“Fight the terrorists by giving my corporation money.”

WALLACE SHAWN imagines a session with a “Foreign Policy Therapist.”

FOLLOWING THE TRAGIC November crash of a jetliner in New York City, the press and the government spokesfolk repeatedly proclaimed there were “no apparent links” between the crash and the terror attacks two months previous. In a world wracked by acts of deliberate harm, the authorities felt a compelling need to reassure all of us that accidents indeed still occurred.

Herewith, some other major and minor tragedies with no, repeat NO, apparent links to terrorists:

• The Mariners’ failure to win the American League pennant.
• The Ash Wednesday earthquake.
• Dead dot-coms.
• Your loser boyfriend who wanted you to have sex with his dad as a Christmas present.
• Sappy Meg Ryan movies.
• Pro basketball’s continuing domination by the Lucking Fakers.
• Oldsmobile dying; Isuzu continuing to live.
• The ex-roommate who keeps making collect calls in your name.
• The boss who keeps threatening to fire you for not doing what she never told you she wanted you to do.
• Your girlfriend always wanting to do it when you don’t, and never wanting to when you do.
• The Napster shutdown.
• An “economic stimulus” bill that gives everything to corporate management, nothing to the unemployed.
• Cell-phone contract terms.
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

(This article’s permanent link.)

My pal’s Jeopardy! appearance doesn’t air locally until Thursday. I forgot about Monday Night Football screwing up the show’s schedule here during the fall.

ELSEWHERE:

“Why Copyright Laws Hurt Culture.”

If you don’t click on this link, then the terrorists will have won.

…and, as the commentators have commentated, it’s a challenge to find things to be thankful for (other than the ol’ “at least things aren’t worse” standby).

On top of the mass murder, war, riots, earthquake, dead dot-coms, runaway Boeing execs, general economic malaise, and other calamities affecting this world, nation, and region this year, government analysts just announced Washington state’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation. And that’s before the 32,000-ish Boeing layoffs kick in.

And now comes something bound to dishearten the most hardy U.S. proponents of the war in Afghanistan–its stunning, nearly-complete success.

This was supposed to go on smoldering for months and years of stalemate. Now, the Taliban are only holding on to four provinces and a couple of surrounded townships; and that principally due to foreign mercenary soldiers. By year’s end, the Taliban could be crushed. Their house guest and patron Osama bin Laden could be captured any month now, or maybe he’ll just disappear as just another powerless refugee, or maybe he’ll be found dead of natural causes sometime next Autumn.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Pentagon/GOP strategists almost admittedly wanted the start of Cold War II, the resumption of what some Vietnam-era activists called “the permanent war economy.”

This was supposed to be so pervasive, so intense, and so drawn-out that three decades’ worth of domestic anti-military sentiment would permanently disappear. The public would unanimously support the re-direction of the federal money spigot back toward weapons contractors.

Citizens daring to speak non-Limbaughesque points of view were to be silenced, either by the shouts of mass disapproval or the heavier hand of new anti-dissent regulations. We were expected to rabidly cheer the piece-by-piece dismantling of due process under the law. Even the mildly authority-questioning satires of Saturday Night Live and e-mail joke lists, the mid-October conventional wisdom went, would have to fall in line with a new and permanent spirit of disciplinary obedience, or face publc obsolescence.

Instead, we’ve got a war that debuted in the fall and just might leave the airwaves in midseason. (Unless, of course, the Bushies try to get it renewed by adding the plot-twist of invading another country or two.)

Maybe, instead, some of us could start scripting our own midseason replacement. One with the far more difficult (hence more intriguing) storyline of trying to build a lasting peace and a more equitable lot for the folk (including the female folk) of that once-obscure land.

Call your cable or satellite provider (or, more directly, your Congressional representatives). Tell them you want to see The Peace Show.

(This article’s permanent link.)

Learning real work!

“The Anti-Manifesto Manifesto.” (Found by The Hotsy Totsy Club.)

