I was at the Mariners-Angels game on Aug. 28. The first inning was fantastic. As for the rest of the game, (insert Mad magazine-style, gross-out sound effect words here).

But some local players still ended the evening coming out ahead. They’re the kids and teens who attend the Rotary Boys and Girls Club, 201 19th Avenue.

That’s due to Tom Herche. He runs United Warehouses, in the (for now at least) industrial district south of Safeco Field.

No, his company’s not the old United Furniture Warehouse, of once-ubiquitous musical TV commercials. It’s a general storage facility, where small manufacturers, importers, and distributors can stow their wares at modest rents.

Every August, Herche buys a block of up to 500 tickets to a Mariners home game. He then resells them to friends and friends-of-friends at $25 each, with all the money benefitting the Boys and Girls Club. Folks who buy four or more tickets get to park in the warehouse’s lot, one long block south of the stadium.

He also treats the ticket buyers to a “Tailgate Bar B Que” at the warehouse. He springs for the burgers, hot dogs, sodas, and pony kegs of Coors. The drinks are served inside the building, the food outside.

The tailgate party was a perfect early evening, held in a perfect setting. United Warehouses looks like a warehouse ought to look. It’s got a curved roof and bare-wood support beams. A delightfully rundown-looking front office emits that vital “we don’t waste our customers’ money” look.

Herche’s company also has three larger, newer facilities out in Kent (plus one in Portland). But his Occidental Avenue building is a classic of warehouse architecture. And it’s a shining example of why the city should fight to preserve industrial uses in the old industrial district.

For one thing, it’s hard to imagine a scene in the big-box Kent Valley like the Tailgate Bar B Que.

The scene outside: Standup “tables” made of shipping palettes with Costco tablecloths. Hundreds of casually dressed adults, and a few kids, basking in friendly chatter and the late-afternoon sun, avoiding both the rush-hour traffic and the stadium parking jam.

The scene inside: Grownups sipping refreshing beers in the refreshing shade, standing amid stacks of cases of soft drinks, gardening tools, small appliances, and whatever else was staying in the warehouse this day.

But after a mere two hours of this, it was time for all of us to march en masse up Occidental Avenue toward the ballpark.

Sure, the seats were up in the right field nosebleed section, but nobody complained—at least not about that.

The game itself, you either know about or have tried to forget. The Ms scored five runs on four hits (including an ultra-rare three triples) in the first inning. It all went downhill from there. Our boys lost their fourth in a row (in what would become a nine-game losing streak), dashing hopes that they’d overtake the Angels for the division lead.

But everyone in the tailgaters’ group still had a swell time. Today’s Mariners organization, unlike the early Kingdome-based outfit, knows how to put on a complete show.

But enough about that. Let’s talk about the night’s real winners.

The Rotary Boys and Girls Club began as the Rotary Youth Foundation in 1939, begun by the Rotary Club of Seattle (still a major supporter). In 1947 it affiliated with Boys’ Clubs of America, which went coed in the 1970s.

The club serves more than 700 children from the Hill and the CD, ages 6-18. More than 200 show up on any given after-school day. Programs include education and career prep, “character and leadership” development, health and life skills, and the arts, as well as sports and recreation.

The club’s been blessed over the years by major supporters. Besides the Rotary Club and United Warehouses, Microsoft and auto dealer Phil Smart Sr. have made big contributions.

But they could always use more cash and volunteer hands, to help keep their programs going strong. You can contribute by calling 206-436-1880 or logging on to rotarybgc.org.

Today’s piece is long and goes all over the place. Consider yourselves warned.

Steven Brant is one of the many commentators who’ve noted the dangerous link between the Bushies’ I-can-do-any-goddamn-thing-I-want sense of privilege and the corporate-motivation side of new age create-your-own-reality philosophy, as particularly realized in the soon-to-end reign of Alberto Gonzales–a tenure which fellow pundit Greg Palast calls “Wrong and Illegal and Unethical.”

By Brant’s line of reasoning, the right-wing sleaze machine has spent the past seven years determined that it can get everything it wants just by believing in it really hard (and, of course, by hustling and dirty tricks and corruption and torture and favors etc.); but cruel reality is increasingly catching up with their fantasies.

I’m getting less sure about this interpretation.

First of all, the GOPpers have remained “successful” at their prime goals–to concentrate wealth upward, to swap favors with the insurance, drug, oil, and weapons industries (even at the expense of the economy as a whole), to turn the entire federal government (with the recent exception of Congress) into an operating subsidiary of the Republican campaign operation, to rig the election process by hook or by crook, to reward friends and punish enemies, to promote a more authoritarian society at home and imperial ventures abroad.

The administration’s simply failed at tasks to which its devotions are shallower–democracy, security, justice, public health, education, economic prosperity beyond the ruling class, and the whole basic spectrum of good-guy goals America used to claim to care about.

But that leads to another question. If us “reality based” progressives are gonna pooh-pooh the right’s positive-thinking shtick, how do we account for the right’s success at so many of its real goals–particularly the goal of persuading and keeping loyal dittohead voters?

