Late Returns

When you’ve fought every day for 10 years
to turn a map you and a friend drew at a kitchen table into a $2
billion transit agency, and volunteered and done strategy for two
winning underdog city council campaigns, and then run for city council
yourself and nearly made it—to say nothing of half a dozen city
and county ballot initiatives you’ve run, the first of which was called
the region’s biggest political upheaval of the decade on the cover of
the Sunday New York Times—and in the end you lost most
of your battles against WaMu or Paul Allen or the state or the Seahawks
or the Mariners and had the gain sucked out of those battles you won,
you know a couple things, or more precisely one thing: You know that
the fix is usually in.

And you get pretty good at calling races.

In the mid-1990s, the city seemed to know the planet was being
ruined. Friends complained about the clueless mall-walkers that
downtown filled up with once the single-occupancy hotels were pushed
out and Nordstrom got its taxpayer-funded garage, but these same
friends way too often didn’t vote. Meanwhile, many of those who were
politically engaged suffered the curse of progressive America, stuck in
an outdated cultural rebellion that seemed to lay up indulgences for
later compromise. By the time I finally left town three years ago, I
thought the stupidity of this city was irrepressible, its progressivism
a pose—irony of ironies being Greg Nickels killing a transit
system and rubber-stamping a freeway at home as he went junketing with
his global-warming crusade and built a career as an environmentalist on
the national scene. (Watch him drop this crusade like a hot potato now
that he has no future in office-
seeking.) The politicos who flew
the green banner proudest and still managed to win used it as cover to
go along to get along or fight progress (I’m talking to
you, council president Richard Conlin, instrumental in putting
the knives into the monorail agency and backing the viaduct replacement
tunnel right up to leading the 9–0 council approval last month).
Saying you “support the environment” was like putting a 100 percent
hemp Free Tibet sticker on the bumper of your car. You didn’t have to
really do a fucking thing.

The mayor’s race this year seemed no change, equally hopeless. The
characters in the primary: Nickels, under threat for killing the
monorail or losing the Sonics, whichever pisses you off most and if
it’s both call me, we’ll have a beer; a no-chance-Charlie named Mike
McGinn whom The Stranger was backing—been
there, dude; a random sports figure; a city councilwoman
who I’d always liked personally because she’s fun to drink with but who
ran as the Downtown Seattle Association’s best friend; and a cell-phone
exec who looked like a cell-phone exec and proved to be the
most entertaining candidate in the race, a train wreck of pro-business
bromides and ill-advised shout-outs (he kept repeating that he proudly
hailed from suburban Everett, “the Pearl of the [sic] Puget
Sound,” without the slightest clue this might be the wrong thing to
say). After Nickels’s hemorrhage in the primary—the severity
of which no one had predicted and which could have been about his
grab-it-all style, the Sonics, his relationship with neighborhoods, his
faux environmentalism, the two weeks the city spent snowed in last
winter after which he comically overrated his performance (“I give
myself a B”), or all of the above—the cell-phone exec, Joe
Mallahan, became the front-runner and the old establishment lined up to
support him. McGinn’s lead role in beating the roads-and-transit
campaign two years ago was downplayed to invisibility among the people
who “matter”—despite the impressiveness of his going up against
the mainstream environmental organizations that were crying that
transit couldn’t win an election without being bundled with more roads,
and then proving them wrong.

I came back to Seattle this summer to write and raise money
to produce a film, not very interested in the mayor’s race. Of course I
hoped McGinn would win. But I didn’t care much, didn’t think it would
ever happen, wasn’t going to let myself get heartbroken again. I worked
on Nick Licata’s first campaign 12 years ago, and our post-campaign
vacation (courtesy of the candidate) to Mexico was my first journey to
the country I would later make my home. Mexico is warm, in every sense
of the word. Seattle’s uptight Puritan New England/
Scandinavian
Protestant soul is intensified by winter depression, cold weather, the
rain—all reasons I can no longer live here year-round, and why (I
believe) the Northwest has made the greatest doomy art in America since
the tales of Hawthorne, and why its cultural heroes die so young. You
can’t talk about Seattle without talking about the weather, and you
can’t go away and then come back without noting that it makes everyone
here a little crazy.

