Famous Lamous

OK. I was in a really foul mood when I was writing this column for last issue, and that may have caused me to froth excessively. But to refer to it as "my lamest column ever" as one person did is simply ignorant. My lamest column ever was in fact the Sept. 1, 1997 column, which opened with the words "In a world of Labrador Retrievers, I am a duck!! (OHHH YES!! OH YYESSS!! A DUCK, I AM, a DUCK, oooooooh yesss!)," and ended with the sad admission that I was not a duck after all. When I think of lame, I think of that column, which forever set the standard of lame for all columns everywhere.

There is absolutely no possibility that any new column I write will ever be as bad as the duck column, owing to the superiority of my current anti-psychotic medication. Still, I want to try. Because, what is life without hope? If we don't challenge our challenges, what will we challenge? I, for one, vowed long ago that I would not surrender to a shallow, vain, pursuit of excellence.

I could just write "I suck" 400 times and turn that in as a column. The management of this rag has assured me that they are prepared for that eventuality. There is in fact a not-very-secret document in a file cabinet in the back room entitled "Wes sucks" that provides no less than two plans. Plan A is to run an old column (preferably the duck masterpiece.) Plan B is to go ahead and print "I suck" 400 times and to sign my name to it.

But that would be too easy not only for me but everyone else involved. It would give the proofreader too little to do. I would not feel as though I had earned my complimentary copies. Homeless activists everywhere would be disappointed because I hadn't been active enough, they want me to break a sweat. At least every other line I should insert the words "and homelessness sucks too" in order to stay on topic.

So I am always on the lookout for creative new ways to suck without merely saying so. That's why I need television.

Without television and the great communicators that communicate to me on television, I would not know how to be as lame as I am. That's why I have shacked up with a sexy rich woman, Anitra "Pay-Pal" Freeman. I sweep the floor, buy the groceries and do the dishes. In return my woman buys TV and TV access for me. It's all so I can watch Andy Rooney and learn. ("Have you ever noticed how bourgeois I am?" is an actual quote. So is "Why do you think my head is so big?" and "Have you ever noticed lots of people call themselves people-persons but nobody ever calls themselves a thing-person?" )

Thanks to television and to its cousin the internet, I have learned that the only thing that matters to most Americans is the quality of middle-class life. Even poor people in this country don't really care about what other poor people are doing or how things are going to get better so that there won't be any poor people. All they care about are the latest adventures of middle-class people like they wish they were.

But I digress. What's important here is finding creative ways to be lame. So what I want to do today is to join the chorus of hand wringing over the fate of the middle-class in America. How about if I call attention to the tragedy of middle-class homelessness? Here we go:

"That's right. This is a huge problem, people. Every day tens of middle-class people become homeless. I'm not talking here about people who were middle-class who suddenly became poor and are now living on the streets. I'm talking about people who still are middle-class and are now living on the streets.

"OK, they aren't really living on the streets because no one with money would do that. But they're living in motels and hotels and RVs. Some of them are even living in Mexico, being forced to read Spanish for Travelers dictionaries and listen to Berlitz tapes at night.

"It is all the more a tragedy because these people pay the taxes that pay the truck drivers to deliver our government cheeses, and yet no one considers their plight(s)."

Yes! As lame as the campaigns!

There's Always One In Every Decision

RANT ALERT!

The good news: a panel of the 2nd US Court of Appeals finally, FINALLY, told the Bush administration that simply declaring someone an "enemy combatant" did not provide them with an excuse to deny that person a lawyer or rights to a trial. The bad news: it isn't over.

Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested in Chicago in May 2002 and has been held in a navy brig in South Carolina for a year and a half. He hasn't been allowed to see his lawyers. Although the government has said that Padilla was involved in a dirty bomb terrorist plot he hasn't been charged with a crime in any court of law. The view of the government is that they didn't even have to say what he was supposed to be guilty of, it was enough for them to declare that Mr. Padilla was an "enemy combatant" to detain him in the brig FOR LIFE in ISOLATION if they wanted to do so.

