Belltown Messenger - Grant's Broiler

This city has changed now, that much is clear. It seemed possible once that Seattle was unique among American cities, that enough people here understood how badly experiments like this had gone before and the terrible consequences of the wrong choice - the deadening waste of land and hours of the day; the anti-human unwild of the broad spaces only built for machines as if builders for a film set had flown in to stage a monster movie that covered the whole world and withdrawn, that illusion somehow come horribly true; the minds in their closed-suturedness out in the isolation of the burbs; the shallowness of childhoods gone angry in a sampling of households away from the warmth of humanity but exposed to the private thriving of sick souls; the disappearance of farms, trees, animals, fish, clean water, clean air, starlight; the slow, slight warming of our thin atmosphere so crowded with the billions of us and the unknowable changes coming soon (already this year the polar bears are gathered waiting along the Alaskan coast for the sea-freeze that now no longer comes, on which they once moved out into their Arctic range).

If the monorail was mocked as a dream, that was justified. It was a dream, that this place could be different, that it could be saved, and the ways in which we might save it set a model for the world. This didn't seem impossible: WTO happened here by some lucky convergence, our new wealth and arrogance cultivating, as if by some natural cycle, its own self-examination. All of us who came or stayed here thinking these things on this lucky isthmus promised to become a force that would drag even the unwilling rest of the region our way: We voted to build mass transit again and again, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004. And when the fat boys wanted bigger roads three years ago we stopped that.

What changed? Perhaps the liars (Henry Aronson, Joni Balter, O. Casey Corr), the greedy developers (Martin Selig, Washington Mutual, Equity Properties), the red-faced Hummer drivers (you see them every day, ask their names), the smiling politicians (Greg Nickels and Richard Conlin) and diversity whores* (Norm Rice and Bob Santos) knew they could wear us down. After all, they don't let up. While we have our various lives, change jobs and struggle, question our paths, travel and have children, they are always on the job, having given everything to that merit-seeking servitude.

Or maybe this is how the world really is. All the rest of history says so, I don't know why I didn't listen. But ain't that America, as the song asks? Little pink houses for you and me. This was the last, best place, and it will go under too. So why not enjoy places where people know how to live, if it's all going to hell anyway? I'm sorry, but why struggle here and put up with this city's Scandinavian tightassedness if not for the dream of something better?

Because now they'll get what they want the wider bridge, the NASCAR track flushing its screams and smoke up the inland slope of the Olympics, I-605 poking the smog into the high Cascade valleys, and, in denial of everything, Allied Arts' fakey waterfront tunnel lid with its bare ledges over a crypt of roaring traffic while this area devolves into another ritzy slum under the curse of what could-have-been.

In fact, it was the tunnel that finally flipped Nickels, for the sake of his own political star. He wants to rise on light rail and his Big Dig and he knew the monorail would never really be his, and would stop his obscene vanity project from happening.

Our revenge: We can expose the tunnel for what it is, an extreme makeover of appearances without substance, a dog kicking sand over its excrement. Let's make him take credit instead for the ugliest elevated highway they can build, let WSDOT's stupid engineer-statesmen drag him down with us. If we're going to worship the car above all else and sacrifice our children to it, then let's make that highway a Mayan volcano. Let's get up on it for the view and watch the world die.

*Diversity whore: an unexceptional riser whose demographic is their major stock-in-trade, or a former antidiscrimination crusader-turned-corporate lapdog.

Wanna talk poetry?belltownpoet@hugohouse.org. Wanna help make a great movie about the mess we're in? www.cthulhuthemovie.com. Wanna call the mayor and tell him you're a witness to what he did? 206 684-4000. But why bother now?