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We're All In This Mess Together
by Clark Humphrey

WaMU had a bad 2008.

MISC IS DEDICATED this month to the greatest American author of our generation, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand at 46. He'll be remembered most for Infinite Jest, his thousand-page epic novel of PoPoMo reconstructivism and recursive complexity, about (among many other things) drugs-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-drugs, set amid a near-future North America in perhaps-inexorable political and environmental decline.

But that was only the cap of a remarkable body of works, fiction and non-, whose common thread was the hyper-rigorous parsing of a scene or a topic down to the most minute detail, the most obscure angle; all treated with a dry humor AND sincere compassion.

Wallace was no hipper-than-thou alt-cult celeb. His stories and essays, even when about his personal experiences (including past struggles with drugs and alcohol), always dealt with more universal conditions.

Perhaps his most direct worldview-statement is his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon University. Towards its end, he states: "It is unimaginably hard... to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliche turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now."

'THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY,' R.I.P.: Acquaintances boasted to me of withdrawing all their deposits out of Washington Mutual. I tried my best to assure them WaMu would not collapse. It would survive, it would be sold whole, or it would be sold in pieces. And its most valuable, most saleable pieces were its bank branches and its individual accounts.

Then my point was proven. The FDIC arranged to have these assets sold off to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.

It might not have been so necessary, so immediately, had there not been so many sudden withdrawals from WaMu accounts-more than $16 billion in less than two weeks!

Thus ends the rollicking saga of the little Seattle thrift institution, a secondary player in the local banking market back during the days before interstate banking giants, that became the biggest institution of its type in the nation.

It effortlessly subsumed such former giants as Dime Savings in New York and Home Savings in California. Like a dot-com (only using real money), its business model was to Get Big Fast. At the peak of America's housing bubble, WaMu was the nation's biggest home-mortgage originator, with some 2,000 branches coast to coast.

But all that growth was predicated upon one gamble-that the national home-buying mania, abetted by lax government regulations and the massive trading of obscure "mortgage-backed securities," would just keep on a-growin' forever. Or at least for five or six more years.

It's easy to say they should have known better.

Which I just did.

But think of it this way: Imagine you were running the last big financial outfit still based in the NW region. Imagine you'd come to believe you had two options. You could remain a local player, slowly but surely losing ground against the consolidating industry giants. Or, you could become one of those consolidating industry giants.

Yeah, I would have picked (a) also.

WaMu's shotgun marriage creates another addition to the roster of big companies that used to be based in Seattle but aren't anymore. Some others: - United Parcel Service: Begun as a delivery service for local department stores in 1907. Now based in Atlanta.

- Carnation Foods: Turned evaporated milk into a pantry staple; moved to Los Angeles; got absorbed by Nestle.

- Airborne Express: Taken over by DHL. Seattle HQ closed. Ohio central air-freight depot threatened with closing.

- Westin Hotels: Originally a regional circuit called Western; then a major global chain called Western International; merged with and de-merged from United Airlines; now just one of Starwood's constellation of brands. - Boeing: You probably know about this one.

DAYTIME DIVERSIONS: Telemundo's now cablecasting Mr. Bean dubbed into Spanish! My day is now complete.

'BOUND' FOR GLORY: A few of you might have noticed that the Obama campaign's got a a really slick graphic-design department.

One of this design team's major motifs is a solitary, serif capital "O." To many, that letter, presented in that context, is reminiscent of a magazine whose figurehead and co-owner Oprah Winfrey is a big Obama supporter.

To others of us, it reminds of The Story of O, the classic novel and movie about bondage, discipline, submission, pain-as-pleasure, and the total surrender of one's being to a figure of strong authority.

Damn, doesn't that sound exactly like the ol' Republican seduce-n'-swindle syndrome, from which Obama promises to deliver us.

Oh, and the time between Obama's convention speech and Election Day? Nine and a half weeks.

THE BIG CON: I watched part of the Repo Men's convention on my TV, while my computer was playing the first-season DVDs of Mad Men. As you may know, that's the drama on AMC about an ad agency in 1960 that's so behind the times, it devises whole major product campaigns around ads in The Saturday Evening Post. Like that agency and the Mad(ison Avenue) Men running it, the Republican Party's retail marketing effort has, for a generation, been about a lifestyle brand image that presumes a target market that's so different from me, relentlessly pushing emotional buttons I haven't got.