This is where a few recent books come in.

The first is Drew Westen’s The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Westen (no relation to ABC News execs Av and David Westin, or to Westin Hotels) argues that the right’s policies may have had a near-totally negative impact on the body politic’s health, but its public messages have been cleverly crafted for optimal emotional impact. Those emotions could be sunny, or fearful, or bigoted, depending on the particular audience “buttons” needing to be pushed; but they were always effectively presented.

Us left-O-centers, in contrast, have had a lousy rep for left-brain, policy-wonk talk that resonates with nobody except ourselves; or for downer everything’s-hopeless cynicism; or for mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road wussiness.

To change this sorry state-O-affairs, Westen sez Dems have to show up with some emotionally compelling narratives of their own, and to fearlessly shout ’em out.

This notion coincides with the premise of Chip and Dan Heath’s new marketing guidebook, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

The Heath brothers seldom mention politics in their book, save for lauding JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech. Their main target is the business person looking for a way to connect with potential customers.

But their premise, if it works to sell shoes and burgers, would also work to sell policies and politicians.

That premise: Ideas that spread, that “hit” with audiences, all employ six key ingredients: “simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories,” in various amounts.

Let’s explore how these principles might work in a marketing drive whose “product” is progressive-Dem candidates for public office:

• 
  Simplicity: Have the wonky details of our plans available online and in print. But have clear, memorable goals and promises in front of them. Defuse the Mideast powder keg. Get our troops home safe n’ sound. Health care for all. Back to balanced budgets.
• 
  Unexpectedness: Voters and pundits may expect another play-it-safe, make-no-waves Dem campaign, vetted by consultants and triangulated for minimum offensiveness. Let’s pleasantly shock ’em with some real passion and guts.
• 
  Concreteness: A budget-deficit cut by X each year. A Medicare-like health card in every wallet. A proud homecoming for our sons n’ daughters from Iraq.
• 
  Credibility: Have the wonk-data ready. But also show the resolve to get these policies up and running.
• 
  Emotions: Where there was fear, there will be hope. Where there was hatred, there will be compassion. Where there was blind ambition, there will be cooperation. Where there was spoiled privilege, there will be responsibility.
• 
  Stories: Life’s been tough. Ordinary folks struggled to get by; while the few at the top kept acting greedier and stupider. A gang of thieves has ripped up the Constitution as well as the social fabric.But, together, we can turn it around. America can mean something again.

P.S.: Yesterday’s electronic town hall by progressive heroine and Congressional candidate Darcy Burner had a few technical glitches (the video stream went down a couple of times). But it was a fundraising smash. Burner raised over $100,000 from nearly 3,000 contributors before and during the event, which got great write-ups on the national political blogs.

(Priscilla Presley quoted in USA Today): “Elvis means something to people because he wasn’t a contrived person, he was organic and true to himself.”

Sorry, ex-mother-in-law of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. You’re mistaken.

As Brit musicologists Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their fascinating new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Elvis was as contrived as they come.

He carefully constructed a persona that was one part nice Mississippi mama’s boy, one part James Dean sneer, and one part R&B outlaw. And it worked. These seemingly incompatible traits melded together in the 1954-58 Elvis persona, creating a musical legend and a world icon.

The trick to the early Elvis wasn’t that he was “natural.” It was that he made his particular artificiality seem natural.

Presley’s later reinventions, as a goody-two-shoes matinee idol and as an overstated Vegas self-parody, were no more or less “real” than his first persona. And they were just as successful with audiences of the time–as they are to this day, in the form of impersonators and merch/DVD sales.

So, on the 30th-anniversary week of Presley’s passing, let’s remember the real “real” Elvis, the consummate entertainer who found a way to rock the world.

(Faking It, by the way, is a wonderful book. Its chief premise: Forget “authenticity” or “keepin’ it real.” All pop music is a contrivance, and that goes for country, folk, blues, punk, hiphop, and square dancing too. Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured image–but so was John Lee Hooker.)

David Thornburg warns that “The real challenge to the US is not our loss of high-skilled repetitive jobs to India, but the fact that we are losing our creative edge to other countries more than happy to invent the future without us.”

…are apparently also worried about corporatization and gentrification running out everything that was funky and quirky about their town.

Jack Valenti, who passed away on Thursday, was an LBJ political operative who moved to Hollywood to become the film industry’s spokes-hack, a job he kept for nearly four decades. He masterminded the industry’s move from overt self-censorship to a “ratings” system that essentially accomplished the same goals. Lest we forget, Valenti also tried to outlaw home video. In the name of global media monoliths, his successors still regularly harass file sharers, DVD backup software coders, and other harmless li’l guys.

(From BoingBoing.net, here’s a short 2004-compiled list of “stupid” Valenti quotes about the industry.)

Meanwhile, a real Profile in Courage moment came in Champaign, IL on Wednesday, when Roger Ebert appeared at a film festival he’d cofounded, after losing his voice to cancer surgery. As noted by my ol’ UW Daily pal Jim Emerson, now Ebert’s Webmaster, Ebert’s wife spoke on his behalf at the festival, quoting a line from his screenplay for Russ Meyer’s cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls–a film the likes of which we may never again see from a U.S.-based producer so long as the MPAA’s secretive ratings thugs still hold sway.