For a week, I helped prepare for a McGinn fundraiser a friend held
in the middle of October. Two years fighting cancer had left him with
hundreds of pounds of pine needles in his gutters and walks; rain had
rotted the wooden steps. I was doing it for my friend, because he
cared, and because he had let me crash in his spare bedroom for
weeks—not out of any passion for the cause. I wove a dozen
strings of Christmas lights across the shrubbery to lead the hundreds
we expected up the dark cul-de-sac from the cross street. The
organizers arrived to a ship’s canteen of food but booze for only
perhaps 70—we could run for more. A dozen people trickled in.
Then it was more like 20. Then about 30. After an hour or two had
passed and the party was tilting past its peak, McGinn, who had been
waiting for more folks to show up, spoke. In the old days, this party
(good people, great food, hardly anyone there) would have signified his
death as a candidate. He had a muddled message that night (I stopped
listening halfway through), one-third of his opponent’s war chest, and
zero air of inevitability.

Sad and by now drunk, I sidled up to an earnest Licata staffer, and
we both spoke at once—whispering so our voices wouldn’t echo
across the (empty) parquet floor: “It’s not gonna happen.” Around this
time, I had run into a man at a Georgetown bar who was on the board of
Yes for Seattle when I was its executive director at the beginning of
the decade. Back then, a handful of plucky young enviros from campaign
shops and nonprofits considered a short-lived “initiative factory” a
viable strategy for greening the city a summer at a time. But things
had changed. “Remember how much we cared about this city?” my friend
said with a smile. “Isn’t that just worlds away now?” I agreed and
thought about how we sounded like the old hippies who’d cut their hair
and sold out back when we started this war against their
complacency.

It was painful to watch McGinn campaigning, because his agenda was
exactly the one I fronted when I ran for city council in 2001 (plus
consultants and savvy calculation). I hung back at the McGinn event,
moved chairs, dimmed the lights when asked, ate sitting down, drank
heavily. The candidate and I found ourselves going for the red beans
and rice at the same time—we had never met before—and he
recognized me, grinned broadly, and shook my hand. He said, “You’ve
been through all this” or “You kind of laid the template for this” or
“You helped us get here”—I would like to remember what exactly,
but I could barely concentrate on what he was saying. I kept thinking
about energy and idealism and hope and young hearts being thrown
against this immovable thing. Wasted time. I could barely speak. He was
nice. He was going to lose.

But there were things going on that I did not see.

The Tunnel (it should be capitalized,
because if it goes through it will be the crowning disaster of this
city for the next generation) is a monster born of compromise: $4.2
billion authorized by the state legislature would remove the viaduct
and rebuild the seawall and Alaskan Way, replacing the state highway
underground—on the condition that cost overruns are paid by the
citizens of Seattle. Megaprojects, especially ones
underground, always have cost overruns, Boston’s Big Dig being
the chief recent American example. But in Boston’s defense, that
project undid a snarl of highways to open up a most unique city’s
divided heart, on arguably the most vital road corridor in the world,
I-95. The Alaskan Way Viaduct, by contrast, according to the Washington
State Department of Transportation, carries only double the volume of
traffic that runs every day on North 45th Street. That’s all! To
transfer a small ribbon of harborside roadway deep underground,
everything else the city taxpayers cover—buses, libraries, parks,
bond issues for schools and low-income housing, habitat restoration,
parades, the arts, the homeless—is to be put at risk.

The rural GOP state reps—with the compliance of most of their
ludicrously retrogressive Democratic state colleagues from
Seattle—are willing to put up billions for the highway but not
one cent for the reclamation of what might be the most scenic urban
shore in America. We are on the hook for that, because the city’s
consensus-
by-default in last year’s election was to remove the
viaduct without replacing it on the shore. And two weeks before the
election, breathing the thin air of the Nickels administration, the
city council voted unanimously to approve the deep-bore tunnel
(in terms of engineering, the same technology that connects, say,
Denmark to Sweden, or Manhattan to New Jersey) without opposition even
from my old ally Nick Licata: His patch-up idea for the
viaduct—strong on wishful engineering—was neither lovely
enough for those wanting an open waterfront nor lucrative enough for
the unions and construction lobbyists who finally got their way with
Nickels and the council. (Steadfastly progressive on all other issues,
Licata is understandably devoted to traffic separation due to an
accident in which his stepson, a pedestrian, was tragically injured
several years ago, and perhaps, in his unwavering allegiance to the
less fortunate, believes the mad myth that the “poor” or “working
class” depend on cars. Only 800 million of the six billion
people on earth have access to a car: They’re not the poor
ones.)

