That's because the voters of this Ayn Rand backwater to which I was long ago exiled by the gentrification of Manhattan are again using their ballots to sneer “Fuck You” at anyone who's dependent on public transport.
Not that I am surprised. Those of us who are transit riders, pedestrians and bicyclists have long been openly despised by a substantial majority of the wealthier suburbanites here, and now possibly we are being targeted by a majority even within the city limits of Tacoma.
It would not be incorrect to label this bigotry a movement – the Anti-Transit-User-Movement. Its well-financed hatefulness has coalesced into cultoid deification of automobiles and pickup trucks as ultimate symbols of “Americanism” and “the Pacific Northwest Lifestyle”: it is literally a car cult, as unique to the Puget Sound region as the cargo cults were to remote South Pacific islands.
Its disciples fume against bicycles, trains and buses as proofs of conspiracy against their imaginary “right to drive” – in ugly reality their self-obsessed, morally imbecilic compulsion to isolate themselves in mechanized armor and mercilessly bully anyone who is not similarly equipped.
The car cultists are road rage personified. They demonstrate their autocentric hatred by refusing to slow their vehicles for bicyclists or yield the right-of-way to obviously disabled people in crosswalks; they spew invective – “get a job, you lazy bum” – at those of us waiting at bus stops; most of all they flock to the polls at every opportunity to vote against transit and thereby continue their relentless assault against transit-users.
And yes it is that personal – as personal as a fist in the face. The insurmountable hardships these anti-bus-rider voters will gleefully inflict on me if they're successful – the lethal misery they will happily impose on anyone whose circumstances are similar to my own – robbed the election of all the joy it would otherwise have evoked.
Make no mistake: I applaud the victory of President Barack Obama, which – or so I desperately hope – has slowed the Ruling Class effort to impose a new form of Nazism on the United States. I am delighted the voters of Washington have apparently elected Jay Inslee governor – and have thereby beaten back the One Percent's attempt to turn this state into another Wisconsin.
I am pleased these same voters have endorsed marriage equality and legalized possession of marijuana, the latter a defiant protest against the federal government's sadistically punitive, implicitly racist War on Drug Users.
Above all else I cheer the election of Elizabeth Warren, the new senator from Massachusetts whose victory pledge – “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion” – promises a potentially revolutionary revitalization of the entire Democratic Party. (Perhaps that explains why slightly more than half her speech, including the pledge itself, is now being suppressed by the corporate news monopolies.)
Warren's apparent fragility paradoxically emphasizes her indomitable strength, a purely female manifestation of the emotionally compelling leadership traits that prompt soldiers to follow a commander through a harrowing of hell. Her proven courage and brilliance combine with her unapologetic womanliness to demonstrate a kind of magnetism and power that has remained relatively unknown in the adamantly patriarchal United States. But in truth it is ageless – witness the examples of Maeve in Celtic mythology and Boudicca in classical history.
Not only do I cheer the senator-elect. Verily, I salute her as well.
Indeed there is a quality of trustworthiness about Warren the like of which I have not sensed in a politician since the halcyon days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his brother Robert. That's why I believe she could become not just the new voice of a Democratic renaissance but the leader and conscience of an all-woman congressional insurgency that might actually free the party from its Wall Street captivity and restore the principles of the New Deal.
Admittedly that may be no more than the oft-disappointed yearning of a man who even in old age has never quite abandoned his conviction the Women's Movement would at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles of liberty and justice for all, much as my late father believed of the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
Though it may be a lot more than that. Ultimately it feels like another reliable prompting of journalistic intuition – the first real, instinctive, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart political hopefulness I have felt in years.
But on election night Warren's bright and blessed promise was ultimately meaningless – a phenomenon far away on the homeland coast from which I was long ago economically banished.
Here in real-time Tacoma the Anti-Transit-User Movement was proving the town and its surrounding Pierce County to be perfect examples of Moron Nation – my name for the USian worst, the most pridefully ignorant, venomously conformist, vindictively anti-intellectual, maliciously bigoted citizenry in the industrial world.
It was a realization all the more painful because I used to love Tacoma. There was a time, 34 years ago, when Tacoma was genuinely more cosmopolitan than Seattle, particularly in the welcome its people extended to “outlanders” like myself. But now the probable outcome of the transit fight was legitimately resurrecting the question once asked by a brazenly snooty Seattle tee shirt: “If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?”
Tacoma's vote is part of the Pierce County vote, and Pierce Countians were not only voting 51-49 to destroy the local transit system they had already ravaged at the polls in March 2011. Now in 2012 with Inslee headed for apparent victory, Pierce County was voting 52-48 for Rob McKenna, the homophobic, anti-health-reform, anti-Medicaid Republican attorney general who real Democrats feared was scheming to be another Scott Walker. And now, though marriage equality had won statewide, the locals were voting against it, 53-74 to withhold full citizenship from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Because of Washington's absolutely reliable but painfully slow method of counting votes, the tabulations will continue for nearly another week.
If McKenna wins, Pierce County's closet-fascist voters can congratulate themselves. They will have made the difference between Washington remaining an officially progressive state or threatening – via gubernatorial powers of decree and paralysis-by-veto – to become another anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay Wisconsin. Likewise, had gay marriage lost, Pierce County could have lauded itself as the locale that swung the knockout punch of religious fanaticism against the LGBT community's yearnings for equality.
As a Tacoma-born colleague of mine pointed out in the context of a gay-bashing incident several years ago, what else can you expect from the town that has more churches and church-going zealots than any other municipality in the state?