Note the convention slogan, "Country First."

In the first half of the last century, "America First" was a slogan of guys like William Randolph Hearst who advocated keeping our butts out of other countries' business when it didn't directly affect us. The America Firsters helped delay U.S. involvement in both world wars.

Today's "Country First" means the opposite. It means war everywhere, war forever, just as long as somebody else's kids have to fight 'em. But "Country" could also be construed as implying the rural/exurban, lily-white, never-existed fantasy utopia to which the GOPpers, from Nixon on down, have appealed. A place that's no more real than the world within a '50s magazine ad.

Fred Thompson's speech was all banal as heck, but at least he delivered it professionally. (Though the only Law & Order star I'd want to see in public office is S. Epatha Merkerson, whom I'll always fondly remember as Reba the Mail Lady on Pee-Wee's Playhouse.)

Now for Sarah Palin.

I do not denigrate Palin for being from Alaska. I live in the city that's the official jumping-off point for Alaska. It's a great state. It would be even greater if it didn't have so many corrupt Republicans running everything. (And besides, I remember in 1992 when the John Carlson types pooh-poohed Bill Clinton as having been nothing but the "failed governor of a small state.")

Nor do I denigrate Palin merely for being A Strong Woman.

Nor do I praise Palin merely for being A Strong Woman.

Having lived under the governorship of Dixy Lee Ray, I know that A Strong Woman can be just as capable of graft, cronyism, and regressive ideas as any man.

McCain then showed up on the convention's final night with a semi-informal, drab sequence of remarks. Some of it was conciliatory and even "friendly." But the basic branding was still there-more war, more drilling, more giveaways to the rich, 9/11 and POW fetishism.

I felt I was watching a victim of some delusional syndrome, occasionally lapsing into lucid human speech before reverting to nonsense. (NO, this is not an instance of age-bashing. The late George Carlin was just a few months younger than Mr. McC., and maintained his sharp wit and sensibility to the end. My mother's older than Mr. McC., and could undoubtedly out-debate him.)

TIME & AGAIN: This five-year anniversary of this scrappy little neighborhood monthly also happens to be the ten-year anniversary of my first firing from The Stranger. I'd been a part of that once-scrappy little city weekly since its ninth issue in 1991, and had fully expected it to be my life's work. Others, let's simply say, had other ideas.

So, in the autumn of 1998, I found myself out in search of new adventures. For a while, I was doing pretty well, getting gigs from those newfangled dot-coms. I kept writing the column online (and still do, at miscmedia.com). And I tried to bring it back into print as a stand-alone journal, in three different formats, all unprofitable.

No, these semi-coherent ramblings about topics significant and trivial needed to be nestled within something. Something with a clear purpose, with a unique selling point to advertisers.

Meanwhile, the Belltown Paper (indirect successor to the Belltown Brain Fever Dispatch) was winding down its run, leaving Seattle's fastest growing neighborhood without a neighborhood paper. Dispatch founder Alex R. Mayer and Elaine Bonow joined forces to start a new one.

The first Messenger (which I wasn't in) came out in late October '03. Somehow, through the aid of spit, baling wire, bobby pins, duct tape, etc., the venture's survived.

Belltown's always been a very different kind of neighborhood. The papers serving it have always tried to be different kinds of newspapers. The Messenger, to be specific, aims to be witty and personable, to be a welcome visitor into its readers' lives.

You may have also noticed we don't run a lot of upscale lifestyle features aimed at the richest of the rich. This isn't just because none of us feel a direct affinity with that particular tribe. It's more that we target those residents who are more likely to walk and dine and shop right here. Which brings us to the state of our artificially-flat stompin' ground five years on.

Condomania was well under way back then. The regional economy had survived the post-dot-com and post-9/11 slumps, and was booming again. With the city government's active approval, tower after tower of "pure prestige residences" was built or at least announced. The only apparent impediment to this boom was a shortage of construction cranes.

Now, several major projects are being redesigned, converted to rentals, or simply postponed. Several long-completed condo buildings have residents who are barely keeping their mortgages alive.

While some might think it fun to laugh and sneer at the nouveau riche suddenly turning into the nouveau poor, I don't.

After more than a decade of increasing economic-class division, in this neighborhood and in this nation, more of us are realizing that we're all in this mess together.

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