Trick or Treat

by guest columnist Mr. Hedley Bowes

MUSINGS ON THIS PAST All Hallow’s Eve season:

It’s 1991 (the shitter) economically; and after hundreds of thousands of layoffs this year and entire sectors wiped out, the government and business communities are looking to consumers to save our collective asses.

Sen. Patty Murray introduced the “Let’s Go Shopping” bill, which would put the Federal government in the business of rebating state sales taxes for a 10-day period during the fourth quarter of the year. This was announced on Halloween, a day when we’ve all been scared into avoiding shopping malls at all costs, lest we put ourselves at risk of terrorists.

It’s been said quite often in the last month it’s our patriotic duty to go shopping. And spend money. Tell that to the corporate community and the venture-capital investors.

Never mind the record: Consumers continued to spend and buoy a sluggish economy in the four quarters since last year’s “election.” Business spending fell sharply after last November and has continued to be soft. Sure, there was a rush in the energy sector; for a while it looked like that would be where the action was. But look where Enron is today (near-bankrupt and seeking a buyer). Gasoline prices (everywhere but here) are the lowest in years.

The second “economic stimulus” package this year is aimed at stimulating big players like IBM ($1.4 billion), General Motors ($833 million), General Electric ($671 million), Chevron Texaco ($572)r, and Enron ($254 million). Any one of these corporations has the option to:

• A) take the tax break and rehire or retrain employees at risk of layoff;

• B) plow the money back into the balance sheet, thereby improving earnings and buoying stock value; or

• C) exercise option B, while shutting domestic facilities in favor of continued offshore outsourcing.

Go ahead. As a contracted bonus-getting, shareholding C-level executive, pick your optimal A, B, or C.

Krispy Kreme, a franchise operation not from here, opened its much anticipated and over-hyped Issaquah store early one late October morning. Lines formed the night before as people camped out. One would think Mick Jagger himself was making the fucking things.

We were privileged to have a friend who camped out overnight for the precious things. After tasting one, we can say the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme doughnuts is their high fat content. The stuff is also very likely airwhipped with powdery sweet confectioner’s sugar. A new drug for these tough times.

What’s going on here?

Historically, this region creates national (and global) trends: Microsoft, Redhook, Starbucks, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Red Robin (and any number of mid to high end theme restaurants) K2, JanSport, et al.

But things have been so quiet around here lately that a relative unknown from across the country can come in and leverage enough free PR from the local press to offset hundreds of thousands of startup dollars. And people are lining up overnight, as if they were waiting for a rock star to show up. Nope, it’s just a doughnut.

Have we lost our special place as an idea and business incubator? Or did we simply over-commit to high technology (a once darling sector) and big business that we forgot about the little things (like doughnuts)?

Game Three: Made for TV. GWB throws out the first pitch in the third game of the World Series. I watched the final inning, waiting for truth to prevail. I wanted so much for Arizona to bring the game to an even 2-2, to take it into extra innings so that we might have some hope that this was not just a made for television win. But it was not to be. And so the writing is on the wall. Through their own special brand of black magic, New York was now certain to take all three games at Yankee Stadium and take the series in seven.

Is it a matter of will? Destiny? Or (as with elections, energy markets, layoffs, tax breaks, and doughnuts) just the way things are “meant to be?”

Thankfully, this was not the way it played out. I don’t favor the Diamondbacks that much (indeed, the irony of a bunch of “desert snakes” taking on the New York Yankees in this of all years was not lost on me)

But the Yankees have come to represent the way things seem to be done in America: Presidents not elected but awarded the post by a court; corporate executives taking bonuses on declining returns on top of salaries that outstrip those of average workers by multiples of 1,000. Our world seems to be one where things are not decided but predetermined, where the decisions we do make as a people are somehow subverted, where the deck is increasingly stacked toward wealth and power: Don’t Mess With Texans (or those with Texas-sized appetites for power, wealth, fame…).

