If you believe a Harris poll published in Forbes (and there’s no reason why you should), Seattle now ranks #3 on a list of “America’s Coolest Cities”. Only NYC and Vegas outdo us in the pollsters’ matrix of arts & entertainment, recreational opportunities, and economic confidence.

It’s been a couple of months since I read it, but I continue to be impressed or haunted (I’m not sure) by Seattle author David Sheilds’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

Parts of it are like an essay anthology, even if they were written expressly to be in the book. I’m particularly thinking of the part where he tells other authors what their books are really about.

Other parts fit more closely into the “manifesto” concept.

And it’s all written in a short and breezy fashion, like Marshall McLuhan’s better known works.

Now if you know my work here, you know I believe there’s absolutely nothing inferior about aphoristic writing, despite four or more decades’ worth of hi-brow ranting against it. Long, cumbersome prose is not inherently insightful. Short, pithy, precision writing is not necessarily dumbed down writing.

In this case, Shields has thoroughly whittled and sanded down his arguments to a fine point.

His main premise: North American white suburban life has become so plasticized, so sanitized, that humans have developed an insatiable craving for “reality.” Even if it’s virtual reality, or faked reality, or fictional narratives disguised as reality.

Hence, we get “reality” TV series. We get the protagonists of these series treated as “celebrities,” splashed over the covers of gossip magazines.

We get first-person novels falsely and deliberately promoted as the real-life memoirs of young drug addicts and street orphans.

We get radio and cable “news” pundits who don’t relay information so much as they spin narratives, creating overarching explanations of how the world works—even if, in some cases, they fudge the facts or just plain lie to make their worldviews fit together.

We get fantasy entertainments (movies, video games) executed in highly hyper-realistic fashions, complete with ultra-detailed 3D computer graphics.

So far, Shields’ argument makes perfect sense.

Now for the “yeah, but” part:

In the past two or three years, most non-billionaire Americans and Canadians have been forced to face a lot of reality; a lot of unpleasant reality at that. Some of us have had all too much reality.

“Reality” entertainment can be seen as just another style of escapism. An escapism that promises total immersion. An escapism that promises, however falsely, to offer an alternate reality, one that’s more dramatic or more comprehensible than the audience’s “real” reality could ever be.

This doesn’t mean Shields’ main premise is wrong.

Millions of people could, indeed, be desperate for more “real” lives.

But they won’t find it in the highly edited and curated “reality” entertainments.

They’ll only get a scratch that makes the itch worse.

What got him initially out of the sub-basement depths of despair and self-pity, on the road toward creativity and fame, sure as hell wasn’t that manic, unquestioning  “positive psychology.”

It was something deeper, richer, truer.

Call it the power of positive negativity. Call it the gallows humor you find among hardcore AA members. Call it radical reality.

It’s what saved Callahan.

And it might just be the only thing that can save us all.

Ruth Rosen at AlterNet ponders “Why Women Dominate the Right-Wing Tea Party.”

Rosen finds at least a half-truth in the conservative womens’ claim to be the true heiresses to Susan B. Anthony and co., who had campaigned for Prohibition with the same fervor with which they had fought for women’s suffrage.

In the ’80s, the late antiporn crusader Andrea Dworkin wrote an essay called “Right Wing Women.” She admired those women for many things. She particularly admired their sexual prudery and also their dream for a world driven less by macho posturing and more by rules and traditions.

The left-O-center conventional wisdom is that there is, or ought to be, a singular collective entity of Women. This big gender-encompassing entity would, by its very nature, be of one mind on most major sociopolitical issues. This mass of Women would always support gay rights, progressive politics, peace, ecology, humanitarian aid, legalizing pot, outlawing fructose, and every other left-O-center stance.

I say fifty-two percent of the species won’t ever think exactly alike.

Gender is but one of countless factors influencing a person’s social and tribal identity. There’s also family, education, religion, economic caste, nationality, ethnicity, culture, subculture, sub-subculture, et al.

Every culture has included women who identified themselves as traditionalists. These women have always sought relative security from a hostile world in the realms of home, family, and clear rules for behavior. The lobbyists and politicians backing the various non-unified tea party strands know how to market their wares to these women.

And so should we.

What do progressives have to offer to traditionalist women?

We offer more careful stewardship of the land.

We offer more economic opportunity for more people, including working-class families.

We offer greater personal freedoms for everyone, including those who follow various religious faiths.

And as (non-Hispanic) whites slowly lose majority status in this country, we offer a vision of cultural diversity that respects minority cultures, including minority cultures that used to be majority cultures.

Once again, we celebrate the anniversary of colonial business bosses’ forcible  secession from the government that had made their success possible.

And once again, the American ideology of bottom-line-above-all has us in a mess. Several messes, in fact, and huge ones at that.

We now have a national economy based on, as Intel cofounder Andy Grove puts it, “highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed.”

We have wars for oil, or more precisely for geopolitical alliances based on oil.

