looking westward: politics from seattle

My dear S. sent me this piece by Jonathan Raban in the new NYRB last week, and I was struck strongly by his attempt to describe U.S. politics from the vantage point of Seattle. Raban's a Brit who's settled in my beloved American city; I've forsaken it for the time being and spent most of the last half-decade in the UK--so perhaps its stands to reason that there are sympathetic echoes, especially his observation, "I sometimes felt as if I were living on an offshore island, looking across a mysteriously widening strait to a mainland coast....America, in its public and official face, has become more foreign to me by the day." I have, in fact, been watching from a faraway island--and yet on visits home, I've felt much the same way. Going back to Seattle is always a source of both joy and sadness: pleasure to be viscerally reassured again that the America I watch through the media from afar, this America of George W. Bush, is by no means the whole story. And yet there's always this faint despair, when I worry how unrepresentative we might be, how this place that makes me feel at home in my country may in fact represent a besieged, marginal assertion of counter-identity. Raban's trenchant observations also remind me of how very much my own politics and perspective were formed in that space:

Another kind of distance was also in play. Other Democrat-voting cities were still coming gingerly to terms with the new presidential administration, but in Seattle, minds had been made up long before September 11: for reasons peculiar to the region, they detested the Bush White House. Politics in the Pacific Northwest turn less on social than on environmental issues: land use, forests, salmon, wilderness preservation. Seattle liberals are creatures of a different stripe from their counterparts in other cities—markedly illiberal in their zeal, their steely, take-no-prisoners fervor on matters like climate change, the Kyoto accords, nuclear power, logging in national forests, the Endangered Species Act, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (it's an old Seattle conceit that all of Alaska is in the city's personal backyard). The Bush administration, packed with executives from the energy industry, was, from the moment of its election in 2000, the declared enemy of everything dear to Seattle's liberal heart.

So the impulse to rally around the presidency in the wake of September 11 was weaker here than elsewhere, even on the urban West Coast. Blanket mistrust of the Bush administration's motives and intentions extended automatically from its energy policies to its "war on terror" and its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Provincial isolation from the attacks played some part, but the deep and angry ideological rift between the city and the administration was at least equally important in shaping Seattle's reluctance to sign up for Bush's war....

Always the vantage point critically alters the character of the view. Seattle habitually looks westward to Asia and has its back turned to Washington, D.C., "the other Washington," as people like to call it here—a distant, generally tiresome city, given to much unnecessary interference in Seattle's international trading activities. When Seattle looks at the war on terror, the Patriot Act, the Bush administration's foreign policy, it's more likely to hold up a mirror to its own face than to focus a telescope on the eastern horizon.

He's good on other points too: the observation that the scars--both of victimization and complicity--left by the trauma of Japanese-American internment in the region during the 1940s seems to have made many people even more suspicious of, and resistant to, the Bush adminsitration's civil rights abuses. This is a live and potent history--the island near Seattle where I spent much of my childhood historically had a large Japanese-American population, and two of my elementary school teachers spent their childhoods behind barbed wire in internment camps. A couple of idiot parents on the island, influenced by a book by rightwing asshole pundit Michelle Malkin that tried to justify internment, recently claimed that the emphasis on the internment in the local school's history curriculum was imbalanced. The Seattle P-I's editorial board responded righteously:

Nonsense. It's perfectly appropriate and educationally sound to let the internment serve a prospective lesson in what can happen when understandable public fear allows an unjustifiable government response. The dispute is ironic in that it arises at an intermediate school named after an internee (Sakai), on an island where another school is named after a local newspaperman (Woodward) who was the lone West Coast editorial voice opposing the internment. Second-rate scholars and apologist journalists may practice cynical revisionism, but one Bainbridge student nailed the essential lesson: "We have to speak up when civil rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution are trampled in the name of national security."

It was when I was a student at one of the above-named schools that I watched my beloved childhood PE teacher break down in tears onscreen during a documentary shown to our history class, talking about the night federal agents stormed into her house and took her father away. It was there that the best teacher I ever had in school--Mr. Hoffman, thank you--gave me one of the most subversive (and now, spookily prescient) assignments of my life: Imagine that in the aftermath of a series of terrorist attacks (this was not long after Oklahoma City, and the first WTC bombing) that the US government decides to intern Arab-American Muslim citizens. A young college student refuses to comply with the order and is arrested; here are the details of his case. You're his defense attorney. Write your opening statement for the trial, detailing every single one of his civil and constitutional rights that our government has violated.

It was revelatory stuff for a thirteen-year-old; is it any wonder that five years later I was protesting outside the federal building? And then there were university years, and battles local and global, over state education funding and city planning, over the WTO and the FTAA, and during my senior year, the 2000 election and the cold awakening to Bush's first victory. And through it all, as Raban describes, our strange liminal status in national politics, and the implications of that for our sense of location, identity, perspective. This is something I feel ambivalent about: but in all these years of living abroad, when people ask me where I'm from, the first instinctive word out of my mouth is never an unadorned "America"; it's Seattle.