Perhaps this highly inconvenient recession, which is souring
everyone’s stock holdings and causing me to contemplate halving the
amount of canned ham I toss in the direction of the house staff this
Christmas, is also to blame for The Stranger‘s embarrassingly
tedious essay this week by GRANT COGSWELL, who, according to my files,
was recently forced by a combination of abject failure and financial
ruin to flee the state of Washington for Mexico. I would bet the farm
there isn’t a cheaper freelance writer currently in practice on the
West Coast. His fulsome typing about the incoming mayor and how he
“broke the Seattle machine” is so prolix, dreamy, and self-serving you
almost can’t help but wonder which job in the McGinn administration Mr.
Cogswell is gunning for—one hopes it isn’t the same job three or
four other Stranger scribes are actively, obviously pursuing
with their recent PR disguised as political “journalism.”
That Mr. Cogswell views the cadre of sandal-wearing
marimba
players the mayor-elect duped into working for him gratis all those
months as the epitome of an idealized state of democracy, which is
itself the idealized state of civilization, merely proves how shopworn
and trite Mr. Cogswell’s mind is. To be clear: Just because Mr.
Cogswell and Mr. McGinn are environmentalists of the most extreme
stripe doesn’t mean they will go down as compatriots in history books,
no matter how far Mr. Cogswell reaches to scratch his own back in
ostentatious self-congratulation. And the mere fact that Mr. Cogswell
was surprised by Mr. McGinn’s “grassroots” victory doesn’t make it
meaningful; if it means anything, it means that Seattle voters were
had. With, as we all know, a generous assist from The
Stranger. In a just world, marimba players play marimba and the
people with executive experience are the executives—and the
people with the credentials to put out newspapers are the ones putting
out newspapers.
In such a world, of course, The Stranger would not exist.
Let us ask ourselves: What would we be missing? We would have to do
without reading about BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT taking part in some sort of
drunken golf tournament (call me old-fashioned, but any golf course
that allows women on its premises is not a real golf course). We would
have to do without DAVID SCHMADER blathering about a book on
cartoons. And we would be spared beleaguered former intern
KAIA CHESSEN suffering (and, by extension, forcing the reader to
suffer) through not one but two plays in the theater section
this week—no doubt because foppish theater “expert” Brendan Kiley
went into hiding after the disastrously vainglorious Genius Awards on
Friday night, which turned out to be no more than an elaborate excuse
to let Paul Constant, Jen Graves, Charles Mudede, and Lindy West listen
to their own voices in a microphone, and to allow a seedy young couple
to copulate in the back row of the upper mezzanine. It is no surprise
given the meretricious, noxiously sexualized character of this
newspaper that no one seemed to mind.