« epilogue | Main | reader mail »
July 9, 2006
old town, new town
red town, blue town
Most people are surprised when I tell them that Washington state is mostly desert. The mountains and waters and mild weather you see on the postcards comprise only the western quarter of the state. Cross the mountains fifty miles to Seattle's east, and suddenly you're in an arid desert that continues for 200 miles until you get to Spokane, where pine trees suddenly pop out of the rolling yellow hills, where it hits 100 every summer and -10 every winter. You'd never guess you were in the same state.
That's where I lived for two years when I first arrived in Washington.
Much like their geographical differences, there's a sharp cultural and political divide between eastern and western Washington. Paint the areas east of the mountains red, the western areas solidly blue. And me, I've had the great misfortune to live in conservative Spokane when Clinton was ruinin' the country and in liberal Seattle now that W. is.
Is that ever tiresome.
If you ever get the chance, open the Spokane Spokesman-Review to the letters to the editor. Here's a synthesis of what you can expect to find:
To the editor,
When are Americans going to WAKE UP and realize that their country is being taken over by the anti-gun choice and tax-and-spend Dumbocrats? They had their chance and all they accomplished was BLOW JOBS! And now we have a President who walks with Christ and all they can do is criticize! Stop the country! I want to get off!!!— Cooter P. McNugget, Hayden Lake
P.S. WAKE UP!!!
The letters are excruciating, yet you cannot avert your eyes. They beckon like sirens to the rocky shoals of your mind, they do. Nor can you long avoid having redneck world views shoved down your throat. "I swear to God," said one woman of Washington's new ban on smoking in public places. "The gummint just wants to control everything nowadays."
"Oh, they do not. This is reasonable. It's not like secondhand smoke is good for you."
"Tough. People have been breathing it for decades." And then she indulged in the stupid man's preferred form of argumentation: say the same thing, only louder and with a personal attack chaser. "THE GUMMINT HAS GONE TOO FAR! WHAT DO YOU WANT NEXT, BANNING FATTY FOODS?"
Because the AM radio tells them to, Spokanites complain about taxes a lot. And even those who pay zero taxes manage to complain about any public services enjoyed by those of us who shovel towering heaps of cash to the government. I once endured a Spokane retiree and a lazy-assed, white-trash, unemployed mooch of a Spokane husband complaining about how their taxes went to pay for my ferry.
"What taxes? Would you like to compare tax burdens? I guaranfreakingtee you I paid more in taxes last year than you've earned in any year of your life." They declined.
When I lived in Spokane, Limbaugh was lord, Clinton was Satan, and I couldn't wait until I was no longer pummeled by idiots' opinions. And then I moved to Seattle, and only the idiots changed.
"Hi, I'm Dawn and I drive a hybrid and go through your garbage looking for recycling fouls and wear no deodorant except for this herbal stuff I buy at the food co-op and I'm a vegan well almost but not quite because I have a silk blouse but it was made from free-range grain-fed silkworms in Tibet and I don't support Bush."
"Hi, I'm John, and I didn't ask."
"I SAID I DON'T SUPPORT BUSH! WHAT, DO YOU SUPPORT HIM?"
A friend once observed that Seatards don't show you who they are; they instead rattle off a list of trends that they've bundled together in lieu of a personality. There's no depth whatsoever to it. They'll speak smugly, and loudly, about owning a hybrid, yet their old car is still out there guzzling fossil fuels for someone else, making their purchase no more environmentally significant than any other conspicuous instance of consumer consumption. I've already railed about the stupidity of their electric busses. Their diversity parade? Please. You'll never meet a less diverse group of people than the Seattle ditzy left. Trust that they went straight from that parade back to social circles who uniformly look and, for lack of a better term, think just like them.
As evidence of Bush's election fraud, several Seatards have said the following to me: "I don't know anyone who voted for him." And they're earnest in this belief. So malformed is their intellect, they think this indicts the election results more than themselves. In a country in which a smidgeon more than half voted for Bush, they have labored to know none of them. Diversity, indeed.
So where does this leave me, other than feeling uncomfortable and vaguely assaulted on both sides of the state? I found myself preferring Spokane folks, though until yesterday I wasn't sure why. They're less educated, demographically. Marginally whiter. Flag-waving, gun-toting, ill-read drones of the AM radio–right. These are not qualities that I admire.
But yesterday when I was in Spokane, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of telling a friend that something he said offended me. And he asked why. And I told him. And he said he'd never considered that. And that was the end of it.
I felt a thud of realization: this was the difference. This conversation has never happened for me in Seattle. I can't imagine it ever happening. No, I would simply be blamed for my own offense. The idiocy in Seattle is not by lazy happenstance but by willful design. Whereas the irritating idiocies in Spokane are largely born of ignorance, those in Seattle are rooted in pretense and hypocrisy. And therein lies the crucial difference.
Ignorance can sometimes be cured.
posted by john at 10:13 AM • permalink