We have massive amounts of this self-same gunk polluting a seabed of incalculable value. We now know that it’s not one company’s fault. The entire industry was spending as little money or effort as legally possible on safety and cleanup (expenses which don’t immediately contribute to profits). The particular two or three companies behind Deepwater Horizon were simply the ones that happened to lose at this very American version of Russian roulette.

And around the country, state and local governments spar over how many social safety nets they can get away with letting rot—because, after all, asking anything from Sacred Business just isn’t done. Especially not here in the state By the Upscale, Of the Upscale, and For the Upscale.

But still, there is hope.

There is always hope, so long as America’s primal contradiction continues to hold.

I speak of the contradiction between America’s ugly realities (a nation built by financiers, conquerors, slavers, and merchant middlemen) and its lofty ideals (a nation professing devotion to freedom, justice, and democracy).

We came dangerously close in the Bush era toward resolving this contradiction in the worst way possible, by junking the ideals and becoming unabashed, unshameable mega-hustlers.

It didn’t work.

Even the furthest reaches of the Far Right found they could not win even core base support for their assorted schemes without making at least nominal appeals to citizens’ more noble natures.

That’s what the professional organizers and corporate lobbyists behind the faux-populist “tea party” nonsense understand. That’s why they disguise their ultra-corporate agenda in images of patriotic kitsch.

Even the money-grubbers’ and power-grabbers’ last remaining loyal followers believe in (at least the symbols 0f) America’s higher ideals.

This is an opportunity for those of us who wish to promote a more progressive agenda.

It’s why I still believe in what this land can become.

Seattle’s about halfway through an ambitious timeline to somehow end homelessness. As you may have guessed, the scheme’s nowhere near its lofty goals.

Hi-tech designer/author/pundit Clay Shirky has seen too many of his NYU female students fail to become industry movers n’ shakers. His conclusion: Women today just aren’t good enough braggarts and liars.

If we’re to believe one of these condom-company PR surveys, Seattleites have a lot less sex than the national average. Just an average of 75 encounters a year, compared to a national average of 82. Maybe the feds shouldn’t have shut down Rick’s strip club.

A few days after my 53rd birthday, the hallway outside my apartment began to smell. It wasn’t a forceful smell, just an unpleasant one, like that of rotting food.

A few days after that, I learned why. I came home to find a policewoman in the hallway. She said the man in the unit at the end of the hall had died, alone. The building managers had just discovered him. The policewoman said there was no immediately known cause; it could have been simply “old age.”

He was three years older than me.

Some commentators have claimed Rand Paul’s not really a libertarian.

They say his way-beyond-the-bounds-of-acceptable-discourse thoughts on corporate rights, including the right to discriminate and the right to pollute, aren’t what libertarianism’s really about.

I believe they are.

I’ve had arguments with big-L and little-l libertarians at several occasions over the past couple of decades. They’re particularly plentiful on the Microsoft campus, where the idea of a pro-corporatism that doesn’t want to ban pot smoking is popular.

And yes, a few of these gents and ladies believe there should be as few restrictions as possible on what businesses can do. In an ideal world, they feel, there would be no such restrictions at all, except when they would unduly infringe upon the rights of other businesses.

So yeah, by these folks it should be quite all right for restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and stores to refuse service to nonwhites.

And oil spills? Unfortunate, and wasteful, to be sure. And they do infrringe on the rights of other businesses, including those in the fishing and tourism industries. But, this line of reasoning goes, that’s no reason to seek vengeance against any poor li’l oil company—a company that didn’t mean any harm, but was just trying to make a buck.

Being “only in it for the money” is some libertarians’ all purpose guilt dissolver. In the mid ’80s I had a spirited chat with an ad saleswoman, about some international arms dealer who’d been accused of funneling weapons to Iran or Libya or such. This woman insisted he’d done nothing wrong, because he hadn’t personally taken sides for or against these countries. He was just out for the money. Nothing wrong with that, right?

In the past two or three years, some of us have learned there can be a lot that’s wrong with that.

The U.S. ruling philosophy of “I Got Mine, Screw You” is older than the second Bush Presidency. Heck, it’s older than the first Bush Presidency. And it needs to be replaced.

Here’s one potential replacement ideology: Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments.

Someone named Fred Clark (no relation) ponders the phenomenon of right-wing hotheads who’ve denounced the idea of empathy toward others, and how and why the rest of us should express empathy toward them.

An essayist with AOL News wishes to praise “America’s Most Diverse ZIP Code.” You’ll never guess where it is.

No. C’mon, guess.

The American political/cultural landscape is To Sir, With Love.

Obama is Sidney Poitier.

The tea partiers and the far-right wingnuts are the classroom rabble.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats are the other teachers, cowering in the faculty lounge, willing to put up with the abuse until retirement age.

Timothy Harris says Seattle should NOT follow a trend from San Francisco! (Specifically, its virulent crackdowns against the poor.)

From Hollywood warpaths to new-agey shamans, Joseph Riverwind deconstructs the “Basic Indian Stereotypes.”