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Photojournalist
W. Eugene Smith in Seattle, 1976. When I asked Gene whether
skyrocketing costs of equipment and supplies might gentrify photography
into a medium only the rich could afford, thereby purging it of its
humanitarian vision, a few of Seattle's vindictively intolerant Ansel
Adams disciples shouted both of us down, denouncing us for our mutual
recognition that art and politics are inseparable. (The negatives from
which this hitherto unpublished image is made miraculously survived the
1983 fire and were dug out of the rubble the following year.) M2 Leica,
35mm f/2 Summicron, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure unrecorded.
Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.) |
*
SOCIALIST
KSHAMA SAWANT'S stunning victory in a Seattle city council election is
forcing me to reconsider my longstanding hatred of what was undoubtedly
the most xenophobic and politically hypocritical town in the United
States.
Seattle's
xenophobia, specifically its legendary hostility to people not born
locally, was so venomous it has given birth to at least three web sites, I Hate Seattle, Seattle Shmeng and the original, Seattle Sucks,
which is seemingly no longer available on-line. The townspeople's
hypocrisy, even more glaring, was measured by the huge gap between their
haughty claims to progressive politics and environmental enlightenment
versus the ugly reality of their malice toward lower-income people –
particularly as demonstrated by their (carefully closeted) bigotry and their relentless opposition to tax reform and adequate mass transit.
The
results of Seattle's bogus progressiveness, which because of the way
the town dominates the state legislature actually afflict the entire
state, include the most regressive state tax structure in the nation
and a regional transit system that, as I noted in a comment on the
aforelinked article's discussion thread, is nearly a half-century behind
those of comparable areas.
But
the fact newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Sawant is not only a
declared Marxian socialist who makes no secret of her radicalism but is
an immigrant as well suggests a sociological change in Seattle that may
be of unprecedented magnitude. Indeed it suggests Seattle is at last on
the brink of evolving into a genuine city, with all the cosmopolitan
open-mindedness that gives urban living its great potential.
That
said, my loathing of Seattle is too justified by ugly facts, too
long-standing and too intense for me to set it aside without a lot of
further reflection.
I first wrote of my animosity toward Seattle in a 1984 Village Voice
piece, a brief but bitterly truthful summation of the four bottomlessly
miserable years I dwelt there, 1972-1976. In terms of unabated
loneliness, these were by far the worst years of my life.
The Voice
account provoked Seattleites to an unsurprising frenzy of censorship,
angry headlines and venomous letters to local editors. In predictable
submission to the malignant Scandinavian/Lutheran puritanism that lurked
beneath Seattle's seemingly benign surface, the local reprints
suppressed my best turns of phrase – especially those describing Seattle
from the perspective of a shunned and ostracized outlander. Some of the
better passages are thus restored here:
(Seattle is) no place for dedicated urbanites. Indeed, anyone tempted to move there should first read Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States,
a University of Washington press book which accurately equates the
xenophobic quagmires of Puget Sound with the intellectual barrens of
Ohio.
There
are the wonderfully enlightened, culture-loving middle-class
professionals who will call you to your face a “fucking East Coast
intellectual” and invite you to “go back where you belong,” with even
stronger language, occasionally accompanied by threats of physical
violence. And then there's the prevalent ethos of “mellow,”
which means any conversation beyond a rudimentary cataloging of new
possessions and recent conquests – his new wife, her new man, his new
skis, her new boat – is “too heavy, man.”
New York males should be especially wary. Seattle women – they're still called “girls”
out in the Evergreen state – won't look at you twice unless you're
blond, tall and built like a lumberjack. But that only gets you in the
door. You've also got to wow the ladies with body language, man, which
means dancing like John Travolta and never forgetting
the taboo on conversation. Otherwise you'll spend the night (which ends
promptly at 1:45 a.m.) getting sloshed on 3.2 salmon piss while you
watch some plad-shirted executive cowboy try to seduce his prom-queen
secretary out of her lip-reader jeans.
Like so many others who have encountered the infamous Seattle Freeze,
at first I blamed myself. Then I met other outlanders and began to
realize we were all despised merely because we had moved there from
somewhere else. That I was born in the Borough of Brooklyn and came to
Washington state from Manhattan made the locals' hatefulness that much
worse. In Seattle, someone whose birth certificate was issued by the
City of “Jew York” – a term I first heard during an unpleasant exchange
of insults with a self-proclaimed Seattle “poet” in 1972 – is even more
reviled than someone from California.
