Browse: Home » Crosscut.com

Crosscut.com

Everett: God’s gift to Seattle politics

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 11, 2009

Politics and humility aren’t always mutually exclusive. Consider, for example, a recent trifold mailer from Seattle Mayoral candidate, Joe Mallahan:

Joe was born and raised in Washington, the seventh of nine children in a working-class family where he was taught the value of hard work, integrity, and service to others.

Note the inspired ambiguity of “in Washington.” In fact, Mallahan is an Everett native, but he wisely ain’t a braggart. Why trumpet roots in the Athens of Puget Sound, Mallahan figures, and risk turning off rank-and-file Seattle voters?

Now that the Everett genie is out, however, it’s easy to conjure a JFK-style exchange between Mallahan and scornful Seattleites. “Mallahan, what do you know about Seattle’s gang problem?” voters will demand. “You grew up in an All-America City enlivened by cruising low-riders, the magisterial Scott Paper Mill, and 40 parks.”

Mallahan will, I imagine, stare back and reply in cool Everett-ese, “No one ever asked me where I learned the value of hard work, integrity, and service to others when I was at T Mobile protecting families from scratchy cell reception.”

To his credit, Mallahan soft pedals the enchantment of Everett life. I’m from Everett, Hometown Joe is saying, but that doesn’t make me a better person than you, at least not in God’s eyes.

How a candidate handles the so-called Everett card is a harbinger of his or her leadership style. An unassuming Mallahan will be level-headed and congenial. Actor Patrick Duffy, Cascade High School Class of 1967, played Bobby Ewing on TV’s Dallas and gave expression to this “Everett cool.”

It’s a thread that sews together Mallahan and Duffy and extends back to, yes, Teddy Roosevelt. Americans remember TR though the lens of San Juan Hill and his leadership preserving America’s wild lands. No one cared that Roosevelt was a snooty New Yorker with a Harvard degree. It’s deja vu all over again as voters judge Joe Mallahan by his real-time achievements, not by his privileged legacy as a son of Everett.

Contrast the Mallahan style with the North Everett hauteur of Dow Constantine, a leading candidate for King County Executive. Constantine, who didn’t even grow up in Everett, effuses about his “ancestral home.” His mother, a schoolteacher, moved to West Seattle because it reminded her of Everett, he said. To magnify his elite status, Constantine noted that his great uncle, George Wilson, played halfback on Enoch Bagshaw’s mythical 1920 national high school championship team. Constantine’s grandfather, Abe Wilson, also played for Bagshaw and followed the coach to Husky football glory.

That’s right, Constantine is insufferable, an unabashed flack for the Everett Chamber.

“Everett is the undiscovered city in our region,” Constantine said. “I believe it has a great future. It’s a great town.”

As a result of his Everett heritage, Constantine should make a stellar King County Executive. But he’ll govern with sharp elbows, this one.

In a recent email interview, Joe Mallahan finally came to terms with his murky past, acknowledging that he was hiding his Everett light under a mailer. It was a cathartic experience for Everett’s next Seattle mayor.

Jackson: You’re the only Seattle mayoral candidate who was born and raised in Everett, and you’re also the only candidate rated “Outstanding” by the Municipal League. Is there causality or coincidence to these two statements?

Mallahan: Everett has long been the incubator of great leaders, and once you have been a newspaper boy for the Everett Herald, your resume is pretty much golden. Scoop Jackson liked to claim he was a Herald carrier in his youth, but I’m guessing he had a route in hoity toity North Everett. I, on the other hand, had the most coveted route in town: the Mobile Country Club on SE 85th Street — 250 mobile homes tucked nicely into less than one quarter square mile. I used to run that route after cross-country practice at Cascade High School. I could deliver 150 papers in 20 minutes.

Jackson: You abandoned your hometown, the City of Smokestacks, soon after graduating from high school. How long have you been plagued by feelings of shame or did you simply elect to repress all memories of your formative years?

Mallahan: They’re not smoke stacks, they’re steam stacks, stupid.

Jackson: In the 1980s, Seattle made a splash with its sister-city agreements, hooking up with every radical and outre city in the world (think of it as the Hippie years). Would you be willing to make Everett a Seattle “Sister City” complete with reciprocal junkets, cultural exchanges, and general goodwill?

