WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)

KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.

THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.

Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.

Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.

WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:

• A citywide monorail line. It’s being worked on.
• Repeal of the Teen Dance Ordinance. It’s being worked on.
• A sign in the library: “This is not a convenience store.”
• A community radio station. A collective called Free Seattle Radio is currently raising money to start another pirate FM operation. But what I’m talking about is a real station, licensed and above-ground, with just enough resources to cover the issues, arts, and voices that make the city.

  Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”

• A theater festival for the troupes and directors too big for the Seattle Fringe Fest (which is fringier than most other North American fringe festivals).
• A good Scottish pub (not Irish or English).
• Better bus service, particularly between neighborhoods (like Magnolia) and non-downtown workplace districts (like Elliott Avenue).
• Rent control or something like it. A reader named Dee writes, “I’ve heard enough horror stories and I feel Seattle is going in the same direction as San Francisco with the big money moving in, and people of low to moderate incomes becoming further displaced. My one hope is Seattle has strong working class roots with a bit of a socialist heart. I think enough educated people will become pissed off enough to make the noise which will lead to better changes.”
• A local, live hip-hop showcase club. For that, we might need–

• A city attorney who’s not a stooge for gentrification. Sure lotsa people hate the classist, possibly racist policies of Mark Sidran, but nobody even ran against him the last election.
• Saner liquor laws. The Washington Liquor Control Board was born in post-Prohibition times when the more “upstanding” elements of local society were worried at the threat of the wild-west saloon culture coming back. To this day, the liquor bureaucracy believes its mission to be keeping a tight lid on what adults can and cannot do on licensed premises while consuming legal drugs. A healthy urban society needs a strong nightlife industry; while the liquor bureaucrats are less restrictive in some aspects than they used to be, they’ve a ways to go toward abetting this the way other “regulatory” departments help the industries they lord over.
• A movie theater with booze. The truly-vast McMenamin’s brewpub empire in Portland has a couple of these. Up here, General Cinemas is planning to convert its low-profile multiplex at 130th & Aurora to a movie theater with food, but no word yet on a liquor license. Before Paul Allen bought the Cinerama theater downtown, another bidder on the property wanted to turn it into a viewing-‘n’-sipping establishment. The Rendezvous restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater has hosted many film screenings with full booze service. Some think there must be a Washington liquor regulation against booze and movies, but that appears to be not the case. Besides, if you can have sports bars with multiple big-screen TVs, you oughta be able to have a bar with a movie screen.
• A real winter bacchanale, not the tame bar-promotion event Fat Tuesday quickly became. Something with real joie de vivre. For that matter, our all-too-fair city could use a little less prudery overall. Scrap that ten-year “temporary” moratorium on new strip joints, so we could get one of those nice “gentleman’s clubs” your girlfriend’s not ashamed of you going to. Establish at least one public clothing-optional beach in the county. Even legalize (or at least decriminalize) prostitution, and make it a co-ed biz (old widows and middle-aged divorcees need love too, ya know).
• A bowling alley in or near downtown. Maybe one could go in part of the yet-unleased old Nordstrom complex, or in the Convention Center expansion (as a leisure amenity for tourists and locals alike).
• More spirit and less “attitude.”
• More democracy and less demographics.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)