***
My
initial encounter with the region's carefully closeted but nevertheless
intense bigotry – in this instance, the same anti-Semitism revealed by the damning of my birthplace as “Jew York,”
was in Bellingham rather than Seattle. It was November of 1970 and I
had just learned to my horror I was homeless – that an unreliable
sub-lessor had abandoned my wonderful Chelsea apartment five months
earlier, that it had thus reverted to the landlord and left me without a
place to live. Now with only a little money remaining after a summer
and fall of chasing the
Back-to-the-Land-Movement/agricultural-commune/resurrection-of-the-Goddess
story through the rural Pacific Northwest, I had rented a room in a
Bellingham boarding house and was desperately looking for work.
Obviously my first choice was the local daily, The Bellingham Herald. Because this was not the South, where my Civil Rights Movement activities had made me persona non grata at every mainstream paper but The Oak Ridger,
I assumed that even if I did not find immediate employment, I'd be
welcomed as a fellow professional, just as I had been on every
Northeastern paper to which I had ever applied. Hence I typed up a resume,
then phoned the lover who had managed to save my files and books from
the Manhattan apartment debacle and asked her to please send me the
recent clippings of my work.
When they arrived a few days later, I
phoned The Herald's managing editor, a guy named Fowler, and
asked if he had any openings for reporters, as in those pre-Watergate
days most newspapers did. He said yes, we made an appointment for an
interview, and I assumed I would soon be on my way toward earning the
exit money that would get me back to the City.
But
as soon as Fowler saw where I had worked, he bristled with rejection.
“We don't like your kind out here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and
catch the next flight back to New York.”
At
the time I dismissed his reaction as that of a small-minded managing
editor of a small newspaper in a small town that – despite its
reputation as a “hippie Mecca” (a description famously applied by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1970) – obviously remained as small-minded as any Southern Klanville.
Now
of course I recognize the Seattle Freeze is misnamed – that with the
notable exception of Tacoma, it should include the entire Puget Sound
area.
To
encounter that same hostility from the newsroom boss of the state's
largest-circulation newspaper, as I did in 1973, was particularly
shocking; I had repeatedly found the better newspapers – note again my
experience at The Oak Ridger – to be sanctuaries of reason even in realms of unabashed prejudice. But the managing editor of The Seattle Times,
Henry MacLeod, rejected me with essentially the same message that had
been snarled at me by Fowler. MacLeod was perfectly polite, as
Seattleites usually are when they're deliberately inflicting
psychological injury, but the sentiments were identical. “All your
experience is East Coast experience,” MacLeod said, “and that doesn't
count out here. We do things differently. You'll be a lot happier if you
go back where you came from.”
***
The
we-don't-want-you-here vandalism to which I was subjected so many times
in Seattle began in Bellingham too, though there was only one major
incident in the two years I resided there. While I never learned the
identity of the perpetrator(s), it was already clear to me there were
people in the local Counterculture community who vindictively envied my
photographic and verbal skills, fervently hated me for my New York
origin and were probably infuriated by my classroom performance as an
unapologetic intellectual at Western Washington State College as well.
Whatever my alleged offense, it prompted some unknown person(s) to
break into my rental house, disconnect the oil-burning heater's
chimney-pipe, turn the stove up to high, leave my dog Dingo locked
inside and nearly murder him with the stove's sooty outpouring of carbon
monoxide.
It
was New Years Eve, the last day of 1971, a night I remember as
improbably clear and invigoratingly cold. I was attending a big party at
a local tavern, was photographing the festivities, had connected with a
young woman there and under normal circumstances would not have been
home until late the next morning. But – fortunately for Dingo – I ran
out of film. So about 12:30 a.m., I went back to the house for more.
Thus an exigency of photography saved his life. But the house itself,
everything in it blackened by soot and reeking of partially combusted
petroleum, was rendered unlivable for the entire month of January. Happy
1972.
Dingo
was a very protective half Malemute/half German shepherd, about 85
pounds of no-nonsense canine, and obviously the perpetrator(s) knew him
well enough to fool him with phony friendship – a dishonest skill
Seattlites seem to possess in abundance. Just as obviously, the intent
of the crime was to kill Dingo and frighten me into leaving town. But as
the Ku Klux Klan learned in East Tennessee, I'm not easily scared into
retreat. Instead I contacted my real friends – a locally born Jewish
businessman named Les and his Chicago-born fiancée Gabrielle, also a
single mother named Billie who shortly afterward moved to California for
graduate school and whom I regret to say I later lost track of (as I
remember she too was from someplace in the Middle West) – and they
willingly granted dog and man the necessary accommodations until I made
the house habitable again.
