…misguided Ren and Stimpy “adult” revival show was a flop, but he’s still a great scholar of cartooning and animation. His personal blog provides an ongoing lesson in these deceptively simple looking art forms. A recent entry on the Chuck Jones short Inki and the Minah Bird lauds Jones for having “the idea to constantly try new things and experiment and always be restless and never satisfied with anything. I might be the last person on earth who remembers the concept of ‘progress’ as a positive thing, a concept that just a few decades ago was the American philosophy that made the country the greatest, most influential and fastest moving nation in history.”

Of course, that same idea of “progress” has caused the film in question to become banned from authorized screenings and TV showings, due to the questionable racial portrayal of the African hunter boy Inki.

Forbes now claims Kurt Cobain is now America’s most lucrative dead celebrity, having passed Elvis Presley with some $50 million in earnings. You may now make your own sick comment about what the poor lad would’ve done with the dough.

TIME MARCHES ON DEPT.: USA Today has discovered that a lot of those kids today are politically active and socially concerned. But writer Sharon Jayson felt obligated, alas, to insert the boilerplate disclaimer inserted into all mainstream media stories about youth activism lo these past three decades: “They may be less radical than baby boom activists in the 1960s and 1970s, whose demonstrations for civil rights, women’s equality and protecting the environment and protests against the Vietnam War became flashpoints for their times….”

When, over the past how-many years, I’ve bitched about San Franciscan attitudes, I was talking about:

• Professional counterculture celebrities who are merely famous for being infamous, who’ve never really written/painted/recorded anything of value but who are adored for their (carefully contrived) outlaw images;
• Loudmouth entertainment/restaurant/fashion hustlers who come up here as cultural colonists, forever whining that this hick town will always suck unless it gets a _____ exactly like the _____s in San Francisco;
• Unimaginative Seattleites who think the only path to true cultural creativity is to copy something already done down there.

I do not, and never have, dissed Frisco (and, yes, I still insist on calling it that) for having gays or liberals within its overpriced midst.

Therefore, I hereby renounce the right wing sleaze machine’s attempt to scare citizens out of voting for Democrats because the Dems would place
a known San Franciscan as Speaker of the House.

…explains “Why I Don’t Believe in First Grade.” Essentially, he believes real learning (as opposed to rote memorization) is a habit that’s gotta be nurtured from birth.

…organizational consultant offers a sure-fire solution to what’s wrong with education in this country (and most others): “Take a Chance… Let Them Dance.” He claims “we are educating people out of their creative capacities” is we don’t allow kids to be artistic and even (gasp!) make mistakes. Of course, he doesn’t mention that a generation of uncreative, obedient drones might just be what certain corporate/governmental leaders want.

“If Seattle’s really the brainiest city in America, why can’t we figure out how to ________?”

I’m the only person I know who refuses the conventional wisdom about the Sonics’ possible move. I believe (1) it’s not inevitable, and (2) we can and should try to prevent it.

Part of this is I’m not a reactionary “radical.” I don’t hate sports. I don’t hate television. I don’t hate working-class people. Yes, I was belittled by the jocks in high school—but I got over it.

Pro basketball is a business. And it’s a good business for a town to have, for assorted tangible and intangible reasons.

It’s good to have affluent suburbanites coming in to patronize our bars, restaurants, and pay-parking lots 41 times a year (plus 17 times for the Storm). It’s good to have blimp shots of the city skyline viewed on ESPN HD. It’s good to have basketball players (even mediocre ones) around to open supermarkets, visit sick kids, and endorse local paint stores. It’s good to have some scrappy underdogs playing under our town’s good name, fighting the good fight against the Lucking Fakers and the other bloated-superstar outfits. It’s good to have white kids rooting for black kids, and with the Storm to have boys rooting for girls.

But the price? It doesn’t have to be bank-breaking.