Then, in the ninth inning of the seventh game, a simple sacrifice brought the wealth and power of dynasty down, leaving in their places a restored sense of truth and hope. What’s great about baseball is that it can accomplish this peaceably. Baseball, our national catharsis—this American oddity is still very much alive.

NAOMI KLEIN comments on the eerie connections between the war and the “intellectual property” cartel.

TAKE PRONOUNCIATION AUDIO CLIPS from an online dictionary, set them to music, and you get Dictionaraoke!

WHATEVER HAPPENED to investigative reporting?

JUST HOW are we gonna pay for this war, anyway?

BASEBALL COMMISSIONER BUD SELIG (you know, the guy who stole the Seattle Pilots away) has won owner approval (but will undoubtedly get player-union challenges to) a plan to not move two teams but to shut them down altogether. This would leave places for the remaining owners to threaten to move their own teams to, and would lower the leverage of the players’ union in the next round of contract negotiations.

Baseball needs to bring more parity to its small-market teams, not pare them down. The Expos, Twins, and Marlins (the three teams most likely to get one of the two death sentences) all were league leaders at different times in the ’90s, and all have had reasonable attendance before current owners mismanaged them to near-death. Yet it’s those very owners who’d benefit the most from killing the teams. They’ll get cash from the other owners, and will be permitted to buy other MLB teams, thus letting them wreak their destructive management styles onto the Angels or A’s.

“Contraction” (Selig’s term for the scheme) isn’t something successful sports leagues do. It’s what outfits like the American Basketball Association and the North American Soccer League did, just prior to folding completely. For Major League Baseball to get away with this would be an outrage to the sporting community.

In human physiology, a contraction can lead to a birth. Selig’s contraction plan, however, could help lead to the death of baseball as we know it, or at least make it fiscally sicker.

…is this one at Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz. The big flag in the window is of the old 48-star variety. That was the type of flag this country had during a certain previous military conflict, one for which Mercedes-Benz manufactured equipment for this country’s chief opponent.

SOME BRITISH GUY mourns the age of the Polaroid camera, whose maker has filed for bankruptcy.

“Emperor” Lee Smith, 59, was Seattle’s premier top-40 AM disc jockey in the ’70s, just about the last time there were such things as top-to AM disc jockeys. He held the morning shift on KJR from 1969 to 1974, and aimed his show at the teens and preteens left behind by a “youth culture” industry more interested in following their older siblings. He spouted witty, energetic banter between the hits of the Spinners, Dolly Parton, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He made public appearances (including annual “chariot races”) clad in a burgundy toga and gold sandals. He made his audience feel they had a DJ, nay a celebrity, of their very own. When he was transferred into the station’s sales department, his last on-air day featured a Watergate-themed comedy skit, “The Impeachment of an Emperor.” He died Oct. 12 from cancer.

Norm Gregory, one of Smith’s former KJR colleagues, said, “The first time I saw him was in 1967 and the last time was in 1995 and he was the same guy from that first day to the last. Emp was a wild and wacky radio personality, a great father, and a wonderful friend.”

More on Smith can be had at the KJR Memories site.

The Northwest Bookfest was held again this year in the Stadium Exhibition Center, and again failed to fill even the front room of that vast space. (Curtaining off sections of the room is apparently not practicable or feasible, because the center’s restrooms and concessions are situated along the side walls.)

The result: While attendance was apparently comparable to last year’s event (which had more touring big-name authors), the room energy (and, perhaps, consequently the booth sales) just wasn’t what it had been back when Bookfest took place in the cozy confines of Pier 48 (where, as I’ve oft mentioned, Alice Wheeler shot the cover of Loser at one of Nirvana’s last shows). The pier, alas, is no longer available for public rental. The State Convention Center, whose more flexible floors hosted the 1999 Bookfest, is apparently not available at the right time of year to land a lot of big-time touring authors.

