"The last thing I ever wanted to be was the mayor of a city where I had to call out the National Guard, where I had to see tear gas in the streets," said [Seattle Mayor Paul] Schell, who pointed out that he was an anti-war protester during the 1960s.
Seattle Times, December 1, 1999
SEATTLE HAS THE REPUTATION of being a laid-back yuppie paradise, a place where ex-Microsoft millionaires hold court in Starbucks, cooking up new dot-com business plans with venture capitalists as blue herons fly over Puget Sound. Lulled by these familiar images of a mellow, thriving oasis, the media and local officials alike were in a state of shock last week when long-planned protests of the World Trade Organization conference degenerated into rioting and looting. Shock turned to horror when -- having lost control of the streets and created an international debacle for the United States -- the police fought back with rubber bullets, clouds of tear gas, and curfews. This was the stuff of liberal Seattlites' worst nightmares. Of all the places you might expect to see such chaos, they all agreed, surely Seattle was the last.
In fact, Seattle had it coming. Its vaunted political culture is practically an invitation to riot. This culture values disobedience over obedience, protest over order, and antic political mischief over playing by the rules. Indeed, before the riots, it would have been hard to say which was the source of greater civic pride: that Seattle would be hosting the WTO delegates from around the world, or that it would be host to the thousands of labor and environmental activists protesting free trade. Other cities -- New York, Washington, any of the European capitals -- would have taken care to cordon off streets and segregate protesters from the delegates, who ended up trapped in their hotels. Not Seattle. Instead, police chief Norm Stamper bragged that no one wanted "to send a message that Seattle was a police state." And mayor Paul Schell went further, telling a Wall Street Journal reporter even as the disorder was still escalating: "If we had to do it again, we wouldn't do it differently. Free speech triumphed."
Yes, that's the Seattle spirit. And those of us who live in the city affectionately known to some local progressives as "Sodom on the Sound" can hardly pretend that last week's chaos was just an unfortunate accident. Before the costumed sea turtles, clowns on stilts, Gap-pants burners, Nike Town- and Starbucks-window smashers came here for the anti-WTO circus, Seattle had a venerable political tradition of embracing all that is marginal.
Consider our recent political history. In late August, the Seattle City Council decided it would extend to transgendered individuals a municipal code "ban" on discrimination already applying to transsexuals and transvestites. Somehow, though, it had neglected to ban discrimination against topless transsexuals. Not to worry. In early September, Ara Tripp, 38, a buxom post-operative transsexual construction worker from Olympia, took matters into her own hands. Tripp scaled a high-voltage electrical tower above Interstate 5 and brought Seattle's rush-hour traffic to a halt by partially disrobing and spitting huge bursts of vodka-fueled flame from her mouth. Power to 5,000 residential customers was shut off for a time. They may not have been amused. But no matter. Tripp wanted to protest the injustice of laws prohibiting women from going topless, while men can. As she told the Seattle Times, "I see guys with boobs bigger than me, with hair on them, and it's legal." Talk radio feasted. Tripp then bared her appurtenances for an alternative weekly. Wearing a red cocktail dress and high heels for her court date, Tripp was fined $ 800 and given only home detention. You might say free speech triumphed.
On the other hand, one city government insider told me that Tripp's protest may have been a test encouraged by WTO protesters who were then in training and considering similar stunts (though without the nudity). Whether Tripp acted alone or not, WTO gadflies could hardly have failed to be encouraged by her relatively lenient sentence, given the disruption she had caused to the thousands of commuters trapped in the traffic jam and the thousands who lost power.