Mallahan: I think a sister city program with Everett would be a good way to heal some of the wounds. Relations have been rather strained since the Teddy Bears incident at the Everett Event Center in the fall of 2007. Everett Silvertips fans have never forgiven the Seattle fans since then. That was the game where every fan was given a Silvertip Teddy Bear, and was instructed to throw them on the ice after Everett scored a goal so they could be donated to the Everett Police Department. Alas, the Thunderbirds beat the Silvertips 3-0, and bears were tossed only when Seattle scored. I’m still ashamed of the multiple Teddy Bear beheadings I witnessed that night. Deep, deep wounds. As Seattle’s mayor, I will deliver a teddy bear to Mayor Stephanson as an olive branch, and a symbol of the high regard Seattle holds for its neighbor to the north.

Jackson: True or False: Scandinavian Lutherans made and enforced the laws of Everett only to have the Irish Catholics upend and violate all that was lawful, decent, and true.

Mallahan: I guess you never read the book, How the Irish Saved Everett Civilization. The Ruckers will always have their hill, and they will always supply the athletic uniforms for thousands of Everett youth every year, but it’s Pat Sullivan and the Irish Soccer Club that put Everett on the world sports map. As for pro soccer stars from Everett, a lot of people forget that Sean Henderson was actually O’Henderson before his family passed through Ellis Island.

Jackson: An Everett litmus test. Please define the following: A choker, a gypsy drum, and a rootwad.

Mallahan: Rootwads were the deadheads you had to dodge when water skiing Steamboat Slough. The real question is what’s a Peavey? If you haven’t handled a Peavey, then you’re not a real Sounder.

November predictions are ill advised, but here goes: Mallahan and Constantine win. They both have certain, well, natural advantages.

August 11, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , ,

What was Shawna Forde thinking?

originally published on Crosscut.com on June 15, 2009

There are times when the arc of Greek tragedy morphs into horror. On Friday the saga of Shawna Forde, 41, birddogged and recounted by the Everett Herald, abruptly turned into a perverted cross between Euripides and the Coen brothers. On May 30, authorities allege, Forde, along with fellow Everett-ite and Minuteman American Defense honcho Jason “Gunny” Bush, and another man, Albert Gaxiola, committed a home invasion in rural Arizona that left a nine-year old child and her father dead.

It was a ferocious crime with an overlay of hate (the family was Mexican), but an apparent motive as old as Eve: the cardinal sin of greed. One more “God no!” layer was added Monday when the Herald‘s Scott North reported that Forde’s compatriot, Jason Bush, has also now been charged with the murder of an Hispanic man in Eastern Washington a dozen years ago.

For months the Herald has ably tracked Forde’s cascading bad luck, legerdemain, and conspiracy. Her ex-husband was mysteriously shot in December of 2008, and Forde herself was allegedly raped and beaten the subsequent week. In January of this year, Forde suffered a bullet wound to her arm. Was she the target of pro-immigrant forces incensed by her border-watch activism? What emerged instead was a clouded picture that appeared part X Files and part paranoid drivel.

Forde’s straight line from the banality of a lost soul to the evil of American terrorist now seems preordained. She was the unstable leader of an Everett-based nativist fringe group, Minutemen American Defense. A classic misfit and troubled kid searching for a higher calling, she became a hate cliche, emblematic of the mass-movement absolutists described by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 masterpiece, The True Believer.

Hoffer observed how nationalists, Communists, and extremists of all stripes are curiously interchangeable. True believers feel oppressed and gravitate to movements that portend a new day in the stark clarity of pure beliefs.

Shawna Forde and her American Minutemen Defense aren’t an historic blip to be dismissed as outliers that evolved in a vacuum. Time “streams,” as Richard Neustadt and Ernest May have argued. Tease up the thread of Shawna Forde and the long seam of nativist bigotry begins to unravel, much of it here in the Northwest. There were the Aryan Nations, the Militia movement of the 1990s, the anti-Indian-fishing forces, the John Birch Society, executive order 9066 to intern Japanese Americans during WWII, the Fascist Silver Shirts active on Whidbey Island, the KKK, the American Protective Association, and anti-Chinese pogroms to name a few. They all stood on the shoulders of the Know Nothing movement of the 1840s and those perennial forces that scapegoat and deal in xenophobia.

The leaders of these groups wrote a kind of lesser-angels’ catechism that indoctrinated the credulous and the vulnerable. As Hoffer wrote years ago, “It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.”