Last year, I proposed revamping Bookfest to fit the space. Since it’s a space built for auto show-type events, I said Bookfest should become more like one of those–a World Of Words Literama, full of pomp and circumstance and balloons and gold lame jumpsuits.

The promoters did successfully attract a few new types of vendors (paper-ephemera dealers, f’rinstance), but still more could be sought out–home office supply stores, computer dealers, college writing programs, grey-sweater and tweed-jacket merchants, magazine publishers (Ed McMahon could even show up to give away some bucks!).

Other possibilities to fill more of the vast room, or otherwise make the thing more exciting: More word-game and puzzle competitions; after-hours no-kiddies-allowed readings from the “good parts” of highbrow novels; Appalachian-style storytelling fests; banks of computers where visitors could add-a-line to ongoing stories; bulletin boards (real, not computerized) where visitors could post index-card-borne answers to pollster-type questions (favorite literary character, first book ever read, etc.); classic poems displayed on big LED-readout walls; maybe even a literary-character costume contest.

Yes, these suggestions go beyond Bookfest’s laid-back-and-mellow dictum of good taste, and that’s part of the point. Reading and (especially) writing are largely solitary pleasures. It’s good to get readers and writers in one big place to share their joys and receive one another’s support. And as a mid-October event, Bookfest marks the beginning of stay-inside season; thus it should be more festive and celebratory, the better to help its attendees stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder and remain cozy and happy thru the dreary months to come.

YR. HUMBLE EDITOR was recently awarded the honor of being one of the 18 jurors who selected the “MetropoList 150,” the Museum of History and Industry/Seattle Times list of the 150 most influential people in the 150-year history of Seattle and King County.

I’m quite satisfied with the final list, available at this link. There’s almost nobody on it I wouldn’t have wanted on it.

Nevertheless, there are several names I wrote in which didn’t make the final selection. In alphabetical order, they include:

• LYNDA BARRY: South Seattle native and acclaimed cartoonist and author. Her novel Cruddy was set in a fictionalized Rainier Valley.
• STEVEN J. “JESSE” BERNSTEIN: Poet and short-story writer of urban decay and dystopian fantasy.
• TED BUNDY: Clean-cut law student and serial killer.
• DYAN CANNON: West Seattle native who became a movie sex symbol at age 32.
• RAY CHARLES: R&B legend whose career started in Seattle’s old Jackson Street jazz scene.
• FRANCES FARMER: West Seattle-born actress with an ill-fated Hollywood career.
• CHET HUNTLEY: UW grad and pioneering network TV news anchorman.
• MARY KAY LETOURNEAU: Middle-school teacher who bore two children by a student, causing much public hand-wringing and analysis.
• MIKE LUKOVICH: Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and UW Daily grad.
• FLOYD SCHMOE (1895-2000): Seattle Quaker leader, mountaineer, and tireless peace activist.
• LESTER SMITH & DANNY KAYE: Seattle businessman Smith, first on his own and later in partnership with movie star Kaye, ran a string of radio stations (including KJR); they also were the Mariners’ original owners.
• DEWEY SORIANO: Was awarded ownership of the 1969 Seattle baseball franchise on the basis of his skill in managing the Pacific Coast League. He didn’t have the financial resources to keep the Pilots going, and the team was sold and moved to Milwaukee after one season.
• ICHIRO SUZUKI: Mariners sensation; first Japanese-born “position player” (non-pitcher) in the U.S. Major Leagues.
• EDDIE VEDDER: Singer for the rock band Pearl Jam. The group’s dispute with TicketMaster in 1993 presaged many later disputes by artists and fans against the bigtime music industry.
• ANN & NANCY WILSON: Leaders since 1973 of Heart, the first Seattle rock band to attain international prominence. Proved you could be all woman AND all rock.
• TOBIAS WOLFF: Acclaimed author and memoirist (This Boy’s Life).