In less extravagant ways, too, Seattle has exhibited a fondness for the disorderly margins of society. The city council spent large chunks of time last year debating whether individuals who had been repeatedly cited for drunk and disorderly behavior should be kicked out of city parks. "Displacement coalition" avengers went to the mat over city efforts in 1998 to bar encampments of homeless tent people under expressway ramps. But city and county officials have mostly been on the side of the activists. They have accepted as given a substantial population of vagrants supported by the city, debating only the details: Should there be bunks for drunks? Where do we put the showers (or hygiene centers, as they are called here)? How do we maintain fresh needle stations for junkies, against concerns that they are ill-advised? Tellingly, this fall's city elections were fought over the issue of whether "civility" is repressive. One unsuccessful council candidate complained that laws to clear the parks and sidewalks of anti-social behavior were making the city "seem as repressive as Singapore." Another decried as "diabolical" any effort to curb pan-handling. As it turned out, even in a political monoculture, voters have their limits: The four pro-civility candidates won.
This small victory for "civility" laws should not be exaggerated. Seattle still encourages a fundamental disrespect. Basic municipal competence and civic pride are strangely absent. The city-owned historic plaza at the Washington Street Public Boat Landing on the tourist-thronged Alaskan Way downtown waterfront has remained run down and neglected for years. Ragged and belligerent vagrants occupy the benches, trashcans overflow with clothes, paint is peeling. No wonder the two flag poles sport no flags. The city is ashamed to claim the plaza as its own, although there's a nice plaque from 1960 proudly noting the landing is a historical point of interest. For more than a year, nothing changed, except the city removed a small pier favored by floppers, forcing a greater concentration of them closer to the sidewalk, under the landing's beautiful, ornate pergola. No boats can land at the boat landing now. But then, why would they want to?
On the way to Safeco Field, the spanking new $ 517 million home of the Seattle Mariners, a stretch of First Avenue South remains fouled with human excrement, the stink of urine, and an abundance of litter and broken glass. It's been like this for more than two years. Most folks walk to the lovely ballpark on the other side of the street.
It's an odd predicament for a city that is, after all, flush with the economy of the Information Age. A leader in trade with Asia, fiercely proud of its symphony hall, its burgeoning arts scene, Northwest cuisine, stunning natural setting, world-class medical centers, and growing philanthropy, Seattle nonetheless is unwilling to police and clean its streets. Doing so would violate the self-image of the city's political elites.
Even before the WTO arrived, Seattle was well on its way to demonstrating the dark side of liberal "tolerance" as a governing principle. This spring, the city's pacifists and environmentalists, joined by "whaling activists" from around the world, mercilessly teed off on the impoverished, dispirited Makah Tribe of the Olympic Peninsula, who had resumed whale hunting as was their right under an 1855 treaty. Protesters tailed the tribe's hunting boat out of Neah Bay, bumped it, and blocked it. The level of invective was astonishing. "I personally hate the Makah Tribe. I hope and pray for a terrible end to the Makah Tribe, very slow and painful," one activist wrote to the Seattle Times. Another chimed in, "I'm ashamed this tribe is here. . . . The white man used to kill Indians and give them smallpox-infected blankets. Is this a tradition we should return to?" Save The Whales. Screw The Indians. Welcome to the yuppie paradise.
If Jimmy the Greek were alive today, he'd lay three to five that by a week after the New Year, Seattle will convene a "conversation of the people" about what went wrong at the WTO opening last week. There will be earnest discussions about free speech and tolerance and the defusing of tensions. For underlying Seattle's political culture is a deep fear of confrontation -- which is considered vulgar in our rain-washed, muted, infinitely polite city. This fear of confrontation has allowed Seattle's politics of the marginal to flower. It's also what allowed our police to stand by so dully when things first careened out of control in the heart of downtown, with the whole world watching. When you wait too long to exert authority -- years in the case of Seattle's governing class -- it can be hard to regain the upper hand.
What the city especially won't want to confront is the truth that was made abundantly clear once the riots began: A political culture that for years had defended the marginal didn't know how to defend the mainstream. Seattle proved literally unable to defend itself. And Paul Schell, mayor of what is arguably America's most left-wing city, had to call in the National Guard as a result. The real irony in Seattle last week was that one of the most striking fantasies of the New Left was finally brought to life in a left-wing city. The liberality suddenly looked like a sham, and the tolerance, as Herbert Marcuse once put it, turned out to be repressive.
Matt Rosenberg is a writer living in Seattle.