One of the best books written about any community, Norman H. Clark’s Mill Town, documents some of the history of Everett’s nativist elements. John W. Frame, a progressive news editor and politico in the 1890s, tried to fight the bigoted American Protective Association (APA) which extended its tendrils into both political parties and the populist movement. Clark writes:

When Frame first settled in Everett, the APA had already applied pressures to have the federal government close a Catholic school which had for years served Indian families at Tulalip. The APA controlled the city school board and was making the most of the confusion in county and municipal politics…”Apaism,” as Frame called it, easily infected every dispute or debate. Frame was infuriated by the political behavior of many recent immigrants from Norway, Sweden, Germany, and England — some of them unable to speak English — who had swallowed “Apaism” and were incanting “American for Americans” against the local Catholics, most of whom were native born.

It all sadly rings true. My own Norse grandparents bolted from Everett’s First Lutheran Church in the early 1900’s because they feared it had grown “too damn much like the Catholics.” (Someone at church must have brought in a poinsettia or, worse, smiled at them.)

Everett, like most Western towns, is chiaroscuro, weaving together the forces of light and dark. The 1916 Everett Massacre marked the culmination of the city’s radicalism and class conflict as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) battled a sadistic county Sheriff, Donald McRae.

On Friday the PBS program NOW cited a Department of Homeland Security report predicting an uptick of right-wing domestic violence. The Forde story now falls together with the shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller and the murder of security guard Stephen Johns by white supremacist James von Brunn at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It’s easy to bemoan Shawna Forde’s self-styled end. It would be better, however, to conjure something remedial and creative to anticipate the Northwest’s future Fordes. Everett-ites, for example, might use the peace-park conversion of the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, as a template. We could pool our money, purchase Forde’s house, and turn it into a center for tolerance training or dispute resolution. Perhaps it could house the Snohomish County Human Rights Commission — presupposing that the county council passes the enabling human rights ordinance.

The facility’s name would be the one decision not requiring debate: The Brisenia Flores Center, in memory of a very innocent nine-year-old girl.

June 15, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Climate change comes to our National Parks

originally published on Crosscut.com

What does it mean for our national parks when magnum storms perennially wash out roads and curtail public access? At a small gathering at North Cascades National Park last week, sponsored by the National Parks Conservation Association, user groups, National Parks and Forest Service pashas noodled the fallout of the climate elephant. It was a postlude to three severe, 100-year storms, bunched together over the last dozen years, that have walloped Washington’s three national parks.

The political rub: America’s gems lose their polish when there’s no one to take in the shine.

The crux of the climate challenge is zero sum. Park boosters know that it’s unsustainable to wring $50 million for repairs from the feds every couple of years. Lawmakers triage these budgets, and such decisions will fundamentally remake how Northwesterners look at their national parks.

Continue reading →

June 5, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Banner week for hypochondriacs

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 30, 2009

On Monday, Governor Gregoire weighed in on the swine flu crisis. “There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for the people of this state to panic,” Gregoire said, “but we all need to be vigilant.” The undertow from the Governor’s use of “vigilant” should trigger fear in the immuno-deficient hearts of hypochondriacs everywhere. It’s a sentiment best reduced to the favorite Czech saying of University of Washington professor Bruce Kochis: “Situation is hopeless but not serious.”

Fatalism, especially for hypochondriacs, is a self-preserving virtue. I had an Aunt Agnes who died in Everett from the Spanish Flu at the turn of the century. I had a Dad who contracted but survived small pox in the 1920s. It doesn’t require a tragedian to connect the apples of the poisoned tree and appreciate that I’m next.

Which brings me to my girlfriend who arrived at Sea Tac Airport at 11:36 PM Tuesday night from Mexico City. What’s a self-respecting hypochondriac to do?

Laurie has a robust immune system which is one of the reasons that I’m so attracted to her. By day she works for an international development organization that is not, contrary to appearances, a CIA front. She labors nonstop, takes frequent overseas trips, and occasionally shouts into her cell in bursts of fluent Spanish like a Latina version of Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. (The Company, I’m confident, would not have sent her to Mexico City).

She is clearly more than a petri dish, or a throat culture, or a potential incubator of the swine flu. She is a human being. That’s why I’m so heartsick that the Mexican government didn’t detain her or throw her into quarantine for just a few days. On this side of the border, why not deposit her into a hermetically sealed bubble like the Apollo 11 astronauts? What’s good enough for Neil Armstrong should be good enough for a non-astronaut Idahoan. It seems pluralism and civil liberties trump epidemiological common sense.

