Washington has long claimed to be the most environmentally consciousness state in the nation – an alleged Ecotopia of green-minded infallibility that was (s)trumpted to the (exhaust-befouled) heavens even before Seattle began calling itself “The Emerald City.”
The name is curiously apt, not for the environmentalism it is intended to proclaim nor the illiteracy it accidentally reveals, but for the fact the original Emerald City made famous by L. Frank Baum in TheWizard of Oz was a realm of deception. The wizardly facade that so astounded Baum's Dorothy is a near-perfect analogy for the environmental denial and deceptiveness characteristic of Seattle and the Land of WA in general.
Nowhere are these attributes more evident than in the hostility to mass transit that defines Evergreen State political attitudes. Five of seven Seattle-area regional transit measures have been slain since 1968; four were rejected by the voters, another – the most ambitious project of all (a federally funded light rail system linking the cities along the Interstate 5 corridor from the Oregon state line to the Canadian border) – was killed by the legislature. The result is that Pugetopolis – the metropolitan sprawl from Olympia north through Tacoma and Seattle to Everett and Bellingham – has the worst mass transit of any comparable urban area in the United States: 40 years behind that of its demographic equivalents.
Such a uniquely dismal record refutes – with the undeniable finality of a capsized garbage barge – Washington's strident claims to ecotopian consciousness. It also exposes what is perhaps the most breathtaking political hypocrisy in all U.S. history. “Emerald City” indeed: “bah, humbug!”
The question now is whether local and regional voters will approve the minuscule sales-tax increases – in every case no more than some fraction of a penny on a dollar – that are essential to preserve such transit systems as already exist in this Nevergreen state.
Without those tiny tax hikes, transit users in the Puget Sound region are facing service reductions approaching 60 percent – radical decreases in the frequency of urban bus runs and already-minimal rail operations, the abandonment and isolation of outlying areas by termination of all service.
While transit officials are publicly optimistic the tax increases will be approved – like athletic coaches, they are forbidden to acknowledge unavoidable defeat even when it is certain – I have grave doubts. I fear the revenue reductions inflicted by the Great Recession have sent Pugetopolis transit to its deathbed – and very probably have done likewise for public transport in most of the nation.
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There are two issues here, one national, the other apparently local.
The national issue – which I discussed in “Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?” (27 April 2010; linked above the headline) – is whether the collapse and its subsequent Great Recession are engineered to fulfill a seemingly unthinkable Ruling Class purpose. Is it deliberate escalation of the seven-decade Ruling Class war on governmental services? Is it to kill transit, education, welfare, unemployment insurance, health care, environmental protection? Is it intended to preserve only those services – chiefly military and infrastructure – that directly contribute to capitalist profits?
If I have read the indications correctly, the answers to these questions are affirmative. The economic crisis is eliminating government services exactly as intended. Which means Teabagger thuggery will probably be mobilized against save-our-transit efforts just as it was against health care reform.
The local issue – though it too may portend a national trend – is a seldom-acknowledged and hard-to-document component of the Pugetopolan mindset: the huge and apparently growing segment of its motoring majority that is brazenly hateful – deliberately sadistic and not infrequently violent – toward transit users, bicyclists and pedestrians in general.
I have never encountered its like. My lifetime itinerary includes New York City, the New Jersey metropolitan area, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Jacksonville, San Francisco and Portland; Montreal and Vancouver; lesser cities in Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia; a working summer on Cape Cod; military postings in South Carolina, Maryland, Georgia and Korea – in other words, a fair sampling.
While I have seen motorists bristle at pedestrians and bicyclists in most of those places, I've never witnessed anything remotely akin to what happens here every day – especially the malicious targeting of transit users. Nor is its sometimes murderous intensity anything new; a state trooper told me in 1978 that hit-and-run victimizations of pedestrians and bicyclists are among Washington's most commonly unsolved crimes.
Though I would not knowingly choose to live amidst such hatefulness, I was stranded here in 1970 by an odd conjunction of improbable disasters, another story for another time. That first year in Washington, profoundly unpleasant for any number of reasons, is also memorable for the hit-and-run murder of a bicyclist whose presence on a rural road apparently provoked a deadly vehicular assault. The victim, though not someone I knew, had been close enough with several acquaintances they were heartbroken.