In
subsequent years, while I worked, resided and attended school in
Seattle, all four of the tires on my automobile were slashed twice, once
in 1974 and once in 1976, and the two right-side tires of a Volkswagen
belonging to my then-lover, a woman from California, were cut beyond
repair in 1975. Scribbled notes stuck under my windshield-wipers in the
'74 and '76 incidents made the vandals' intent unmistakable: one said
“go back where you came from,” the other said “we don't want you here.”
***
In
1975 I was assaulted during a post-opening party at which I was one of
the honored guests. I was one of three participants in a show at King
and King, a Seattle gallery that flourished during the mid-'70s but closed years ago. My presence in the
exhibition was a courageous act on the part of the proprietors given
that all my photography in those days was social-documentary work – an
utterly taboo medium in a town where Ansel Adams is a cult messiah, his
Zone System is the cult's biblical or qur'anic equivalent and any use of
film to depict the human condition is considered a sacrilegious mixing
of politics and art.
However it was not my photos that triggered the assailant's rage. Those he
merely scorned, his “why don't you go back where you belong” routine a
typical expression of Seattle xenophobia. Now, eavesdropping on my
conversation with other guests, he somehow got the utterly mistaken
notion I was badmouthing the hostess and tried to ambush me with a wild
right hook aimed at the side of my face. He was at least a foot taller
than I, built like a runner or a bicycle racer who also lifted weights, a
blond, handsome, obviously athletic specimen of Homo Sapiens Seattlus,
equally suitable for a Nazi recruiting poster or an advertisement for a
trendy health club. If his wrecking-ball fist had landed with its
intended force, I have no doubt he would have knocked me down if not out
cold.
But
in those days my peripheral vision was still good and I saw the punch
coming and stepped inside his reach and all he did was knock my glasses
off my face and send them flying across the room. I poked a couple of
intentionally distracting left jabs upward toward his chin and launched a
full-power karate kick at his balls. Yes I intended to hurt him –
badly. The viciousness of his sneak attack warranted no less. I assumed
the kick would drop him to the floor, where I would kick him again as he
screamed and writhed and clutched his ruptured nuts: welcome to the
jungle, motherfucker.
Alas the kick foundered in the tsunami of onlookers who washed over both of us and pulled us apart.
One
of these onlookers was a pretty woman whose eloquent reaction to my
photographic collages – see “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit” – had
aroused my interest both intellectually and physically. But now she
turned on me, exactly the sort of treachery I had come to expect from
Seattleites of whatever gender. She shrilly denounced me for my attempt
at self-defense, yelling something like “you bastard you tried to kick
him you fucking New Yorkers always fight dirty,” at which point I sensed
I was in danger of becoming the object of a lynching and quickly
departed.
As
in this incident, Seattle-born women often seemed breathtakingly cruel
to me. This was a profound shock because women elsewhere, particularly
in the Northeast but even in the South, had generally regarded me as
good company. Many Northeastern women – I can say it now at age 73
without seeming boastful – forthrightly acknowledged they were sexually
aroused by my intellect and my ability to share its content. There's
also the fact I genuinely like women, that I regard women as
intrinsically better human beings than men and usually more interesting
as well.
But
in Seattle, even if the women managed to be somewhat intellectually
accomplished, they viewed intellectuality as an exclusively female
domain. They dismissed male intellectuals – especially those of us who
genuinely relish female companionship – as repulsively effeminate. Thus
they retained the mating habits of high-school prom queens, insisting on
men with the bodies of professional athletes and jock-strapped minds to
match. Most of these women also made no secret of their contempt for
what they considered “East-Coast-type” males – smallish, slight of
build, with dark eyes, curly dark brown hair, coal-black beard and
Manhattan's signature intensity – in other words, men much like myself.
Because
Seattleites so often assumed I was Jewish, I soon recognized this
almost fanatical aversion to physical features like mine as implicitly
anti-Semitic – yet another of the fascist instincts that lurked beneath
the allegedly “progressive” facade of Pugetopolis politics.
***
By
the spring of 1974 I was beginning to sing to myself that Bob Dylan
line that goes, “I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had
enough,” but then by a strange quirk of fate I was offered the
opportunity to became the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which
would enable me to showcase my camera work as never before. It also put
me more or less at the town's (pseudo) bohemian center, which I assumed
would open doors both professionally and socially.
But the hatred
actually intensified.
One
of the unsuccessful contenders for my job was a smugly handsome local
boy of about age 20, a typical Ansel Adams disciple named Nick who had
no discernible photojournalistic talent and even less verbal skill but
had the physique, carriage and blond cowlick of a male model. The local
women on the staff didn't give a damn he was professionally incompetent;
they merely wanted him around as a boy-toy to pretty up the office.