…these lists of “the 100 Sexiest Women in the World” that keep popping up. All of them are celebrities of one sort or another (actresses, models, singers, porn queens, one tennis player, and one racecar driver); as if baristas, schoolteachers, policewomen, seamstresses, lady lawyers, etc. can’t be steamin’. All are English speakers and almost all are from the U.S., Canada, or the U.K.; as if there couldn’t be alluring, captivating females in (or from) the rest of the planet. And don’t start me on the uniform mainstream perky thinness of most of the list.

…that the Virginia Tech shooter, like so many other Deranged Loner Males, was a lifelong victim of bullying who might have been helped by some serious medical attention, and by efforts in the schools to encourage self-respect.

Fleetwood also notes that Washington’s state legislature passed a law to encourage anti-bullying programs in schools, but that it was opposed by Republican legislators. Well, why not? After all, the school bullies of today are the right-wing politicians, executives, and commentators of tomorrow.

…since the gruesome tragedy at Virginia Tech. I’m writing this installment from within line-O-sight of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle office, where another Deranged Loner Male (DLM) went on a destructive rampage last July, one of two fatal DLM attacks in Seattle that year.

All week, pundits and bloggers have asked how come this country not only breeds DLMs but attracts them from far-off lands. I could say a lot of things about this that don’t really matter, just like many of the pundits and bloggers have.

I could say we need more familial love and social bonding, but that would be trite.

I could say we can only stop guns with more guns, but that would be false. (And trite.)

Perhaps all I can say is this is a long-term thang.

America’s “culture of violence” ain’t going away by itself, and it ain’t going away anytime soon. It’s ingrained in the very fiber of our nation’s identity, from Wild West bad men to Southern lynch mobs to Northeast urban gangs; from bloodfest movies to pro wrestling to the verbal “shots” doled out by insult comics and talk-radio bullies.

But censoring video games and comic books won’t prevent the development of more DLMs. Indeed, the culture of repression, that oft-ignored symbiotic partner to the culture of violence, might be a more direct cause in DLM-festering. It’s repression that does a lot toward turning shy outcasts into seething would-be avengers. It’s self-repression that helps cause DLMs to lose affinity with the rest of the human species.

So let’s stop harassing the misfits. Let’s invite the lonely and the forlorn to share solace and comfort wherever it can be found–in music, in nature, in art, in everything beautiful and warm and prosocial.

Yeah, like that’s gonna be easy. Remember after the Columbine shootings, when school administrators around the country sought to track every bullied and put-upon non-jock boy, so these boys could be bullied and put-upon with official sanction?

…named Naill Ferguson, writing in Vanity Fair, claims the “American empire” is in inevitable decline, with Europe already further along the road to oblivion. He cites many of the usual cultural-conservative whinge targets–sexual libertinism, pop-culture dumbness, immigrants, cultural diversity, a lack of intellectual and fiscal discipline, kids who don’t respect their elders, disinterest in religious authority, and particularly diminished military capacity in the form of fewer foot soldiers who receive inferior training and, yeah, discipline.

Ferguson compares today’s western powers to ancient Rome. Like that decadent and overstretched power, he thinks we’re on a path of converging historical forces heading straight for a decline-n’-fall.

Ferguson doesn’t ask whether empires are, by and of themselves, a good thing to have, and whether ceasing to be an empire is, by and of itself, a bad thing to be.

I will ask.

And my answers, as you might expect: No and no.

As we all should have learned in recent years, military conquest/occupation is a crude, wasteful, and usually futile way to spread influence.

As we all should have learned from the Soviet debacle, militarist/authoritarian culture is a lousy way to foster democracy, self-reliance, artistic achievement, material prosperity, or social health. It doesn’t even do that reliable a job of keeping its own elites in power.

A post-imperial America, a post-imperial world, is worth promoting/defending. And you can’t effectively promote or defend such a world by imperial means.

A Pew Research study claims today’s 18-25-year-olds are more tolerant and more Democratic-leaning than their elders, have more casual sex and binge drinking, and are more eager to make tons of money.

…the same things from the progressives that Drinking Liberally wants–less pomposity, more fun in our revolutionizin’.

Author Marybeth Hamilton claims blues music, from its first appearance on 78 rpm records, has always been a vehicle for white intellectuals and curators to fantasize about the supposed primeval “authenticity” of ethnic folks. And it has continued to be so, on to the recent fad for Paul Simonized “world” music and the thug stereotypes deliberately perpetuated by gangsta rap.

WELL-DUH DEPT. #2: The TV show 24 is produced and written by pro-war Republicans. Who else would so lovingly depict torture as an act of heroism?

…makes #48 in the Guardian’s UK-centric list of “the 50 men who really understand women.” (George Clooney’s #1.)

…of new-age philosophy evolves ever more passive-aggressive odes to hyper-happy obedience, a Rice U. researcher claims “grumpy workers” make the best employees.