but it’s not. I don’t care whether the City Council can fire him or not, if they’re just going to keep on endorsing his policies regardless.

No, it’s this quote from Bounds that caught my attention: “I grew up in the segregated South, and the parks-and-recreation system was my avenue to befriending people of other races."

There you have it, folks. We can’t ever fire Mr. Emancipation!

Now I understand why Ken Bounds thinks it would be great to put fences around the City Hall Park to keep the homeless from sleeping there. Homeless people don’t belong to races, don’t you know?

The biggest and smoothest example of big-city cojones belongs to the Seattle City Council itself, in connection with its decision a few weeks ago to do without a public referendum and endorse the tunnel option to replace the Alaskan Way viaduct.

What makes this decision such a monumental case of effrontery is the fact that all involved justified it by the fact that the estimates for the cost of the tunnel option were rising precipitously.

The view was encapsulated by City Council Member Richard Conlin who said the issue would present "a moving target" to voters because the replacement design isn't complete.

To rephrase and expand upon those few words: “Dear fool voters! We on the City Council don’t know what the final costs will be, or what the tunnel plan really entails! You can’t hit a moving target and we ourselves can’t hit the side of a stationary barn! So we’ll decide for the tunnel for you!”

My Very Successful Prognostication

I'll confess, I'm not a terribly physical kind of guy. I'm not into rough competitive sports like baseball or rugby or marbles. I don't object to sports altogether, but I prefer the solitary sports, sports in which it's just me competing against myself.

My favorite of those is Olympic Style Nervous Pacing. Incidentally, my best score ever against myself in a pacing competition was 9.6 (it would have been a 10 if it weren't for the Russian judge.) Not to brag, but I did so well I cost myself a medal. Myself was deeply chagrined and never competed again. Really. No, not really, I just wanted to say "chagrined".

So naturally, whenever I am in an earthquake, which seems lately to be whenever I am lying in bed naked in a vulnerable position, or at least once per decade, my feeling about it is not unlike the feeling of a student who, having tried out for the varsity band, was instead picked to be a center for the football team. My feeling is that there has been a horrible mistake, I don't do contact sports. I don't even watch them!

Not that earthquakes can't be entertaining to me. Hey, I can be amused as easily as the next guy. It's just that they don't amuse me for very long. It's like sticking your finger in an electric light socket, isn't it? The fun part is pretty much over when you've realized that you have done it and you haven't suffered massive cardiac arrest yet. So, well, that was an earthquake, wasn't it? Hey, I'm not dead! What fun!

Those of my friends who are sports enthusiasts tell me that part of the value of taking part in sports lies in testing their limits, learning what they can accomplish when they throw themselves into something.

I can see that now. I mean, it isn't often that I become so distracted that I forget where I put my pants. Ordinarily I am on top of those sorts of things; "life's little details." So I guess you could say that the earthquake allowed me to discover new depths of self-distraction, great new vistas of blind panic...

Speaking of senseless violence, how 'bout that Fat Tuesday? There's another contact sport I can live without.

The first few nights of the Mardi Gras violence had no impact at all on me, even though I live in the Pioneer District, because I ignored it. (Some things deserve to be ignored, I believe. Like the practice of confounding the District and the Square. I simply don't let myself hear such idiocy. It's the Pioneer District, damn it. Or the Pioneer Square District, at the worst.)

But Tuesday night, as I was riding the bus home at about 11:30 pm with Anitra "not an actual Italian Duck" Freeman, we were unable to not notice the crowds, as they were slowing the bus so much that we were better off walking. So we continued to our Pioneer District apartment building on foot, and I had to notice the way the police were deployed. Not interspersed with the crowds, but on the periphery, in fact, just next to our building.

So I told Anitra (I'm not making this up), "First, I am going to watch Letterman. Then, I am going to do my Real Change duty, and go out there and see what is going on in those crowds. Then I am going to come back, and together we we will be tear-gassed by these police at about 2 am, when they can't think of any better way to control the crowds, which will be dispersing at about that time, under our very windows."

Did I guess wrong? No, I did not. I did exactly what I said. I watched Letterman. Then I wandered out into the Fat Tuesday crowd. I saw the beginning of the brawl that was filmed so well from the police helicopter. At that point I returned to my apartment, and waited to be tear-gassed. We were tear-gassed right on schedule, at about 2 am.

OK, there is a sport I love. I love predicting what Seattle will do next. It's poetry in motion.