IN ADDITION, here are some names nominated by other people (with the descriptions these anonymous nominators wrote) for whom I voted, but who also failed to make the final cut:

• DICK BALCH: Local Chevrolet dealer and irreverent pitchman for cars (smashed cars with sledgehammer on TV ads).
• OLE BARDAHL: Proprietor of Bardahl, the Ballard-based engine additive company known for its hydroplanes (the Miss. Bardahl) and its giant neon sign.
• SIR THOMAS BEECHAM: A renowned English conductor, Beecham became the director of the tiny Seattle Symphony in 1941. He is remembered most for his quote, “If I were a member of this community, really I should get weary of being looked on as a sort of aesthetic dust-bin.”
• PETER BEVIS: Founder and director of the Fremont School of Fine Arts and the Fremont Foundry, established in 1986. An artist who makes molds of road kill, Bevis’s work illustrates the recklessness of people in nature. He bought the Kalakala back to Seattle.
• BOB BLACKBURN: Longtime voice of the Seattle Supersonics, from their first season in 1967 until the early 1990s.
• BOBO THE GORILLA: Bobo introduced Seattleites to the great apes and to “exotic” wildlife in general; he taught a whole generation to abandon diabolical “King Kong” images of gorillas. He inspired better zoo husbandry and perhaps paved the way for primate preservation attempts. In his current taxidermied form, his legacy lives on.
• STAN BORESON: Scandinavian musician, comedian, and host of the long-running children’s program KING Clubhouse.
• BERKLEY BREATHED: Cartoonist, Bloom Country.
• FRED BROWN: The former Sonic star, who help lead them to their only title in 1979, influenced a generation of ballplayers locally and nationally through his long-distance gunning which inspired the term “From downtown…” now heard in broadcasts everywhere, but is as Seattle–and omnipresent–as “Skid Road.”
• HIRAM CHITTENDEN: An officer in the Army Corps of Engineers and one of Seattle’s first port commissioners, Chittenden worked to develop the Port of Seattle. He oversaw the construction of the Lake Washington Canal and locks, which now bear his name.
• JOHN CONSIDINE: Considine’s “People’s Theater” was a Seattle success, which led to his preeminent career as an impresario. He helped pioneer early Edison films and established the famous vaudeville circuit. Considine and his brother Tom were involved in the notorious killing of Seattle’s police chief, William L. Meredith.
• LLOYD COONEY: Former KIRO-TV station manager and editorial commentator.
• D.B. COOPER: Infamous airline hijacker (flight from Portland to Seattle) who may or may not have gotten away.
• JACK ENDINO: Recording engineer/producer who made early studio recordings of Nirvana, Soundgarden, the U-Men and other proto-grunge acts.
• JEAN ENERSEN: Television news anchor for KING-TV.
• RANDY FINLEY: Founder of the Seven Gables Theatre chain, which, along with the Seattle International Film Festival, fostered and bolstered Seattle’s appetite for fine cinema.
• CHARLES FRYE: Frye was a partner in Frye and Bruhn, Meatpackers. He founded the Frye Museum atop Seattle’s First Hill, an institution that is one of Seattle’s leading museums today.
• BOB HARDWICK: KVI disc jockey in the 1960s and 1970s, known for wacky on-air antics.
• DENIS HAYS: Director of the Bullitt Foundation; created Earth Day in 1970.
• SAM ISRAEL: A hermit who lived in Eastern Washington, amassed over 500 properties, worth between $100-$200 million at the time of his death (1994). He owned over 30 downtown properties, 14 of which were located in Pioneer Square. Due to his negligence many of his properties were vacated and fell into disrepair. However, the low rent helped spawn a lively artists’ scene in Pioneer Square.
• QUINCY JONES: Garfield High School’s musical prodigy has more Grammy nominations than anyone else in history. Jones has written film scores, sonatas, and popular music, done arrangements for other artists and performed throughout the world with his own band and orchestra.
• RICK “PEANUT MAN” KAMINSKI: If you attended an event at the Kingdome from the 1970s to the 1990s, you saw Kaminski throwing bags of peanuts to his customers, along with a tennis ball sliced open enough for the patron to place his money inside for the return toss.
• JOHN KEISTER: The quintessential bittersweet Seattleite who remembers how it used to be before so many people moved here, Keister used his position as host of KING -TV’s Almost Live! weekly comedy program to poke fun at Kent, Bellevue, Ballard and other Seattle suburbs and neighborhoods.
• NORM LANGILL: Founder of One Reel, producer of Bumbershoot and other cultural events.
• GARY LARSON: creator of The Far Side, a hugely popular cartoon panel. Prior to Larson’s retirement in 1995, the cartoon strip appeared in 1,900 daily newspapers in 40 countries, and was translated into 17 languages.
• GYPSY ROSE LEE: West Seattle’s Lee, with her sister June Havoc, performed in a kiddy vaudeville act that toured the nation. She parlayed her experience into a famous striptease that was a hit at the Zeigfeld Follies. Her life was portrayed in the musical Gypsy.
• LOGGERS: When white men first came to the Seattle area travel was long and difficult between Seattle and Tacoma. With the arrival of the loggers travel became significantly easier.