And renowned environmentalist and new council president Richard
Conlin? Except for his rare foray into real environmental advocacy on
the ill-fated plastic-bag tax, Conlin, a characteristic light-green
Seattle politician, has always been careful not to expose his flanks to
conservative attacks or provide more than scant justification for his
self-applied green label. While priding himself on
deck-chair-rearranging legislation like the ordinance legalizing pygmy
goats within city limits, he was instrumental in the slow assassination
of the monorail project by Nickels, developer Martin Selig, and WaMu
CEO Kerry Killinger—along with a rich supporting cast of
real-estate barons; crypto-racist NIMBYs
from Crown Hill
block-watch groups, carefully phrasing their opposition to “outsiders”
coming into their neighborhood; and well-
intentioned light-rail
true believers happy to let transit take a lifetime to get built. I
suspect—after prolonged exposure to these people—Conlin’s
soft-enviro supporters are attracted more to what they hope he might be
than what he is, with scant evidence beyond a yogic poise and goateed,
unflappable calm that he is one of them. This year, a
campaign as strong as council member–elect Mike O’Brien’s would
have dusted him.

It remains to be seen how hard the new council president will fight
for the tunnel. You have to hope that McGinn’s promised acquiescence to
the council’s decision begs a movement like the one that stopped plans
for the Arboretum-destroying R.H. Thomson Expressway in the 1960s. No
project since then here has been so stupid. There is no other word for
it. It’s not just the tunnel’s concrete and the cars, the lack of exits
downtown, the sprawl-multiplying effect, and the elitist gold-plated
highway for drivers and the slow bus for the poor. If this were a
transit system—$2 billion for 1.7 miles, not even counting the
inevitable overruns—it would be a bad idea. In fact, it would be
laughed out of existence. My darkest mind says if McGinn won only after
accepting the eventuality of a tunnel, then what I decided four years
ago after Nickels undermined the monorail is true: There is not a
majority of voters in Seattle serious about sprawl; salmon-killing,
orca-poisoning runoff; social justice; and climate change—and our
“eco-consciousness” will continue as a back-and-forth shuffle of
half-measures and corrections, a sham of image and self-regard. And
something else: As I’ve aged, I’ve changed a little. I understand my
Republican friends from high school who want to hunker down in their
suburban homes in Texas and Florida, make their kids comfortable and
safe, cook really good dinners, and ignore the fate of the
world—but they don’t act like they are any better than they
are.

Of course, the state legislation promising to hold Seattle
responsible for any cost overruns is still fungible:
Conlin—elevated to quite undeserved hero status in a recent
feature in The Stranger—is on the record, along with
McGinn, calling it unacceptable. They may get out of it just
by treading water while this nightmare project kills itself. A tunnel
entirely on the state’s tab is hardly, as the conventional wisdom would
suggest, a “done deal.” Mayor Nickels has characteristically done his
best to hide the bad news. Studies show drivers—maybe up to 40
percent of them—will avoid the tolls the tunnel will have and
take surface streets, in the absence of fixes to the downtown street
grid, which won’t have been made because of the cost of the tunnel.
People’s Waterfront Coalition chair Cary Moon says, “There is unlikely
to be a single bomb that sinks the deal, but an accumulation of risks
and negative impacts that may capsize it at any time.” And that
infamous breeding ground of lawsuits, the environmental impact
statement, hasn’t been done yet, and it’ll be a
doozy—probably a decade of construction shutting down
either end of the city center, a tunnel mouth under a national historic
district, and more traffic on the roads (because planners are finally
discovering increasing road capacity in turn creates traffic
to fill it). All for twice the traffic on 45th, people.

The 9–0 council vote boggles the mind, but I was not surprised
when McGinn gave a brief sidewalk interview immediately thereafter,
expressing his intention to enforce the laws of the City of Seattle or
some such soft capitulation. This was business as usual. What was the
point of playing nice if you were just going to get the pants beaten
off you anyway? The mayor-elect’s hired consultants, the Mercury
Group—who came out of nowhere two years ago to strategize McGinn
and O’Brien’s campaign against the roads-heavy, transit-light
RTID—might have known what they were doing all along, or perhaps
were just lucky, or perhaps were the beneficiaries of a late pivot on
McGinn’s part that no one on the outside saw coming. McGinn’s
politically unwise opposition to the deep-bore tunnel under downtown
was turned to his benefit with a parsing Mallahan could not only not
have made but probably didn’t understand either. It allowed McGinn to
sound reasonable (We won’t drag this out forever
Seattle-style) without stepping away from his principled
opposition. It was no longer the viability of that opposition that was
the focus, but the heart, the sense—sort of like the monorail
movement without the agency, the contractors, the condemned blocks, the
weirdos for and the wackos against—minus the unpleasant and messy
difficulty, the endless dead-end corridors of
Nickels’s vaunted
“Seattle Way” itself.

