The 29 Arts, Music, Creative, and Small Business Leaders with an urge for the Burge
The 29 "Arts, Music, Creative, and Small Business Leaders" with an urge for the Burge.

In an open letter distributed last week, 29 "Arts, Music, Creative, and Small Business Leaders" endorsed Seattle City Council President Tim Burgess's candidacy for re-election. Among the signatories were high-up representatives of Sub Pop, STG, Vera Project, Capitol Hill Block Party, 5th Avenue Theatre, MOHAI, Culture PAC, Washington Filmworks, Seattle Opera, and Seattle Music Commission, plus the owners of several popular restaurants and nightclubs, and five working artists.

You can read the complete text of their endorsement letter here, or, if you'd rather, you could wait until this evening when The Stranger's endorsements for the upcoming election will be published. (I suppose it's disclosure-worthy that I'm friends with John Roderick, who ran against the Burge in the primary. Also, I have no participation in or influence on The Stranger's endorsements, btw. I'm just the '90s Rip Van Winkle Arts and Music Editor who guest hosts Blabbermouth when Eli's out of town. I do have a brief thought about this open letter, though.)

The race between Burgess and Jon Grant has been pitched as a Goliath v. David/ MCP v. Tron/ Once-ler v. Lorax narrative, which in many ways it obviously is. Burgess is a powerful political insider and Grant is a charmless housing activist whose chief interests (affordable housing, police reform) happen to be massively relevant issues. That narrative makes it tempting to think of Grant as a noble (if, again, anticharismatic) Dudley Do-Right for all the Seattle artists who can no longer afford Seattle rents, and minority citizens who have no recourse to iniquitous and selective law enforcement. Which casts the former cop and adman Burgess as a kind of Snidely Whiplash landlord character. The unsentimental reality of artists, arts organizations, and city government might be a little more complex.

Everyone on this list has practical and legitimate reasons to cozy up to Burgess. Many of their organizations are nourished, directly and indirectly, by government spending (if not at the council level, then certainly at higher ones) and all are affected by the city council's regulatory disposition. In the absence of a more robust film incentive program on the state level, the names that represent the interests of the local film industry will be looking for powerful allies should a Seattle-specific initiative ever become plausible. Plus, everyone seems to think the Burge is certain to win, and if/when he does, he's more likely to A) make decisions that favor already-prosperous arts and nightlife institutions, and B) remember who his friends are.

Also, Grant is widely perceived as an ideological apparatchik of the Sawant Industrial Complex, which would give any millionaire business owner a good reason to oppose him. (It's one thing to have a lone Socialist demagogue on the city council, since she clearly offers a strong and consistent corrective to the body's standard-issue pro-growth, management-friendly tendencies, but I'm sure the idea of Sawant having a de facto cryptosocialist proxy on that dais must be chilling to many of the undersigned.) And even if he's not entirely in her orbit, Grant's campaign is all about the little guy, which makes him unlikely to direct a thin tax nickel toward the interests of arts institutions or nightlifey businesses. True enough that when artists can't afford a place to live, they have a harder time making art. But when art and political ideology, socialist or otherwise, make alliances, the art invariably suffers.

Even a conservative calculator puts the value of the names on this list at a couple-few hundred million dollars in combined hard wealth, speculative valuation, and institutional endowments. This makes it hard to be entirely sympathetic given that struggling artists are already starting to flee to Tacoma even as rents skyrocket and Seattle's olde bohemian cobblestones are increasingly paved with vile tech lucre.

NEVERTHELESS, this being the world, there's also something to be said for considering the interests of the institutions that house, support, commission, and show the work of those artists who remain. I look at that list again and see a great many organizations—and even a couple of bars—that Seattle arts and culture would be way worse off without.

On the personal front, who knows to what degree the endorsements of 29 "Arts, Music, Creative and Small Business Leaders" will influence on actual voters? The small, italic line beneath the names is worth noting: "The signers of this letter are endorsing Councilmember Burgess’s election as individuals. Their title and organization names are for identification purposes only." Maybe so. Maybe they genuinely believe in what Burgess is about. But no matter how simpatico they may personally be with Grant's progressive platform (never mind that the candidate's speaking voice is as delightful as pus draining from a sebaceous cyst), all 29 signers are shrewd enough to know that supporting him would gain them nothing, and could potentially lose their businesses and organizations quite a bit. You can hardly blame them for dancing with the guy who brought them.

(This is all just a small part of why many people find the gestural dumbshow of politics so profoundly distasteful, but that's a subject for another Slog post...)