Bush's people still think that's the way it should work and will probably appeal. They are no doubt encouraged by the fact that one member of the 3 judge panel actually sided with them. The idea of the dissenting opinion was that the president needs the power to detain people who may be a threat to the public.

Let's reflect on that dissenting opinion to get a clear idea in our own minds as to what a screaming imbecile that one lame judge is.

The man has been detained for one and a half years. The immediate threat is over. HE'S IN THE BRIG. He's detained already. The issue isn't the detention. His arrest was proper. The issue is, once you've got him, YOU STILL HAVE TO LET HIM SEE A LAWYER AND TRY HIM AND LET HIM GO IF HE TURNS OUT TO BE INNOCENT.

And oh yes, the Bush Administration has had A YEAR AND A HALF to do that. Did I make that clear enough? A friggin YEAR AND A HALF.

Here is a personal note for that one lame judge: * Guess what? I think you're a threat to the American people. Good thing I'm not the president or I might declare your ass enemy combatant material and put you in isolation for, oh I don't know, how about for YEAR AND A HALF?! * -- Ha, ha, just kidding -- Dr. Wes.

Speaking of South Carolina, that was where police stormed a school recently and searched a hundred students for illegal drugs, some of them at gunpoint, because their principal thought it would be swell. What we have here is another threat to the American people. There are getting to be too many of these.

I don't expect the police to know or understand the constitution. That would be dreaming. But is it asking too much for a school principal to have read it with comprehension?

What part of the Fourth Amendment does that principal not grasp, I wonder? Was it the part about "the right of the people to be secure… against unreasonable searches?" Was he not aware that minors also constitute people? Was it the part about how search warrants were required to be specific? How specific is searching every kid in a school hallway whether they have done anything suspicious or not just because a crime may or may not have at one time occurred in that hallway days or weeks earlier by completely different people?

Here's another one, folks. Say you're on vacation in Guadalajara, Mexico, and our government, or some imbecile in it, decides they want to incarcerate you for life without charges or a hearing. Here's how they could do that. They would seize you in Mexico without clearance from the Mexican authorities. Then, they would take you to Guantanamo Base ("Gitmo") and imprison you with all the Taliban, as an "enemy combatant" (It doesn't matter if you are or not, they don't have to prove that part. They just have to declare it.)

Gitmo, a secure US military enclave, isn't really America, so all that constitution BS doesn't apply. -- that's the essence of our government's actual legal position as they fight for that power to the Supreme Court. What a crock.

We Were Number Seven!

I've got Seattle neighborhoods on my mind. I think the neighborhoods of Seattle are what make this city, or whatever it is, great. It used to be the smell. Back in the sixties downtown Seattle smelled like rotten fish heads, and some of us thought that was pretty cool. But, now, the pretty cool thing about Seattle is its neighborhoods.

Most people don't know just how many Seattle neighborhoods there are. Anyone who has ever watched Almost Live, live or in reruns, knows at least 10 or 11 easy areas of Seattle like Ballard, Wallingford, the U District, Belltown, Pioneer Square, the International District, Rainier Valley, Georgetown (maybe), and West Seattle (the Kent of Seattle Proper.)

But how many of you knew that West Seattle isn't considered a neighborhood itself but is composed of nine neighborhood pieces, namely Alki, North Admiral, Junction, Seaview, Fairmont Park, Genesee, Gatewood , Fauntleroy and Arbor Heights? I certainly couldn't unless I were cribbing off of the neighborhood list of http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us. The Internet is to die for.

When you add it all up our government has identified somewhere around 95 to 97 neighborhoods, depending on whether you lump some together for consistency's sake, or let them all hang out.

They each have their own history and character and reputation. For example, once when I was in college on the East Coast I found myself by chance in a room full of guys who were all from Seattle just like I was. Everybody had to say what neighborhood they were from and when they got around to asking me I told them I was from Mid Beacon Hill and they all laughed. Especially the guy from Broadway. "You're from Beacon Hill? What a loser! Ha, ha!" he said. What a great memory.

