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.

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 4, 2008

For decades my mother ritually pulled out the Everett Herald sports page, folded it into squares, and inserted it neatly under the cat pan.

It was the family exception that underscored the rule: All parts of a newspaper are equal, but some parts are more equal than others.

For Snohomish County history-philes, the rule was thrown into relief when the Herald abruptly dropped its long-running history feature, Jack O’Donnell’s “Seems Like Yesterday.” Tucked inside the local section below the fold, “Yesterday” delivered a compendium of events, sports scores, and headlines culled from the paper’s archives. It was the local-color touchstone that was, we believed, more equal than others.

Explaining the decision, Executive Editor Neal Pattison wrote:Championship teams see their winning streaks end. Even the biggest hits on Broadway eventually go dark. And every year, it gets harder and harder to find some of our favorite items on the store shelves. The world around us changes. Things end.

It was the nature of that thing’s end that had all the earmarks (and the attendant only-if feel) of an accidental death.

Because of a communications glitch, “Yesterday” was dropped for several days. Its absence, however, didn’t kindle a popular uprising. One reader phoned to complain. O’Donnell understood there were at least four e-mails or calls.

No matter. History buffs, unlike history makers, are practitioners of soft power. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have mobilized a history-phile army outfitted as Wobblies and stormed the Herald newsroom shouting, “One Big Union!”

Again, hindsight.

The demise of “Yesterday” raises a broader, existential question. In the age of dice-your-news Internet and print austerity, how salient is local history? The Herald has yet to stumble into the maw of homogenized wire news. Its local coverage is excellent, and its editorial page easily ranks as one of the best in the Northwest. All the while, most SnoCo-ers don’t run to the Herald for analysis of Darfur or the financial crisis at Fannie Mae. They read it to get the local skinny. They read it because a sense of place and a sense of history hang together.

It’s easy to dismiss features like “Yesterday” as folksy relics, the exclusive reserve of blue hairs with magnifying glasses. Consider, however, the popularity of Web sites such as HistoryLink, with 8,000 daily unique visitors and a “This Week Then” home page that’s essentially a writ large version of O’Donnell. Or consider magazines like Harper’s and The Atlantic that regularly reprint essays from 50 or 100 hundred years ago. More than octogenarians in letterman’s sweaters hunger for this sort of idiosyncratic history.

Neal Pattison is a savvy, experienced editor. He’s pledged that the Herald will continue its focus on local history.

In a spirit of reconciliation (Pattison’s “things end” sentiment qualifies as philo-Lutheran), and on behalf of the outfitted Wobblies agitating for revolution, I beg of you, Brother Neal, please reconsider.

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 9, 2008

The April 11-15 Puget Sound visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama teases out multiple narratives with quintessential Northwest story lines.

There’s the wireless tycoon with the Paul Allen appetite for the Big Cause; the social entrepreneurs and early learning boosters who’ve inherited a new platform; and the Dalai Lama serving as Dalai Rorschach, a stand-in mirror that reveals the old, the new, and the still-in-progress of Seattle.

Tom Robbins, where art thou?

Lama-Palooza’s man behind the curtain is a driven entrepreneur named Dan Kranzler, a Charles Foster Kane for children and early learning (better that than, say, politics or yellow journalism).

Kranzler is a Bellevue-based wireless executive who founded Mforma, a mobile-entertainment company, in 2001. He was also an InfoSpace investor who used the windfall of the 1990s high-tech gold rush to create the Kirlin Foundation, a grantmaking institution with a self-described vision “of a global society, identified first and foremost by the grace of its empathy and compassion.”

“Kirlin” is an aggregate of the names of the two Kranzler daughters, Kira and Caitlin.

Kirlin’s grant recipients include the Bellevue Schools Foundation, Arts Corps, and other mainstream, child-centric charities. Last year, the Foundation teamed up with the Venerable Tenzin Dhonden, a monk and Dalai emissary, to launch “Seeds of Compassion,” a vehicle to host the Dalai Lama and promote the benefits of compassion early in life.

Seeds of Compassion does not have Form 990s, submitted by nonprofits to the IRS, because it’s an initiative of Kirlin. Kirlin’s last 990 from November 2007 reports net assets of approximately $6.3 million. Consistent with many family foundations, the board is tiny (six members, including Kirlin’s executive director, Ron Rabin, who serves ex-officio).

Because the Seeds initiative is so new, it’s impossible to root out expense figures such as the salary of former Seattle Schools superintendent and executive director, Raj Manhas, as well as the specific amounts donated by organizations, companies, and individuals.

This short term, Masonic-style obliqueness doesn’t suggest anything sinister other than cloaking the obvious, that a generous benefactor is footing the Dalai Lama’s bill.

Fundraisers, volunteers, and dozens of Seeds of Compassion sponsors will challenge this, with various supporters ponying up thousands of the $2.75 million already raised. KING-TV in Seattle is donating air time, and many are laboring 24/7 pro bono, along with more than 1,500 volunteers.