As I’ve written previously, we can offer the new owners a decent, if not spectacular, arena makeover. Enough to add a food court and an amusement arcade (perhaps replacing current such facilities elsewhere on the Seattle Center grounds), and to make it more viable for hockey. Tie it in with a larger Center sprucing-up, one that would directly benefit all Center-goers and citizens. The public’s part of the arena part can be paid for by keeping the current rental-car and restaurant taxes for a few years longer.

This could have all been settled with the previous owners a year ago. We now know why it wasn’t: The previous owners were preparing to sell out and take their value-appreciation profits. Now it’s the new owners’ turn. We can make ’em a reasonable offer that, if they reject it, will make ’em look like even bigger dorks than the previous owners now look like.

But back to all the overt public cynicism: An awful lot of the folks I’ve talked to, exchanged emails with, and read online said, in varying terms, that they’d like to be rid of the Sonics as a big FU to the supposed mindset of our civic leaders, who (according to this interpretation) will normally suck up to any big, worthless corporate scheme as long as it promises to turn this into “a world class city.” The team’s loss, this line of reasoning goes, is a good-riddance event that’ll show those downtown schemers a thing or two about real priorities.

When I first started hearing this line, I initially reacted that it wasn’t “The Seattle Way” to mope around in self-defeatism. But then I remembered it is.

For every element of pioneer gumption and inventiveness we’ve got, we’ve also got a huge dose of unseemly grumpiness. We love to whine that everything in this hick town totally sucks, always has and always will. Cobain took this attitude as a personal worldview. More recently, Cobain’s former next-door neighbor Howard Schultz whined on and on that the city and us fans just didn’t understand his needs.

Now we’ve got a prospective new owner who’s talkin’ just like Ken Behring and Jeff Smulyan used to, that he really really wants to keep his new team here but we’re just being insufficiently cooperative. He’s playing his assigned role by making these cynical statements; we’re playing our assigned role by giving him cynical rejoinders in response.

But behind this scripted posturing, serious backroom dealmaking can occur, and I hope it will occur. For that is also The Seattle Way.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.

…another reason why we perhaps shouldn’t accept “business” as the default model for all societal institutions: “People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.”

…and the only devil I saw was a certain ex-boss of mine, who showed up for the weekly session of Drinking Liberally. Mr. Savage sported a custom tee with the slogan CAN’T WE HAVE CRAIG KILLED?, in reference to the founder of a certain free-want-ads web site that’s put a wrench into print-media busines models across the country.

It’s been a decade and a half since Mr. Savage and co. were the new kids on the local-media block, with a surefire business plan that took ’em to the top. Now, newer outfits with newer surefire business plans are causing both “mainstream” and “alternative” newsprint publishers to run scared. Ah, the more things, well, you know…

…some handy guidelines for left-O-center folks who’d rather remain comfotably out of power: “Do NOT leave your comfort zone!… Powerlessness is a familiar and comfy place. Remember: you have no power.”

• “The curse,” reversed?
• Could Stephen Colbert be right about America’s biggest threat being bears?
• It’s official: Even Marshall Field’s in Chicago is getting Macyfied, alas.
• The mainstream media have discovered that Starbucks is a “lifestyle brand” even more than it’s a restaurant chain. Duh. I could’ve told you that, and have. From the pre-Howard Schultz start, Starbucks’ original founders intended to rebrand European-style coffee as an essential acoutrement to a young-professional, neo-bourgeois lifestyle. They offed the image of coffeehouses full of bongo-playing beatniks, and invented the image of a home espresso machine next to every Cuisinart.
• My recent acquaintance David Goldstein has a nice essay pondering out loud about whether we can use the “F” word (no, not the boring ol’ “F” word but another, more incindiary one) to describe the current U.S. political machine.My take: This word has been so overused in political discourse, especially in online discussion boards, that it’s become nearly worthless as a descriptor. Besides, its use can easily confuse readers/listeners. We’re not (or at least I’m not, and I believe Goldstein’s not) talking about some wholesale adoption of all the cultural, verbal, and sociological shticks of 1933 Germany—or even those of 1920 Italy, which our current regime more closely resembles.

  A Texas two-step is not a goose-step.