• DARRLY MACDONALD: Co-founder of the Seattle International Film Festival and purveyor of Seattle’s now firmly-established reputation as a city of cinematic connoisseurs.
• HELENE MADISON: When 19-year-old Madison returned to Seattle with three gold medals in swimming from the 1932 Olympic games, the city raised a celebration, including a ticker tape parade. Two pools in Seattle are named after Madison.
• VIC MEYERS: Seattle jazz-band leader who ran for mayor in 1930 on the whim of some practical jokesters at the Seattle Times. He was eager to lend himself to the joke, and Times reporters wrote him up throughout the “campaign.” After losing the election, he won the election for the lieutenant governor of the state.
• LORENZO MILAM: Founder of KRAB radio in 1962. KRAB was among the earliest community radio stations in the country. It was one of the voices and centers of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s.
• SIR MIX-A-LOT (Anthony Ray): Seattle’s first national rap star, who hit it big with his “Posse on Broadway” single.
• DAVE NIEHAUS: He has been delivering colorful descriptions of Mariner baseball since the team was established in 1977. His enormous contribution to Mariner baseball was recognized when he was asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch in the inaugural game in Safeco Field.
• MARNI NIXON: Broadway singer. Among her famous roles was singing for Audrey Hepburn in [the film version of] My Fair Lady.
• BILL NYE: Seattle star (and former Almost Live! character) on PBS’s Bill Nye The Science Guy, seen by millions of kids nationwide.
• PAT O’DAY: High profile disc jockey on KJR radio through the ’60s. The first disc jockey in Seattle to really start playing rock ‘n roll, an action for which he earned 37 percent of the radio audience.
• JOHN OKADA (1923-1971): Author of No-No Boy, winner of the National Book Award, a novel that explores the return home to Seattle of an interned Nisei Japanese, who refused to forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan and to fight in uniform for the United States when those questions were posed in the internment camp.
• JIM OWENS: UW football coach. Took team to three Rose Bowls
• MARTIN PANG: Started the 1995 fire in the Mary Pang qarehouse downtown. Four firemen died while subduing the blaze. In his confession, Pang said he started the fire to relieve his parents the burden of running the facility.
• BRUCE PAVITT & JONATHAN PONEMAN: Co-founders of Sub Pop, Seattle record label that originally signed Nirvana, Soundgarden and other grunge acts.
• ANGELO PELLEGRINI: Italian immigrant who settled with his family in Southwest Washington; made his mark as a UW English professor and food and wine expert. He wrote many books and gave talks on Italian culture.
• GEORGE POCOCK: Designer and builder of racing shells, including those used by 1936 gold medal US Olympic Team. Also designed the hull of Boeing’s first commercial plane.
• THE PROSTITUTES OF THE 1800s: The main reason many men originally came to the Seattle area.
• DIXY LEE RAY: Washington’s first female governor. The idiosyncratic Ray was at the helm when Mt. St. Helens erupted.
• LARRY REID: Early director of COCA (Center on Contemporary Art).
• ROSIE THE RIVETER: Popular symbol during WWII of women entering the blue-collar work force in order to keep up industrial production to support the war effort; believed to be based on women in Boeing’s work force.
• BILL “THE BEERMAN” SCOTT: Kingdome concession employee who became the defacto yell king for the Mariners, Sonics, Sounders and Seahawks (when all played under the same concrete roof).
• RUBEN SIERRA: Founder of the “multi-cultural-before-its-time” Group Theatre.
• JEFF SMITH (FRUGAL GOURMET): Author and chef who popularized good cooking for a mass audience.
• DICK SPADY: Founder, with two partners, of Dick’s Drive In, which opened in Wallingford in 1954.
• ELBRIDGE A. STUART: Created the Carnation Co., which initially focused on evaporated milk. Stuart developed a dairy farm near Tolt, which was renamed Carnation. In 1926 Carnation entered the fresh milk and ice cream business. The firm [now merged into Nestle] was known for its slogan “Milk from Contented Cows.”
• CONRAD UNO: Egg Studios owner/producer who recorded and/or released records by up and coming Seattle acts in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Young Fresh Fellows, Posies, and Presidents of the United States of America.
• GORDON VICKERY: Driving force in getting Medic One in the Fire Department. Many thousands of lives have been saved because of this.
• BURKE WALKER: Founder of the Empty Space Theatre.
• BOB WALSH: Seattle entrepreneur behind the Goodwill Games (1990) and attempts to bring the Olympic Games to Seattle.
• ROB WELLER: Former UW Husky yell king and Entertainment Tonight host credited with creation of the circular, undulating group cheer known as “The Wave.”
• BILL YEEND: Longtime host (25 years) of KIRO radio’s number-one rated morning news program.
• MARION ANTHONY ZIONCHECK: Born in Austria, Zioncheck attended the UW. After passing the state bar exam he won a seat in Congress. His mental deterioration and suicide (leaping from the Arctic Building in Seattle) were national stories.