A handful represent a Who’s Who of child advocates, including Pam Eakes, the founder of Mothers Against Violence in America, former Washington First Lady Mona Locke, and former Boeing executive and consummate public servant Bob Watt.

This is the real story, Dalai Lama notwithstanding. Washington state is in the vanguard of foster-care innovations, brain-development research, and early childhood education. What better vehicle to burnish an extraordinary cause, irrespective of religious faith?

Traditionalists might wince at the protean spirituality of Dalai-philes who pick up nuggets of Buddhism like cafeteria Catholics, draping on only those accessories that feel comfortable. Northwesterners know that old religious leaders are supposed to be, by temperament and design, old scolds.

Fear not, me Lutherans: The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is “that life is suffering” and what could be more despairing or inherently Northwestern than that?

Moreover, as the University of Washington’s Kyoko Tokuno observes, the Dalai Lama can’t control those who gravitate to his example of Buddhist teaching. Says Tokuno, a Buddhist scholar and assistant professor in comparative religion: “They came to him and he obliged.”

This is particularly relevant for the Richard Geres, Steven Seagals, and other Hollywood gliterrati who’ve embraced Tibetan Buddhism.

Musician Dave Matthews, scheduled to perform at a sold-out KeyArena benefit Friday afternoon, illustrates the Dalai Lama’s celebrity fix. Thousands will hear the peaceable message of a Nobelist and spiritual icon. All the while, a rock concert feeds the stereotype, at least among squares and skeptics, that Tenzin Gyatso, his Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, is mostly about pop-fluff and the Zeitgeist.

For those fearful of children, repelled by rock and roll, and otherwise flummoxed by the mystery of the Divine, the Dalai Lama’s visit throws light on the political question of Tibetan sovereignty and human rights.

Here things get tricky, as Western and Eastern sensibilities collide.

As Holly Morris writes in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review of Pico Iyer’s new biography of the Dalai Lama, The Open Road, the Dalai Lama “continues to urge a controversial forbearance (rather than direct action) toward the Chinese, even as occupied Tibet is a whisper away from gone.”

Others, such as Patrick French, are more scathing.The Dalai Lama is a great and charismatic spiritual figure, but a poor and poorly advised political strategist. When he escaped into exile in India in 1959, he declared himself an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance. But Gandhi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March and starving himself nearly to death – a very different approach from the Dalai Lama’s middle way, which concentrates on nonviolence rather than resistance. The Dalai Lama has never really tried to use direct action to leverage his authority.

Graft the spiritual Middle Way to the political sphere and let loose the “tsking” of the Academy.

The Middle Way is not a political strategy but a philosophical foundation, Tokuno notes. “He is a religious man. Strategy is a political term.” She says the value of patience and noodling issues over the long term are consonant with the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist heritage.

The burden of moral leadership, however, is also the burden of unintended consequences. Kindle hopes for political freedom sans teeth and political leverage in the same year as the Beijing Summer Olympics, and Tibet risks repeating the tragedy of Hungary in 1956.

This may reflect the arrogance of a Western lens, but it’s the only lens most of us know. Our orientation is Aristotelian – man as a political animal. “It’s a cold world,” the great Northwest poet William Stafford reminded us. Stafford also happened to be a committed pacifist.

To proffer a political critique of the most gentle and beloved spiritual leader on the planet is to invite decades of bad karma. Let’s begin:

Professor David Bachman, a respected University of Washington China scholar, fears that the Dalai Lama’s visit will not necessarily translate into anything meaningful for the people of Tibet.

“He does have to strategize now,” Bachman says, noting that the Dalai Lama has had since his 1989 Nobel Prize to magoozle a political solution to the Tibet crisis.

One recommendation from columnist Nicholas Kristof offers a solution.The Dalai Lama is the last, best hope for reaching an agreement that would resolve the dispute over Tibet forever. He accepts autonomy, rather than independence, and he has the moral authority to persuade Tibetans to accept a deal. The outlines of an agreement would be simple. The Dalai Lama would return to Tibet as a spiritual leader, and Tibetans would be permitted to possess his picture and revere him, while he would unequivocally accept Chinese sovereignty. Monasteries would have much greater religious freedom, and Han Chinese migration to Tibet would be limited. The Dalai Lama would also accept that the Tibetan region encompasses only what is now labeled Tibet on the maps, not the much larger region of historic Tibet that he has continued to claim. With such an arrangement, China could resolve the problem of Tibet, improve its international image, reassure Taiwan and rectify a 50-year-old policy of repression that has catastrophically failed.

Let’s hope that the Dalai Lama takes time to commiserate and pray with fellow Nobelist Desmond Tutu, who is also scheduled to participate in the Seeds of Compassion program. Tutu may represent a Western paradigm, but he understands the nature of peace, the import of direct action, and the realities and limits of human nature.

Herein lie the roots of Northwest cynicism: that Puget Sound vendors will sell out of “Free Tibet” bumper stickers while that distant land with its indigenous population, emboldened by the spirit of the well-intentioned, burns.