Eventually – over vehement protests of two of The Sun's three
outlander women (one of whom was my source inside the struggle) – the
local women prevailed. They didn't care it flushed the paper's
photographic quality down the toilet. For them, alternative journalism
was more about having fun than producing great work. In any case, being
from Seattle – or Texas – they wouldn't have recognized or understood
quality social documentary photography even if it were handed them as
the visual epic entitled The Family of Man. Just like Barbie
wants Ken, and just as mindlessly, they wanted Nick no matter what. And
when they finally got him – when his mediocre pictures began replacing
my work on the cover – I knew The Sun had started to set.
So
it was back to singing that Bob Dylan line. It took me another 18
months to get out of Seattle – I still had five quarters of school to
complete before I got my bachelor of arts degree from Fairhaven College,
and along the way I had acquired some private photography students to
whom I felt strongly obligated – but by the fall of 1976 I was gone from
Emeraldville. I was never there again save for occasional visits with
friends, never more than an overnight stay.
***
The
South, where I spent about two thirds of my boyhood, was despite its
xenophobic history infinitely more accepting of me than Seattle ever
was. In 1957, obviously a Yankee, I immediately found part-time work on The Knoxville Journal with samples of writing I had done in Michigan for The Grand Rapids Herald and later for The Grand Rapids Press.
Though I was the carpet-bagger son of a carpet-bagger mortgage-banker,
though I bore the odium of a child of divorce, I was nevertheless during
my senior year at Knox County's Holston High School voted “Boy Most
Likely to Succeed.”
Seattle
was therefore hands down the most viciously hostile place I have ever
been. Considering those places include several locales in the the Ku Klux South
– one of which is this same Jacksonville that still honors
slave-trader, Confederate general and KKK-Founder Nathan Bedford Forest –
Seattle's hatefulness was surely without peer anywhere in the United
States.
Since
then I have continued to criticize Seattle relentlessly, focusing on
its political deficiencies as revealed by its opposition to adequate
transit and tax reform.
In
fairness, I should note that Tacoma and its suburbs, formerly staunchly
pro-transit, have now become more anti-transit than Seattle, actually
damning public transport as a form of welfare, denouncing transit users
as parasites and voting two years in a row to kill the local transit
authority by ruinously downsizing its bus service. But I still regard
Tacoma as infinitely more cosmopolitan than Seattle. I have lived in
Tacoma twice, 1978-1982 and again from late 2004 onward, and never once
have Tacomans made me feel unwelcome.
Indeed
three of my closest longtime friends are Tacomans, Mary whom I met at
Western in 1971; Jim whom I met immediately after I moved to Tacoma in
1978; and another woman, Gretchen, a working artist, whom I met here in
1979. (After I sort of nudged Jim and Mary toward one another, they were
wed in 1983. Not only do they remain happily married; they are also,
for me, de facto family.) Thus Tacoma has become my home – that
is, the closest approximation to home I will ever know in this lifetime
after gentrification permanently exiled me from New York City.
But
the point here is that now after the election of City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, whose open affiliation with the revolutionary Socialist
Alternative Party proves her to be what I consider a real socialist, I
have to reconsider my attitude toward Seattle. No matter how repugnant I
have found it in the past, Seattle now seems to be transcending its xenopobic bigotry and reaching out to the peoples of the nation and the world by offering a true alternative to capitalism. Perhaps Emeraldville is at last approaching the sociological
maturity that will make it a genuine Emerald City. Let us hope –
especially for Councilwoman Sawant's sake – this turn of events is not
merely another Seattle deception.
*****
My Contributions to Last Week's Dialogues on Other Websites
“Does Hillary's Silence on Iran Show Neocon Pull on Her Presidential Run?” Truthout's
Robert Naiman challenges Hillary to declare her true self. Applauding
Naiman's astute analysis, I cite the facts revealed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family,
which prove Hillary to be not just a closet Republican but a secret
collaborator in the JesuNazi effort to make the United States a
Christian theocracy.
“We Need More Than Words”
Thom Hartmann discusses how a recent speech by President Obama “cut
right to the core of some of the biggest issues in our nation, but we
need more than words to fix this broken system.” I reply the only sure
lesson of the past six years is that any promise uttered or implied by
Obama the Orator is sure to be a Big Lie – that to imagine he will not
again always serve the One Percent by shape-shifting into Barack the
Betrayer is to prove one's self a fool. The result is a notably
civilized discussion on one of the Internet's best news blogs.
LB/8 December 2013
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