Fortunately I have since moved up in life and have lived in more highly regarded neighborhoods. When, a few years out of college I found myself living in a car, it just didn't make sense to park it on Beacon Ave when I could be part of the "In" crowd and park on "The" Ave. Since then I have slept in an alley in Belltown (at a time when it was the seventh coolest neighborhood in the whole country!) and I now live in subsidized housing in Pioneer Square, or as I like to think of it, the hot neighborhood where the cool all began.

A couple of weeks ago the One Night Count of homeless people was held and the big news was that the overnight homeless occupation of Ballard increased by 132 percent this year. It looks like somebody else has got the idea: if I have to sleep outside, at least I can sleep somewhere interesting. Seattle neighborhoods are catching on with our homeless people and I think it's fantastic. I want to see them have to do the count in Blue Ridge next year. By the way, the view of the Sound from Blue Ridge is fabulous in October – so everybody make your travel reservations early!

Speaking of Seattle neighborhoods, I want to complain about the City of Seattle Charter Amendment No. 5 that's being voted on soon. How lame is this? They want to elect city council members from nine city districts instead of city-wide.

Nine? Nine? Out of over ninety neighborhoods they're going to rig nine districts? ARE THEY MAD?

What this city needs to do is wallow in its neighborhood-icity. We've got the neighborhoods, now we need the Neighborhood Representatives. We need a Seattle Congress, a legislative branch consisting of a House and something else I haven't thought of yet.

We need at least one, maybe two, representatives from each of Seattle's 95 or so neighborhoods to legislate and debate and advise and consent and all the other things that representatives do.

Then, and only then, will we be able to witness a roll call in a Seattle House of Reps and hear a guy from Ballard stand up during roll call and talk for fifteen minutes about Norwegians. It would be almost as good as getting the smell back.

Opinions Shouldn't Come Easy

So I was thinking about my minor faults, and I thought of another one. I'm useless. I'm useless in so many ways, but one of my favorite ways of being useless is as an opinionated columnist.

An opinionated columnist is supposed to, above all, have opinions. But, oops, I hardly have any. In fact half the work of writing these things every two weeks is spending the nine or ten hours it takes each time to force myself to have one.

I've just called it a fault, but actually I'm so un-opinionated in my un-opinionated-ness that I can't really decide whether it's a fault or not. Maybe it's a cute quirk. Or maybe it means I could be the world's greatest jury member. "Mr. Browning, I'm sure you've read the hundreds of stories in the newspapers describing my client as a blood-thirsty murderer. What do you think of that?" "Duh, I don't know." "I have no objections to this juror, your honor."

I was reminded of all this Wednesday a week ago as I was reading the Seattle Times. I kept repeatedly running across stories that I felt I should have strong opinions about but I couldn't decide what they should be, just because I am so lame.

There was the story about 200 people from all over the world who have volunteered themselves to Iraq to serve as "human shields" in the event of a war. Now I have no problem figuring out what I think about Iraq's use of involuntary human shields. That's totally wrong. Iraq did that last time, they will probably do it this time, and it's wrong. But if people do it willingly, what can I say?

Sure, these people superficially resemble the suicidal bombers that we all hate for, uh, suicide bombing. They've got the suicide half down, and there's bomb-action involved. But WE'RE the ones about to be doing the bombing. How is that their fault?

Then, at the bottom of the same page, I got the privilege of reading for the first time about our military's latest computer-military advance, the new computer program called "Bugsplat."

Did I mention that I was preparing to see a psychiatrist as I was reading this? Here I found out that our military has a computer program that analyzes the potential for "collateral damage" that any given bombing might have, so that our commanders in the field can judge what size and kind of bombs to use in an attack. The program displays the potential collateral damage graphically as images of bugsplats on a computer screen, they say. So, I thought, why was I the one seeing the psychiatrist?

OK, the real name of the program is FAST-CD (Fast Assessment Strike Tool – Collateral Damage.) OK, if they're going to have a war and bomb people, I can see the benefit of having a computer program warn when a lot of civilians would be killed. I can see it on a practical, or what do you call it, logistical level. But it sickens me to think that the program has a built-in tolerance for a degree of civilian death and suffering. The idea isn't to avoid all "bugsplats" but to "minimize" them. We are building a definition of what that "minimizing" should be into a piece of software, so that our military commanders don't have to use their own consciences to make those sorts of decisions. Isn't that evil?

