Smool's ceremony was to feature the burning of wooden figures symbolizing the four horsemen of the apocalypse, wood frame animals covered with the written wishes of thousands of Seattleites for the new millennium, and, as the centerpiece, a large wooden egg, representing "a hopeful vessel for an abundant future." It was postponed by the Center for security reasons a good week before the rest of Seattle Center's revels were shut down.
"We try to do a lot of ceremonies," Virginia Andersen, the director of Seattle Center, told me. "I think as Americans, we're so rational; we minimize the importance of ceremony."
Seattle Center does indeed have a lot of ceremonies, particularly as part of the year-round string of weekend festivals rounded up under the rubric "Festál." Spanning the globe, from celebrations of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year of Têt to Fiestas Patrias, celebrating Mexican independence, the events of Festál attempt, in the words of Seattle Center's website, to reflect "the richness and diversity of our region." As you might guess, that diversity is expressed solely through the celebration of non-white and white ethnic (Irish, Italian, Jewish) cultures. It does not include celebrations, for example, timed around well-known national celebrations like Oktoberfest (Bavaria), Guy Fawkes Day (England), Bastille Day (France), Fasching (Germany), or Canada Day, let alone American holidays like Thanksgiving.
It also omits overtly religious festivals, skipping Ramadan and Passover, for example, though including semi-secularized festivals like St. Patrick's Day and Têt. Into the void left by religion, Seattle Center inserts the contemporary religion of secular multiculturalism.
As of the 1990 census, Seattle, with some 516,000 citizens, was around 75 percent white, 12 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, 10 percent black, and 1.4 percent Native American. By combining Seattle's census numbers with those for declared ancestry, and removing those who claimed Irish or Italian ancestry, you can figure that well over half of Seattle, most egregiously the huge numbers of German and Scandinavian-descended citizens -- is unrepresented in the festivals that claim to represent our diversity. This is a failure in terms of Seattle Center's justification for Festál, but it also means that the events, collectively, are unfamiliar to the majority of Seattle residents.
Lacking suitable ceremonies to celebrate America's secularized holidays, Seattle Center tends to import them or turn to Seattle's tiny Native American population. The fire ceremony planned for the (Christian) Millennium was inspired by Virginia Andersen's witnessing of a rite at a Shinto temple in Japan. Smool sought inspiration from another ceremony -- Valencia, Spain's Las Fallas, where papier-mâché figures in satirical scenes are set afire on March 19, welcoming spring.
Fire ceremonies take place all over the world, from Indonesia to Mexico, with all kinds of motivations: cremations (as in India), effigy burning (England), and purgative ritual welcoming spring (Spain, Belgium). But in America, large-scale ceremonial fires happen in three instances, only one of them national: Burning Man in Nevada, Zozobra in Santa Fe, and Homecoming bonfires at high schools and colleges across the nation.
This leaves other ceremonies open to misinterpretation, as illustrated by an item in the November 18 Stranger Police Beat column, where a rowdy party of English people had their Guy Fawkes Day revels interrupted by a Seattle police officer, summoned by fearful neighbors who misread the effigy of Fawkes (a Catholic terrorist executed for attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605) for a burning cross.
When Seattle government officials and representatives of federal security forces met with Virginia Andersen, they expressed fears that the fire ceremony would be incendiary in more than the intended sense. Fears of post-WTO New Year's Eve protests or unrest were invoked, not without reason, as protesters had been provoked by the very preparations intended to prevent them from operating in Seattle Center. So Andersen agreed to drop Smool's ceremony from the New Year's events, leaving Smool's 16 months of labor and $120,000 budget wasted. While the show will go on, and the figures will eventually get burned, those involved are feeling cheated. But given Seattle Center's perpetual fetishization of the exotic, this sort of thing was bound to happen.