But Tacoma and Pierce County also have the largest per-capita labor union membership in the state, which makes their citizens' calculated brutality toward transit-users all the more astonishing. It is a malevolence so intense the ballots have become like bullets – volleys to savage anyone who can't afford an automobile.
Once again, brandishing as they did in 2011 the Moron Nation shibboleth that “transit is welfare” (the corollary of which is “let's kill the bums by shutting down their transportation”), the Anti-Transit-User Movement was vetoing a last-ditch, save-our-system measure proposed by the agency that operates the local bus service.
Pierce Transit, as it's called, had asked voters to choose between two alternatives.
One is a tiny, three-tenths-of-one-percent sales-tax increase – that's three pennies on a $10 purchase – a sum even a pauper could afford.
The other is a 53 percent cutback in bus service: no service on weekends; no service after seven p.m. on weekdays; service on the few surviving routes reduced mostly to one bus per hour – utter devastation dealt those of us who depend on public transport.
Because the vote counts continue, it's logical to wonder if there's any chance for a last-minute reversal in the results. I asked two well-positioned sources that very question. Neither answered.
In other words, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County has almost certainly won again – not really a surprise since its voters have rejected every other such proposal, whether from Pierce Transit or its Seattle-based regional counterpart Sound Transit, at least as far back as the middle '90s.
Even if by some miracle we pro-transit people manage to eke out a winning margin, our enemies – and enemies is precisely what they are – already threaten a Florida-type recount fiasco that could delay the decision for weeks if not months. Clearly their hatred knows no limit; seemingly, neither do the bank accounts of their financiers.
Nor is this unusual. The entire Puget Sound region has a uniquely anti-transit history that dates to 1968, when Seattle's first effort to build a regional light-rail system was easily defeated by a breathtakingly nasty campaign built around the assertion, never publicly proclaimed but often whispered, that “we don' wanna be like 'Jew' York.” Impossible to trace, it was apparently spawned by a faction of the One Percent that regarded adequate mass transit as a threat to its hegemony – an invitation to “undesirables” who might challenge local sweatshops and question the exclusionary privileges that make much of Western Washington a private country club for the super-rich.
Three more decades of xenophobic no-transit votes reduced the population's smugly arrogant claims of environmental superiority to undeniable proof of a hypocrisy so huge its only counterpart in U.S. political history is the fossil-fuel industry's Big Lie efforts to persuade us it's not Mother Nature's deadliest adversary.
Only in recent years has a huge influx of high-tech “outlanders” nullified Seattle's indigenous hostility to public-transport users. Compared to transit systems in other Pacific Northwest coastal cities, Portland to the south and Vancouver in Canada, Seattle mass transit runs at least four decades behind – deliberately kept so backward it cannot possibly catch up – an urban-area outrage even in the notoriously autocentric United States.
Now, as if in a race toward a new bottom, the Anti-Transit-User Movement of Tacoma and Pierce County is bidding to make its own bailiwick many times worse. What nobody in authority wants to admit is that downsizing of the magnitude being inflicted by ATUM voters will almost certainly mean the death of Pierce Transit. Nearly a fifth of its operating revenues come from the fare box. A service reduction of 53 percent will slash fare-box income to the proverbial bone, most likely enough to bankrupt the agency and shut it down permanently.
One knowledgeable transport-industry source says Tacoma/Pierce County thus will have brought upon itself the odium of being the largest urban area in the industrial world without public transportation. Thus too will it become a monument to greed, bigotry and miserliness, a nadir of anti-transit-user malice. Endorsed as the ATUM is by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce and a deep-pocket coalition of local automobile dealers, it is already attracting the most negative sorts of international attention.
Clearly, its alliance with the rabidly Teabaggerish ATUM severely limits the chamber's ability to fulfill one of its primary responsibilities – promoting Tacoma/Pierce County as a forward-looking place in which to headquarter, expand or build business and industry.
Presumably the chamber represents all local business interests, but its emergence as a leader in the war against mass transit users suggests a much narrower (hidden) agenda. Has the chamber deliberately made itself an instrument in the One Percent's lethal subjugation of lower-income people? Is there some secret cabal of obscenely wealthy speculators eagerly awaiting the last run of the last Pierce Transit bus? Do they intend – once the transit agency is slain – to launch a for-profit bus company?
No doubt such service would be priced to exclude all save the richest commuters – the aggressively Caucasian autocentrics who loudly decry the area's ever-more-gridlocked highways even as their votes against transit make the traffic that much worse.
Why then do they vote as they do?
Only a boundless aversion to the implicit democracy of public transport – a bottomless loathing and contempt for racial and ethnic minorities and the urban poor in general – could prompt such self-contradictory voting. With Pierce Transit slain and a for-profit bus company operating on the commuter routes, the wealthy suburbanites – and let us not forget Tacoma's growing number of penthouse urbanites – would finally have their own de facto limousine service.
Plausible? You be the judge. But as we all know, privatization is almost always the ugly motive behind the deliberate downsizing and destruction of government services.
Perhaps some securely employed investigative reporter – if indeed any remain – will wrangle an assignment to explore these questions in depth.
Meanwhile there's no doubt the attack on Tacoma/Pierce County bus riders is class war of the most vicious sort. Those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished and therefore dependent on public transport for medical appointments, grocery shopping and other life-sustaining errands are being handed the Ayn Rand version of a termination notice: "we don't want you here; hurry up and die."
LB/7-8 November 2012
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