Conscientious hypochondriacs have already bookmarked the CDC’s swine flu website. It’s instructive, includes various podcasts from in-the-know docs, and offers up several gems from the hypochondriac’s Bible, e.g., “Try to avoid close contact with sick people.” No-contact behavior dovetails with the broader notion of “social distancing” which sounds like code for “act like a Northwesterner.”

And so I arrived at SeaTac sans protective mask (read: John Wayne-style) to pick her up. She’d kept her mask on in Mexico City, she said, except to eat. “Why did you need to eat?” I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t muster the nerve.

Today Laurie has the sniffles. “Just like I always do after a long trip,” she says. To echo those sanguine Czechs, “Situation is hopeless but not serious.”

April 30, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Blogging the Inaugural: Near-death becomes pure joy

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 21, 2009

I hit a standing-room mass at my Tenleytown metro station yesterday. It was 6:30 a.m. Imagine getting wedged into a box of bundled flesh with a stranger’s chin on your shoulder. Now imagine you’re a Scandinavian who fears to be touched. By the time I reached Farragut North, I panicked and elbowed my way out.

I walked the mile-and-a-half from the Farragut stop near the White House to Union Station. It’s burn cold here. Ice curls formed in my hair, yeti-like. The only relief was soaking in the street market in All-Things-Obama. It’s unfettered capitalism that locals here refer to as Obama’s first stimulus package: “We Did It!” posters, Obama calendars, paintings, t-shirts, scarfs, and ski caps. Every block a half-dozen hawkers. And every block thoughts of death by frost bite.

At Union Station, I met up with fellow Crosscut scribe, Adam Vogt. We were fortunate to land a pair of seated yellow-section tickets courtesy of Rep. Rick Larsen, who handed out tickets and hosted a constituent meet-and-greet Monday morning at his Cannon Building offices.

Now it was our turn to stand and wait for two and a half hours. No movement. We waited amid the shouting and pushing with no one offering direction except for a handful of alpha male and female ticket holders. One takeaway from an ecstatic rabble: ecstasy doesn’t track with chaos.

A couple times tensions erupted along the (post-racial) color line. We yellow-tickets ballooned and narrowed like a sick artery as the purple ticketers kept pushing through. We heaved forward in a swale shouting, “Darwin!” It was Lord of the Flies on ice.

Two hours in, I paid a scalper five dollars for a pair of eighty-cent hand warmers that I promptly stuck in my sneakers. Make no mistake: I would have paid $200 or (no offense Adam) handed over Adam’s ticket. It was grim, and our only inspiration was this moment in history, the thrill of the Inauguration. That, and watching a stoic Garrison Keillor who stood caplessly nearby.

At 10:45 a.m. our line began to move. At 11:25, just under the wire, we went through the security check, a column of metal detectors that looked strangely out of place on the park grass. Then, suddenly and without warning, we arrived in Oz. We were up close, seated in the center row. The masses on the mall behind looked like thermal waves on asphalt. It was, well, pure joy.

January 21, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

2008: Year of Hope, Year of Fear. Essay 10

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 1, 2009

In 1984 then-state Sen. Jim McDermott ran for Washington Governor on the APPLE agenda, with each APPLE letter spelling out a political goal. It was “L” promising “life with hope, without fear” that stirred a subconscious transposing. Didn’t McDermott mean “life with fear and with hope?” Doesn’t fear, properly channeled, give us meaning?

Both currents, as the overall headline for this series of year-end thoughts implies, defined 2008 just as they will define 2009. A couple of questions arise: 1) Will the Northwest, as a far-left-coast laboratory of democracy, have any influence on the national conversation? and 2) Will the economic crisis speak to our better angels and translate into a full-scale blitz for things such as National Service?

Washington’s progressive tradition still hangs like the scaffolding of a home remodel that’s never quite finished. We have public utility districts, a populist state constitution requiring voters to pick a public lands and insurance commissioner, port districts conceived to delegate control to citizens (ha!), and an initiative process borrowed from the Swiss and designed to smash concentrated interests.

All these instruments of accountability and direct democracy have corrupted over time because people are, well, people.