(This article’s permanent link.)

What little creative spirit left in Seattle commercial radio is likely to get washed away. Longtime local station boss (and former Sonics owner) Barry Ackerley is retiring from the broadcasting biz and selling all his remaining properties (including KUBE-FM and KJR-AM) to Clear Channel Communications, the current 1200-lb. gorilla of U.S. media.

We first wrote about Clear Channel when it bought and promptly killed our second-favorite online radio station, Luxuria Music. That was the least of its crimes against culture. Thanks to government “regulators” allowing nearly unlimited industry consolidation, CC’s acquired over 1,100 stations. It runs them on the cheap: Firing local DJs, running centralized and automated playlists, bullying any remaining local competitors into cutting ad rates beneath break-even levels.

With this enormous airplay clout, CC’s become mighty pushy toward record companies. While it’s still legally prohibited from directly charging the labels to play their records, it manages to force other “considerations” from them.

Especially now that CC also owns one of North America’s two main concert promotion companies. It bought SFX Entertainment, of which The Stranger said in 1998 that “they could crush TicketMaster like a little bug.” As part of CC, it’s gotten even bigger and pushier, adding ticket surcharges and cutting artists’ fees. Many cloutless acts are even expected to perform for free at shows charging $25 or more per ticket, in exchange for airplay consideration on CC’s stations.

Clear Channel can easily be called the Microsoft of music and broadcasting. This is not a favorable comparison. Its strategies are clearly not competitive but monopolistic. It operates not to directly make money (indeed, it’s fiscal performance is at least as sorry as that of any media company in this ad-slump year) but to maintain and expand its power. And no politician has spoken out against it, not even the ones who love to bash the media. (Did I mention that Rush Limbaugh is now a CC employee?)