The election of a mayor here is as much
about theme as city business: Norm Rice (mayor from 1990 to 1997)
proved to America that a nice African American without too much style
could win a white-majority town’s approval; developer Paul Schell (1998
to 2001) was the perfect regent for the city’s dot-com gilded age and
wore the finest suits I’ve ever seen on a man; Nickels, who came after
Schell, was fat and bought his suits from JCPenney or something, his
election largely a reaction to the caviar scent of his unlucky
predecessor. Nickels was a pure pol, dropping out of college to work
for Rice on the council and hailing from West Seattle, where the 1950s
seemed to last to the final years of the century. His Seattle Way was
an elevation of process and a bow to thousands of volunteers who had
spent years negotiating never-to-be-followed neighborhood plans and
bought his bullshit hook, line, and sinker. His execution of this style
took place in classic backroom deals and bullying, a Machiavellian
level of information control: Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis was quickly
nicknamed “the Shark” and reveled in the moniker. The theme by 2009,
however, was that process had ruined our chance to build the West
Coast’s Central Park, instead ceding the whole neighborhood to
billionaire Paul Allen; had lost us the Sonics; had worn everybody down
until the establishment got the answer it wanted on the monorail; and
didn’t show up when it snowed for two weeks and business froze to a
standstill.

Nickels rose through the system on the hidebound and conservative
Democratic district organizations—in a city as Democratic as
Seattle, power seekers who would be Republicans anywhere else learn to
wear the costume. But the Howard Dean campaign in 2004—and then
the Barack Obama campaign in 2008—brought out young and earnest
people eager to learn the organizational ropes, people for whom (bless
their little hearts) it was fresh. A bland establishment candidate

like Mallahan found no safe purchase there. Before Facebook, the
pyramid scheme of campaign influence involved mostly political
consultants and PR firms and boards of not-too-concerned citizenry and
economic development groups and the unions. When I ran, the radical,
immigrant-driven unions that have reenergized the labor movement for
the past decade had just begun their resurgence. McGinn won the support
of the upstarts representing the truly low-income service

industry, grocery and hotel workers and janitors, who have nothing
to lose.

A decade ago, in Seattle politics, union meant the middle-class
unions: the building trades and longshoremen, the firefighters, the
police, teachers, and the umbrella (shifted left by recent chair and
McGinn supporter Steve Williamson) of the King County Labor Council.
Campaigns were afraid to print their own materials—which makes
the most sense for a low-budget grassroots campaign—because a
crucial secret handshake was the tiny union “bug” on campaign
literature printed by a union shop, a matter of protocol that rendered
labor’s true ideological allies indistinguishable and gave
accreditation to anyone who could afford it. Most of these
organizations, it goes without saying, endorsed McGinn’s opponent this
year, as they endorsed mine.

The Municipal League does not endorse but gives individual
assessments: Ludicrously, Mallahan, an irregular voter with a nearly
nonexistent history of real civic engagement, got top marks
(“Outstanding”), while McGinn rated “Good” (the “fuck you” of Muni
League rankings). The spineless Washington Conservation Voters has
consistently hedged its bets and threw its strong name recognition
behind establishment candidates, while the Sierra Club, from which both
McGinn and O’Brien sprang, was usually willing to take the risk of
supporting candidates who backed an actual pro-environmental agenda,
and for this it was considered “fringe.” At the top of the power
pyramid, fed credibility from below, lay the papers: the Seattle
Times and the late Seattle Post-Intelligencer. When they
were both still in physical existence and were both making endorsements
(the online remnant of the P-I no longer does), they bolstered
the authority of each other, the Times‘ suburban-oriented
right-wing editorial board tipping city folk to listen to the
P-I, the presence of which softened the umbrage with which the
Times‘ views are now received.

What the papers gave to all this was a daily check-in on the
conventional wisdom, and most of what made a candidate win was whether
the establishment believed as a whole that he or she could or would
win. Without the counterbalance of the P-I this time, the
Times‘ pro-Bush, pro-Hutchison editorial page had no
credibility with the voting public. Its editorial writer covering city
races, the haughty Joni Balter, is the apotheosis of the Seattle false
liberal, making ad hominem attacks on individual council members for
their riskier efforts (Licata is a favorite target) with a strongly
discernible scent of classism. It is refreshing to see the power of
Balter—whom I have witnessed use the presence of her children as
a human shield from being taken to task in a public
forum—diminish to a shrill sound in the wilderness as far as city
politics are concerned. The papers came out every single day;
now, sources of information have scattered and require heightened
attention.