Suitably chastened, what then should we do? For starters, during the 2009 legislative session we should identify one or two specific issues which reveal some core values. For me it’s establishing a sensible rate cap and finally reining in the payday-lending industry that preys on military families and the working poor. Think of it as one of those if-they-can’t-do-it-now-they’ll-never-ever-have-the-backbone-to-do-it benchmarks. But remember: the payday-lending industry has deep pockets.

I also like Ted Van Dyk’s suggestion of dropping industry-specific giveaways as a way to address the budget deficit — an inspired idea that runs counter to the tyranny of interest-group politics. Alas, it probably won’t happen. So maybe before lawmakers monkey too much with budget sweeteners and other revenues, they should re-noodle the armature that carries the load, Washington’s regressive tax structure. Someone in Olympia needs to dust off Bill Gates Sr.’s 2002 “Tax Structure Study Report” and move on it.

True, that won’t happen either.

On the federal level, 2009 can be crystallized in one issue driven by the economic storm: National Service. In addition to military service, there will be a massive ramping up of AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps along with innovative initiatives such as a Green Service Corps, a Hospital Corps, and a National Park Service Corps. These programs will conflate the idealism of the Peace Corps with the hands-on, back-to-basics ethic of the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Here, finally, is where the Northwest can press the conversation. We’re leaders in National Service with a major contingent of AmeriCorps members working in classrooms, in community centers, and in our parks and national forests. We are, as folks are wont to say in this era of stimulus moola, “shovel ready.”

January 1, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Inauguration: the fine print

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 23, 2008

For a Northwesterner to enter and win the inaugural-ticket lottery is to become Rod Blagojevich. You’ve got this thing, see, and it’s [expletive deleted] golden.

The congratulatory notice from your Congressman begins innocuously enough, like the first line on a prescription-drug label:

Congratulations on being selected to receive two tickets for the 56th Presidential Inaugural Ceremonies in Washington, DC on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. I look forward to seeing you when you come to pick-up your tickets.

True, you’re poor and it will cost at least 600 smackers to fly to DC. Why not give your tickets to a friend instead? Your inner-Blago awakens and says to you, “It’s a [expletive deleted] valuable thing. You just don’t give it away for nothing.”

Your Congressman anticipates miscreants like you. He writes:

Inauguration tickets will be available for pick-up in my Washington DC office on Monday, January 19th from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM. This is the only day that tickets will be available.

Each person will need to show photo ID in order to receive their ticket. Tickets are non-transferable. Ticket holders will be required to provide the names of each individual in their party in advance.

Drats, you think, no windfall. At least you’ll be a part of history. You can sit back with your umbrella and thermos of Scotch and watch “Change We Can Believe In” finally come to pass.

This is the part of the message qua prescription-drug label that kindles second thoughts. It’s that mid-section on the back listing possible side effects such as dry mouth, trouble breathing, and mild-to-severe psychosis rarely lasting more than four hours.

The Inaugural Ceremony is held outside the West Front Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Historically, Inauguration Day is cold and sometimes wet with an average temperature of 37 degrees. Attendees should be prepared to stand for several hours. If there is rain on Inauguration Day, umbrellas will not be permitted within the security perimeter.

No umbrella? What of your thermos? What of your Cutty Sark?

Once inside the event, movement will be limited and attendees will be asked to stay within their ticketed area. [read: weak-of-bladder best not attend] Please review the list of prohibited items carefully as there will be no place to leave prohibited items.

Prohibited items include, but are not limited to: Firearms and ammunition (either real or simulated), Explosives of any kind (including fireworks), Knives, blades, or sharp objects (of any length), Mace and/or pepper spray, Sticks or poles, Pockets or hand tools, such as ‘ꀜLeatherman,’ꀝ Packages, Backpacks, Large bags, Duffel bags, Suitcases, Thermoses, Coolers, Strollers, Umbrellas, Laser pointers, Signs, Posters, Animals (other than service animals), Alcoholic beverages, Other items that may pose a threat to the security of the event as determined by and at the discretion of the security screeners.

A TSA-style gauntlet followed by a freezing, thermos-umbrella-backpack-free inauguration?

Make no mistake, it will still be [expletive deleted] golden.

December 23, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Sic Semper Tyrannis!

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 28, 2008

It’s a sweetly alarming image: Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders shouting “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!” at the Attorney General of the United States during a Federalist Society dinner in Washington, DC last week.

It was a Colonial-style insult followed by a public injury when, a few minutes later, Attorney General Mukasey fainted mid-speech (there was no connect-the-collapse causality, mind you).