Seattle was the last big U.S. city not to have a CC-owned block of stations. Now our radio will likely suck as much as the radio everywhere else.

(This article’s permanent link.)

A friend saw a late-night TV program (or was it an infomercial?), which she swears was on PBS affiliate KCTS. It offered tickets to a free seminar at the Sheraton, which would be all about helping individuals get government loans and grants (for home buying/improvement, business, education, etc.). She couldn’t make it that day, so invited me to attend in her stead. Turned out advance tickets weren’t necessary. Anyone who wanted to could enter the ballroom; about 200 did.

What we all got: Not an info-backed lesson in the grant process but a 2.5-hour sales pitch for a $799 weekend seminar which, according to the salesman, would provide the information we’d been promised to get this day.

It was easy to spot the glib hypemaster’s real agenda from the start. He didn’t matter-of-factly list categories and sources of grants, application tips, etc. Instead, he gave a highly emotionally manipulative marathon spiel. It was a sort of cross between a revival sermon and a medicine-show pitch, illustrated with PowerPoint animated images on a big-screen monitor.

The spiel was heavily seasoned with neuro-linguistic-programming shticks. He frequently asked us all to think about our current lives, then to imagine how much better our lives would be with lots of money, a secure retirement, a new home, a new car, and a business of our own where we’re in control of our own agenda.

Then he proclaimed all this was possible with government money–but that the money is hard to find, hidden among hundreds of agencies (federal, state, local) with thousands of programs, all with different eligibility requirements and application processes. If you try to play the grants game yourself, he insisted, you were doomed from the get-go.

Then he said you could successfully navigate the bureaucratic sea with the help of a profressional grant writer or a specialist attorney on your side–except that anybody who’s any good at the job would charge far more money than most newcomers to the game can afford.

The solution? None other than the company he works for, the Boca Raton, FL-based National Grants Conferences Inc.

With the localized, freshly-updated info you’d get at the conference (and in its documentation and on its members-only website), you could start applying right away for just the right program for you. He even claimed you could grab enough public-trough cash to pay for the conference before its price shows up on your credit-card bill.

At one time, I almost thought his pitch to be semi-plausible; particularly when he warned us that the majority of our grant applications would be turned down, and that we’d have to be persistent and professional about the quest.

But that kind of caveat (as I’d once learned from Jim Rose, when he talked about his days as a pest-control salesman) can really be just part of the carefully crafted pitch. That’s how it turned out, when he revved up his fast-‘n’-loud act for the big finish.

This phase began when he told us how he didn’t used to be the dynamic, charismatic, confident man he told us we were seeing now. He’d been just another schmoe in Rochester, NY, loaded with debts and lacking in self-esteem. Then he went to a seminar about getting rich in real estate with no money down. (You remember, that earlier infomercial fad that collapsed when one of its leading promoters went bankrupt, after too many course-takers demanded refunds.)

That course, he forthrightly pronounced, had changed his life; just as this new course, more detailed and more attuned to present-day opportunities, would assuredly change ours. (But we’d have to Act Now, because space was limited and the best time of the year for submitting applications was drawing nigh.)

But the real clincher, the part where I knew I’d never take the course, came when he switched the big-screen monitor’s image to that now-ubiquitous photo of firefighters raising a U.S. flag at the NYC disaster site. He told the crowd an ever-so-slightly distorted version of one of the post-attack news items–that men allegedly connected to the terrorist network had received a grant to run a crop-dusting operation. The pitchman, in full-aggression mode, challenged us to imagine: If such purely evil people could attain government cash, how much easier could it be for good-hearted, all-American do-gooders such as ourselves? He came just this short of demanding we buy the course as our patriotic duty. The moment was even more tacky and obscene than I relate here.

He closed by exhorting us to rush with all deliberate speed to the front of the room, checkbooks and/or credit cards in hand. Instead, a healthy majority took the opportunity to get the heck outta there.

(This article’s permanent link.)

…you just bought made in China?