My first month in Seattle, where I lived from 1972 through 1976, I witnessed a morning-rush motorist attack a bicyclist. The motorist deliberately veered toward the bicyclist, forced him into a curb so high it wrecked the bike; the impact catapulted the bicyclist over the handlebars and onto an adjacent greensward. Then the motorist pelted the bicyclist with empty soft-drink cans, finally speeding away when I jumped out of my own automobile to intervene.
The bike was destroyed, the bicyclist's trousers shredded, his knees skinned and bleeding, his ribs painfully bruised. I offered to drive him to an emergency room or to his destination, both of which he declined. So I gave him the license number of his assailant and later added my testimony to a police report.
After several more such incidents – at least one in which I was the target – I who had fearlessly peddled all over Manhattan on a Raleigh 3-speed became afraid to bike even on Seattle's side streets and sold the 10-speed I had bought to accommodate the city's mountain-steep grades.
I have never dared bicycle here since.
Now of course I am too crippled to bicycle anywhere.
Apart from an interrupted return to Manhattan during the mid-1980s – a promising and joyful professional resurrection ironically terminated by the house fire here in Washington that destroyed all my work and robbed me of any possibility of further journalistic success – I have been a resident of this state for nearly 40 years. But until my automobile died last July, I was unaware the majority's smoldering antagonism toward bicyclists had burst into a conflagration of hatred against anyone without a car or truck.
The first week I rode buses in Tacoma was even more disturbingly eye-opening than my long-ago effort to bicycle in Seattle. Tacoma motorists nearly ran me down in crosswalks a half-dozen times. One driver shouted “hurry up and die,” and while I was waiting in a bus-stop shelter, another driver cursed me as a “fucking bum.” A couple of days I later was targeted by a man in a shiny new gas-guzzler pickup truck (what else), who blared his horn and swerved toward me when I stepped off a curb while (presumably) protected by a “walk” signal; his passengers cackled with malevolent glee when I nearly tripped over my own cane as I leapt out of his way.
Now after 10 months of riding buses – the permanence of Jobless Recovery guarantees not only that I will never own an automobile again but that I am probably stuck here in anti-transit land until death – I assume any such trip will include at least one encounter with a pedestrian-hating motorist.
Most of my fellow transit-riders – those with whom I have chatted at bus stops or en route somewhere – report similar experiences. The common denominator is some road-raging driver spewing toxins from a cesspool mouth: “buy a car you piece of shit.” The denunciations of choice for obviously elderly, obviously crippled pedestrians like myself are typically “useless motherfucker,” “goddamn grandpa” or “fucking gimp.”
Today I was obviously burdened with groceries, obviously moving at maximum hobble to catch an approaching bus, but not one driver in a long line of at least 20 vehicles turning through a crosswalk would allow me the right of way that would have let me catch the bus. There is no question the bumper-to-bumper obstruction was deliberate – many of the motorists were laughing, jeering and giving me the finger. A women shouted “get a heart attack”; a man yelled “fuck you drop dead.”
And yes, as a result of the obstructionism I missed the bus.
The 30-minute wait for the next bus is the 30 minutes of angry contemplation now boiling over onto this page.
But at least now it is clear to me we are damned not merely by politicians in lucrative servitude to Big Automotive and Big Oil and therefore bribed to minimize the reality of petroleum bankruptcy. We are also cursed by horsepower-as-virility males terrified of impending castration and automobile-as-adornment females hysterical at their looming loss of glamor – a hopelessly enslaved population that so desperately loves its vehicular bondage it will literally kill to maintain it.
Probably – Palinoid denials not withstanding – these vindictive motorheads are also panicked (as well they should be) by terminal climate change. Whatever their psychological trigger, they are now consumed by the Moron Nation psychosis of blaming the poor for the crimes of the rich – hence the antagonism toward transit exploding into the malevolence toward transit users I encounter every time I ride the bus.