“Tyrant” is a pregnant old-schoolism that triggers thoughts of King George III or Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. John Wilkes Booth purportedly yelled “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” (“thus always to tyrants”) after shooting Abraham Lincoln and bounding from the Presidential box at Ford’s Theatre. (Sic Semper Tyrannis is also the official state motto of Virginia which puts Washington’s gentle “Al-ki” to shame).

Justice Sanders may be a libertarian eccentric, prone to ill-considered outbursts. But give the magistrate his due: In the context of Mukasey’s November 20 prepared remarks, the tyrant broadside appears to be deserved.

The spiel-in-question was part Federalist Society suck-up (“The Federalist Society should be proud of the role it played in supporting these judges”), part lament of the liberal media, and part defense of the indefensible. One choice passage:

And when people denounce a purported assault on the Geneva Conventions, you might expect some level of specificity in the charges. One cannot assault a treaty as an abstract concept; one can only violate the treaty by acting contrary to its words. The Geneva Conventions contain 319 articles, of which 315 are plainly addressed to armed conflicts among the nations that signed the Conventions. It is hardly surprising that the United States concluded that those provisions would not apply to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda, an international terrorist group and not, the last time I checked, a signatory to the Conventions.

Ick. Mukasey embraces the dubious inheritance of Alberto Gonzales without apology. Does that make him a tyrant? As Yeats wrote a long, long time ago, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”

November 28, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Escaping Scandinavia

originally published on Crosscut.com on October 18, 2007

The recent dedication of August Werner‘s re-pedestaled Leif Erikson statue at Shilshole Bay Marina in Ballard was sweetly timed, falling as it did on the eve of an ill-considered federal holiday. (Acknowledging the latter only inflates the myth, but his/its initials are C.C.) Epoch-namers are a cruel lot: Students absorb pre-Columbian history rather than pre-Eriksonian or even “pre-genocidal” history.

There’s no reason, of course, that we can’t amend that error right now: Leif Erikson, as all good children know, landed in North America half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. Like a responsible Scout – and contrary to his notorious counterpart – Leif left his camp the way he found it.

The Erikson statue was originally dedicated in 1962 as a kind of heritage counterweight to the Bubbleator, the IBM Selectric typewriter, and other rocket-age artifacts of the Century 21 Exposition. Unlike the Selectrics and the Bubbleator, however, Leif continues to thrive.

The new plaza, brilliantly designed by a Seattle artist, Jay Haavik, reflects the vision and fundraising prowess of the Leif Erikson International Foundation. (Yes, the acronym is LEIF.)

Weathering Viking-appropriate gloom the day of the dedication, the grandees of the Northwest’s Scandinavian-American community downed champagne and listened to Hugo’s Accordion Band and the Norwegian Ladies Chorus of Seattle. Outside a small-carnival-sized tent, the stoic and genealogically obsessed hunched around 13 rune stones patterned like a ship. Each features the names of Scandinavian immigrants (including my grandparents), a mini-Stonehenge hemming in Leif.

This handsome effort will, I hope, begin to lift the veil on the Great Unspoken, the mystery of the Norwegian Diaspora.

Like most Americans, I have pals whose shackled ancestors were hauled to the New World on slave ships, pals whose great-great-great grandparents escaped the Irish potato famine, friends whose families escaped pogroms, wars, pestilence.

So it rings false when I confess that my grandparents “escaped” from Norway, the country that currently ranks first on the United Nations human-development index. Edenic, peaceful, prosperous Norway. It’s much easier to concentrate on my mother’s Scotch-Irish clan, most of whom were scofflaws fleeing the long arm of the Sovereign.

Curiously, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Norway hemorrhaged a third of its population, with nearly a million immigrating to the U.S. Washington ranks fourth after Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California in the number of Norwegian-Americans.

These new citizens were purportedly motivated by a spirit of adventure as well as a lack of arable land. Why, then, do the black-and-white portraits of my grandparents telegraph a life-is-short, hemorrhoidal despair? Were adventurous Scandinavians simply unable to express themselves physically? The short answer is yes. Think of an Ingmar Bergman film or look at any Lutheran to confirm.

It still suggests a mystery, especially since Norwegians gravitated to a climate and landscape that mimicked the Old Country. I mean, why leave?