  America’s devolution from democracy to empire has occurred in an all-American way. It’s rooted in the dark side of our own traditions. And it’s within the good side of our own traditions that its effective responses must be found.

• Last week, I was interviewed by a white hip-hop DJ from the Seattle U student Internet radio station. He was eager for stories about gangbangin’ violence in Belltown. I tried to explain to him that the noise and the rowdiness and the drunken brawling seen on First Avenue in the weekend wee hours are principally the work of young affluent Caucasians, who often arrive here en masse on chartered buses from the Eastside.I could have digressed, but didn’t, that the whole gangsta mythology was a stereotype invented a decade ago by LA record producers, specifically to nakedly exploit young affluent Caucasians’ images of young black males as sexy savages.

  In real life, violent criminals of any race tend not to be alluringly handsome, well-spoken, or well-dressed. They’re far more likely to be pathetic, desperate losers, out of touch with their own souls.

…to remember the late, great John Kenneth Galbraith this week, let’s look at what his almost-as-great son James sez about the state of the nation. James writes in Mother Jones that the U.S. has become a “predator state,” with its upper classes feeding off of the declining living standards of everyone else.

Galbraith fils depicts a nationwide, pervasive culture of corruption. It’s a disease that can’t be simply lanced off like a boil by removing a few politicians from power. It’s more like marrow cancer, something parasitic, deeply rooted, and ultimately fatal to both parasite and host.

I tend to agree with this downbeat diagnosis.

Getting rid of Bush and/or Cheney won’t get rid of the whole rotten-to-the-core right-wing machine running all three branches of the federal government; it won’t get rid of the machine’s media whores; and it sure won’t get rid of the machine’s well-heeled sponsors.

I’d even call Bush expendable to the machine as it’s currently constituted. One fiercely obedient puppet ruler could easily be replaced by another.

So what is to be done? Galbraith fils asks that question at the end, and doesn’t answer it.

But I have a glimpse of what it would take. I saw that glimpse Monday afternoon.

The participants in Pro-Immigration March II: The Sequel had been coached beforehand, by Web sites and by preachers and by Espanophone talk radio, to present themselves as patriotic Americans who wanted to fully participate in their newly-chosen homeland. The participants followed this instruction with gusto. They chanted “U, S, A.” They waved American flags. They carried signs proclaiming their pride in their work in and for this land.

Several years ago (1994, to be precise), I wrote, “We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We need to figure out how to put it back together.”

That’s what the immigration advocates are attempting to do.

They’re presenting themselves as less cynical, more hopeful, and more constructive than the selfish boars now in charge of the federal apparatus.

In so doing, they created a protest march where the usual hangers-on and would-be leaders of protest marches (the Bob Avakian cult, et al.) looked like the backward-thinking nostalgists they were. They rendered the entire patchouli-reeking carcass of post-1970 “counterculture” politics superseded, a “version 1.0” to be remembered and archived but no longer relied upon in everyday use.

The May Day marches, like their April forebearers, proclaim a new “new left.”

A left based on active effort, rather than hedonism.

On unity-in-diversity, rather than separatist “identity politics.”

On working-class solidarity, rather than the supposed superiority of an enlightened few.

On folks getting together to liberate themselves, rather than depending upon some “vanguard” caste to take charge on their behalf.

On building a viable future, rather than bringing back some “spirit of the Sixties.”

There’s a heckuva lotta work still to do in the years to come, both in electoral politics and beyond it.

But we now have the rhetorical and cultural means with which to do it.

…since before the war? Undoubtedly. It was exciting and dynamic, and totally free of the hip-cynical defeatism seen at so many Anglo-American-led protests. It was great to be in the middle of it all.

Make them be about what the old left used to call “the Workers.” Instead of ignoring race/class divisions, make them the focus. Put the people themselves in charge, instead of the retro-“radicals” of the goatee-and-ponytail set. Make them about saving lives, saving livelihoods, and respecting basic human dignity.

(In case you’re wondering, I managed to take these pix on my still-ill camera with the still-troublesome shutter button. More about this later.)