Information moves faster these days, but is polyglot: Judgment comes
slow. The surprising development in this age when high schoolers call
handwriting “cursive” is that noncentralized information spurs
independent thought. And pollsters still don’t reach cell
phones. As the actress Parker Posey has pointed out, the crucial thing
to remember about the internet is it is not real: When it
throws a bad vibe, gets dirty or smelly, insults you or shouts too
much, you can click it into oblivion and drown the offending opinion in
the fulsome flood of its worldwide web. But you cannot close out a
recurring mood or a common dream, and this is why the internet has
changed the way democracy works—maybe for the rest of human
history.

Like Nickels in 2001, McGinn was in Southeast Seattle late in
the campaign, speaking to community groups and churches, his words
being translated into Vietnamese and Spanish, Lao and Amharic, the
languages of Seattle’s newest newcomers. The presence of volunteers
drawn aboard during these pit stops gave the venue of his very brief
acceptance speech, at the campaign’s secondary headquarters off Rainier
Avenue and Othello Street, a truly international flavor the night the
final results came in. One senses that this actual contact and received
help, rather than the usual name-check pandering, will bring these
communities deeper into the city’s social fabric and power structure.
McGinn—and this is perhaps why the pundits as well as most casual
observers rated his chances of victory so low—has a way of doing
three or four things at once when it looks like he’s doing nothing at
all.

Among the people in the room for McGinn’s acceptance speech that
night was Aaron Pickus, the 23-year-old media-relations coordinator for
the mayor-elect. A recent college grad (double major in linguistics and
political science), he fell into the campaign when he found himself
with extra time between his part-time shifts at a radiology clinic. He
is so far from the ordinary portrait of an inner-circle city
staffer—
which he will almost certainly become, after landing
a job in McGinn’s transition team—that it’s wonderfully, joyously
laughable. (Pickus was once an intern at The Stranger.) When
he returned my call on the weekend before the final tally came in, he
was polite and humble. He confirmed for me what I believed had a
crucial role in this campaign—the presence, early and wide,
McGinn established on Facebook and Twitter. I am a Facebook junkie, but
I have never explored Twitter. Tweets were effective for announcing
volunteer opportunities and keeping people abreast of developments in
the race. But Facebook, Pickus says, “took on a life of its own, with
people commenting, tossing up ideas. It was a kind of nonscientific,
rolling poll, a 24-hour town hall.”

The primary, from a distance, appeared to be a fluke when McGinn
came out on top. But look a little deeper: Mallahan, after dropping
more than two hundred grand of his own money into his coffers, spent
$12.03 for every one of his primary votes; McGinn spent $2.03. Which
was a good thing, because Mallahan
was poised from the start to
raise the big money. He ended up laying down three times McGinn’s total
expenditure, and losing: McGinn’s cost per vote in the general election
only went up two cents, to $2.05. Cleve Stockmeyer, an attorney and
activist I befriended in the monorail fight and a founder of the
nascent Transit Riders Union, puts it this way: “Here’s the new math:
Mallahan had about 400 $700 donors on average”—the maximum legal
individual contribution. “McGinn had about 700 volunteers, 300 of them
hardcore. You spend about six months with a Colby Underwood [Mallahan’s
fundraiser, formerly Nickels’s fundraiser] on the phone, massaging
those checks out of the people who write them. Everybody knows who they
are—there are only about 4,000 of those people. Seven hundred
dollars buys you about 2,000 pieces of mail. Or you can just go on
Facebook and rely on networks that already exist, that will respond or
not to your ideas, and reach at least that many people. So one
volunteer is worth one maxed-out donor.” Except more than that, because
Pickus tells me that McGinn had only about 250 active volunteers.

Election night I ended up—briefly—at McGinn’s party on
the corner of Pike Street and Harvard Avenue at the
Cold-War-
nostalgia-themed nightclub the War Room. Most of the
people there, 200 perhaps, were in their early and mid-20s. I saw Marco
Lowe, Nickels’s one-time campaign manager and aide—also 23 when
he ran Nickels’s first mayoral run but the opposite of an Aaron Pickus.
Lowe was wandering alone through the McGinn victory party, unrecognized
by most. He must have been there as a supporter. If so, good for him.
But the look on his face said he saw the destruction of all that a few
thousand people—comfortable, well-connected people who had long
compromised themselves and fed great swaths of their lives to the
machine—had once planned.