So then I moved on to the local news, thinking that I would be safe there. Nothing but familiar issues, issues I had long decided upon. Did I mention that I was seeing that psychiatrist to talk about child abuse that happened to me 40 years ago? So what do I read, but that there is now a move in DSHS and the state legislature to open up child abuse hearings to the public.

Ouch. I want people to know what goes on in these hearings. I want the extent of child abuse to be known. But I want the children to be protected from exposure. They need to be protected from the public.

Why can't the decision to have a hearing open or closed be made the hard way, in each individual case, by a judge or jury faced with the specific circumstances of that case? Do we have to have an opinion about everything in advance, no matter who could be hurt by it?

Dumbest Bubble in the Fizz

Today I want to talk about ignorance.

A lot of people are going to read that and get entirely the wrong idea. They're going to think, "Uh-oh, here goes, the smart-mouthed columnist is going to go making fun of our president again. Hasn't our poor president suffered enough from being called a moron by that Canadian woman? Who does this guy think he is, thinking he's so much smarter than our elected president?"

No, really, I don't care about George Bush's ignorance. It's my own that interests me. As 5 out of 6 girlfriends have put it, I only care about myself. This is in fact the source and substance of my ignorance. If it isn't about me, it must not be important enough to know.

At this point it is entertaining for me to reflect that I am ignorant as hell, and yet I write this column. Ha. I know incredibly little about everything but I write these tiny mini-treatises every other week and some of you actually read them all the way to the end. I know because three of you have told me so. What gives?

I like to think that my ignorance is a light, a shining beacon, for others. Because if I can turn my affliction into a proud asset, what else is not possible? Cannot then the blind lead us to greener pastures? Cannot then the lame trample our foes? Cannot then the Honda total the SUV instead of vice versa?

This is my promise to America. I will remain ignorant as long as it takes to achieve my dream in which everyone, not just the rich, can live their lives without having to know what it's like to have to know too much. We should all be able to say, "My tuition is paid for; you have to give me an A." Let me show the way.

The most important thing I ever learned in life, I learned in kindergarten. No, I'm kidding, I learned it in graduate school. But I could have learned it in kindergarten. It was that stupid. The stupid thing I learned was: if you need to know something, ask.

You might think, "That is counterproductive. If I ask questions, pretty soon I'll start knowing too much and then I won't be ignorant anymore. I will lose my identity. The next thing I know I'll start speaking with a foreign accent and wearing purple scarves, if I don't already."

No you won't. You only have to pay attention to the answers you receive long enough get things done. Then you can forget them and go back to being yourself.

Isn't that what it's all about? It's about being yourself and nobody else. If you learn a lot of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with you then you won't be you anymore. You'll be one of those pinheads that gets interviewed whenever Jim Lehrer doesn't know why Americans are too fat. The trick is: be Jim Lehrer, and you won't have to be the pinhead.

In the meantime, you may be surprised at how much you can learn just by thinking solely about yourself. For example, I like to sit on my butt and stare at the ceiling. Because of this, and because of the delight that I take in contemplating this fact, and because I am alert and receptive to sympathetic delights, I have learned in time that G. K. Chesterton once wrote 20 pages about a ceiling. Some day, or in another life, I may read those 20 pages. Later, I may learn who or what G. K. Chesterton was. Likewise, I once had sex in the front seat of a Dodge Omni, so I know what a pain parking brakes can be.

The thing that's annoying about George Bush isn't that he's the dumbest bubble in the fizz. What's annoying about him is that he's defensive about it. Like Clinton with his "I didn't have sex with that woman," Bush could benefit from outing himself. He could admit that he never wanted to speak to Gore because he was afraid Gore would know something he didn't. If Bush would publicly admit that he was ignorant he could prove himself to be the great leader that he so far has only pretended to be.