We know that Norwegian-Americans had a wonderfully disruptive impact on the Northwest’s social and political culture. They transplanted a taste for trade unionism and fair play and filled the ranks of the ill-fated Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Advancing social justice and health care balanced a weakness for alcoholism, unipolar depression, and inedible delicacies like lutefisk.

Applying the description “wonderfully disruptive” to the nebula of immigration might inflame the occasional Know Nothing or Lou Dobbs’s nativist. It also happily underlines their ignorance. Immigration has always been a shifting stream, that Heraclitus notion of never stepping into the same river twice. In the coming decades, we could witness LIEF analogues with statues of Pushkin in Mountlake Terrace, Wash., or of Santa Ana in Yakima, or of Mahatma Gandhi in Boise.

It’s true that for the P.C. and the hyper-sensitized, a statue of a helmeted, jut-jawed Viking is yet another symbol of the patriarchy. But give us this, please: As locals are wont to say, Leif Erikson just may be the last Scandinavian in Ballard.

October 18, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Remembering Keith Grinstein

originally published on Crosscut.com on October 2, 2008

Keith Grinstein, who died unexpectedly on Sunday, Sept. 28, at age 48, was a kinetic entrepreneur and altruist, as hilarious as he was intense. Picture a young-end Baby Boomer as a throwback to Seattle’s civic lions, circa 1962.

It may be a sin to use the subjunctive tense, especially about a life interrupted, but Keith’s biography would have tracked with the Northwest’s Jim Ellis and Eddie Carlson, innovators who knit together business savvy, public vision, and community values.

It’s a “what if” that only magnifies the grief, the break of a generational thread that can’t be mended.Next: The problem with Seattle’s progressive chattering class

Keith’s first job after graduating from Yale was as a $16,000-a-year natural resources aide to my late father, Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. It was Keith’s public-service baptism, the ballast for later life. It was also, again, a $16,000 position. After six months, he came up for review. His new salary was set at $17,600.

Years later, Keith would rib his former boss, chief-of-staff Denny Miller. “Come on,” Denny reminded him. “That was a 10 percent raise!”

Keith moved on to Georgetown Law School and an inspired career in telecommunications and venture capital, the kind of work where a 10 percent raise carries a bit more oomph. Along the way, he seemed to breathe life into a line from Theodore Roethke’s The Waking: “I learn by going where I have to go.” Wherever he landed in life or career, Keith was bound to a legacy of service.

To witness Keith together with his dad, Gerry, a former hand of Sen. Warren Magnuson and the recent former Delta Air Lines CEO, was to experience the science fiction of H.G. Wells. It was a dance of identical twins with one time-traveling sibling three decades younger than the other. Son complemented father, both emblematic of service above self; each was shrewd at tackling complex problems while highlighting the absurdity of certain politicians and other inflated egos.Next: Symptoms and struggles persist for WA couple, 10 months after COVID

Keith was, make no mistake, a frenetic presence. A year ago, we served together on a foundation finance committee. He’d rock in his armchair and rapid-fire acronyms, liquidity trends, and other arcana. There was a dervish-style coherence to his method, but I was clueless. I would quietly write down what few nuggets I could comprehend, usually “Dow Jones” and “buy low.” It was humbling.

In the 1990s, Keith became a member of Seattle’s dot-com aristocracy, those youngins who shoveled their Gold Rush loot and remade local philanthropy. It’s a community that’s done enormous good, recasting funding priorities and embracing transparency. Too many, however, have boosted vanity projects or expressed do-gooderism as an extension of themselves. Keith had the good judgment to concentrate on a few community totems and behind-the-scences volunteering that employed his skills as an investment guru. He was focused, effective, and (and I mean this) understated. It was meaningful do-gooderism as an end in itself.

Looking for some big-brother-ish guidance a few years back, I met up with Keith at the Montlake neighborhood Starbucks.

I began to wax Bohemian. What should I do with my life? I was acting the obnoxious Hamlet.

“Michael Jordan,” Keith said. “He does just one thing. Basketball. And he thrives.”

Hmmm. The analogy sounded a little too simple. I continued pressing.

Keith made some jokes at his own expense and finally leaned forward and said something quasi-Scandanavian, a sentiment that spoke to my Ingmar Bergman-esque soul.

“Just imagine that you’ll only live to be 40,” Keith said. “What can you say that you did with your life? You have to seize something now, something you love, and run with it.”

Wise counsel from a wise man: Do one thing well. Life is short.

If only that the latter weren’t true.

October 2, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,