Two nights later, I attended an art opening at Lawrimore Project in
the International District for the ingenious and extremely civic art
collective SuttonBeresCuller. Walking through the crowd—which
felt more like a house party, as events at Lawrimore always do—I
did an unscientific poll. Everyone I spoke to was for McGinn, some
ecstatic with hope for the city’s future. Even the less politically
engaged were drawn to him: Eric Fredericksen, curator of the Sodo
gallery Western Bridge, said he didn’t have time to pay very much
attention to the campaign, but saw “a man on a bike, and that really
said something to me.”

My business partner, the film director Daniel Gildark, told me
once—about the worst of the monorail opponents—that there
are some people who simply thrive on destroying things, on tearing good
and careful efforts down. I recall these foaming goons when they would
stalk into the Seattle Monorail Project offices to testify at the
agency’s public hearings, moving with spitting contempt past the models
and images of our dream. That energy—a version of it—will
serve the fight against the tunnel. But it is a destructive energy,
souring all it touches, and even if and when a groundswell rises to
carry their critique of the tunnel project into the mayor’s mouth and
onto the TV and computer screen (Nickels worked this against the
monorail—merely repeating its opponents’ distortions catapulted
them to the front page), it is vital that the mayor’s agenda avoids
being swept up in a negation. The possibilities now are too great, and
to lose them to a huge distraction—well, it would be better to
stand apart, let the fools build their tunnel and let them take the
blame when it’s half-done and the bill come due.

Of course, the question under every progressive campaign from Obama
down to McGinn is when and to what degree will those brave challenges
be compromised, played game to larger goals or mere tenure. Let’s hope
that’s not what happens. My heartbeat is steady. As the artist Ben
Beres said to me the Thursday after the election, when the outcome of
the mayor’s race was still uncertain (though not Mike O’Brien’s
victory, or Pete Holmes’s, or Dow Constantine’s, to say nothing of Tim
Eyman’s long-due trouncing or Nick Licata’s win of a fourth term over
his strongest challenger yet): “This is kind of the greatest thing ever
for Seattle.”

Under McGinn, Seattle might actually become what it has long liked
to think of itself as: a grassroots democracy; a city dedicated to
environmental stewardship; young, smart, progressive. I would like to
think—it would help me to feel better about the course my life
has taken—that McGinn’s victory is an aftereffect, at least in
part, of the years of work Moon, Stockmeyer, Licata, Dick Falkenbury,
Peter Sherwin, Pam Johnson, Knoll Lowney, and I put in. Except that,
thanks to time, circumstance, technological change, and a new
generation to whom the crisis at hand is plain as day, McGinn actually
pulled it off. It might be possible that in the next 8—or 12, or
24—years, we could see a network of bike lanes and paths more
extensive than any in the world; sidewalks in the North End; covered
bus stops and public restrooms; affordable housing; sustainable jobs;
less glitzy shit and more places that honor the pedestrian; a
waterfront for human beings where we can look out on the finest urban
sunset on earth, hearing and smelling the Salish Sea and meeting its
denizens; a rail network connecting with fast buses to form a
comprehensive and regular system of regional and local public transit;
schools that are the envy of the nation (and a courthouse that doesn’t
send nonviolent offenders into that darkest stain on our national
conscience, the privatized American gulag); clean runoff and plentiful,
healthy salmon in Lake Washington; pleasant density here and wild
country outside the city; street life (music, street food, arcades for
shelter from the rain, skateboarders, etc.).

I’m only back in town long enough to pull together a budget for a
feature film—a dark romantic comedy I wrote about Ukrainian
internet brides slated to shoot this winter in Kiev and the Crimea.
McGinn says one of his first orders of business is to get a rail line
along the old monorail alignment from Ballard to West Seattle on the
ballot and to build it within the decade. I’m not back in the game:
Being an artist is more satisfying than politics ever was, win or lose.
But I am suddenly optimistic, after so long believing there was no
cause for hope here, and happy for my friends who live in a city that
might now begin to match their great dreams.

Grant Cogswell ran for Seattle City Council in 2001. GrassRoots, a dramatic feature film based on Phil Campbell’s book about that campaign, will be directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and shot in Seattle this spring.