Meanwhile the local aristocracy demonstrates a unique and breathtaking hostility to electrically powered rail transport. It clearly believes those of us who cannot afford automobiles should be condemned to busing: allowed only herky-jerky people-compactors – roving ovens in summer, traveling Petri dishes in winter – Third World transport for the New Third World.
What makes this bus bias even more astonishing is that Washington is served by Bonneville Power – a kind of mini-Tennessee Valley Authority (and like TVA another legacy of the New Deal) – that provides the state with the second cheapest electricity in the nation.
Perfect for electrically powered public transport, right?
So we might assume, but we'd be dead wrong.
Even in the post-oil-embargo '70s, Seattle's Metro Transit was secretly junking its electrically powered trackless trolleys and replacing them with fossil-fueled, internal-combustion-engined buses – a scandal exposed (and stopped) by The Seattle Sun, the alternative weekly of which I was the founding photographer.
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Most of us from elsewhere instinctively expect better from a place so smugly, even arrogantly eco-preachy.
But eventually – if we pay attention – we see past the Emerald City smiley face and the politically correct hokum to something presumably a bit more akin to reality.
There's also the fact the Evergreen State was named not for its environmental zealotry but for its annual tree-kill: the evergreen harvest beloved of its timber barons.
And we should never forget the Ehrlichman Function: Seattle Felon John Ehrlichman's admission during the Watergate Hearings that Washington is the testing-ground of choice whenever the Ruling Class wants to try out a new technique of oppression.
Such is the Oz-like wizardry that governs the land of ecotopian deception, where the reality described by “evergreen” is the flow of Big Business funding that ensures the DemocRats remain indistinguishable from GOPorkers save in rhetoric; where “sustainability” is the chief attribute of that quid pro quo; and where – as a result – no politician dares publicly admit that bus-dependency merely perpetuates our enslavement to the Big Oil/Big Automotive oligarchy.
It is the most glaring example of Ruling Class tyranny – and Moron Nation stupidity – I have witnessed outside the South.
But even if the voters do the improbable and approve these tiny save-transit tax-nudges – “nudges” because “hikes” is far too strong – the fact all the state's systems are inseparably wedded to buses dooms them to eventual self-destruction.
It cannot be said too often that buses are no different from cars and trucks in being hopelessly subject to skyrocketing fossil-fuel prices and the looming fuel-supply shortfalls imposed by petroleum bankruptcy.
This dependence on finite and therefore ever-more-expensive propellants is what makes all bus-centered transit systems ultimately a colossal waste of funds – money that (given the permanence of Jobless Recovery) – will never again be available.
Knowing the malevolent depths of capitalist hostility to any governmental service not exploitable for profit, I cannot but wonder if this built-in termination mechanism is the real reason the Ruling Class so relentlessly opposes the rail systems that could entrain us to socioeconomic sustainability.
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And Now If You Need More Specific Proof...
I had intended to include the two stories below in my Earth Day anthology, but I cut them because their added length crashed the TypePad server. Then I resurrected them here because of their obvious relevance.
The first demonstrates how the Ruling Class continues to fight rail transit with the same closed-minded stubbornness that characterized the efforts of die-hard segregationists half a century ago in the South. The second proves that – again exactly as in the South – tyranny in Washington state is born of Ruling Class domination of government. My responses – for which scroll down the comment threads – elaborate on these themes.
The summaries are mine; the headlines – including the scare-screamer immediately following – are as they appeared:
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We're still in denial about Sound Transit costs
Ted Van Dyk, a writer for Crosscut, a Seattle online daily, continues the attack against adequate transit. I reply by pointing out just how outrageously backward Pugetopolan transit is already.
http://crosscut.com/2010/04/21/sound-transit/19756/
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Who killed the water quality tax?
Daniel Jack Chasan, also of Crosscut, reveals how DemocRats and GOPorkers collaborated to kill an important environmental protection measure, severely wounding a plethora of victims including “Puget Sound water quality, Washington's cash-strapped municipal governments, and unemployed laborers and teamsters.” I point out the measure's death is merely more evidence of how the state's politicians are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Big Oil and Big Automotive.
http://crosscut.com/2010/04/16/washington-legislature/19749/
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Welcome to the Evergreen State. Step right up.
LB/29 April 2010
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