…may still tout the notion that our local real estate biz isn’t crashing at all, not really, at least not like some other places.

That rosy perspective hasn’t stopped Washington Mutual’s CEO from warning the national housing market could be heading for a “near-perfect storm.”

So did that granddaddy of all most-frequently-shoplifted-by-stoners novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

I didn’t used to understand what all the Kerouac alterna-celebrity hype was all about. I’d read On the Road and some of his other books; but the rambling odes to young-adult wild oat sowing failed to inspire awe in me.

Sure, he’d lived an adventurous life (until he became a bloated drunken burnout). But I’ve never given a damn about a writer’s gossip life, only about his/her actual writing.

(Hence, I’m not the best person to share your worshipful odes to the lowlife legends of Kesey, Bukowski, Nin, and especially “Hunter.” Talk to me after you’ve read their works.)

Then I attended the Kerouac monologue bio-play at the old Velvet Elvis theater. Soon thereafter, I discovered Kerouac’s Playboy essay, “Origins of the Beat Generation.”

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Kerouac, I learned, was reared in Boston to Quebecois parents.

Kerouac’s beat dichotomy of hipsters vs. squares was really the great Canadian dichotomy of earthy Quebeckers vs. stuffy Ontarians!

With that revelation, I understood. Kerouac’s works were only partly romans a clef about himself and his friends. They were mostly rambling, improvised love songs to the people, places, and things he loved, to the America of hot jazz, R&B (not its teenybopper dilution as rock n’ roll), blue jeans, the long lonesome highway, drinkin’, whorin’, and all your educated-straight-white-male pleasures.

All this is a prelude to David Mills’s Guardian essay contrasting Kerouac, Wm. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.

Mills’s premise: Like certain later cultural scenes, folks who happened to be in the same place at the same time didn’t necessarily make the same stuff.

The gay Ginsberg and the then-closeted gay Burroughs, Mills claims, had a lot more at stake in their personal revolts against Eisenhower/squaresville America.

Burroughs, the most formalistically-minded artiste of the three, was particularly able to hold his philosophical and aesthetic principles as the society around him churned.

But Mills believes Kerouac, the meat-and-potatoes straight guy who’d documented the adventures of his more overtly freaky friends, came to feel left behind, or even betrayed, as the Beat worldview was commercialized into hippie-dippie hedonism. All this led, at least indirectly, to his drink-sodden premature demise in 1969. Ginsberg and Burroughs, meanwhile, remained resolute and active into the 1990s.

As an old college radio new-waver, I heartily preferred Burroughs’s staccato rhythms and imaginative dystopian fantasies.

The latter-day Ginsberg? Those amateur performances of giddy song-poems lauding the allure of underage boys? Not my idea of significant art.

That leaves Kerouac. Many have superficially adored his works. I superficially dismissed it. I’ve since learned to appreciate it, and its evocation of a world that had already passed by the time On the Road came out.

It won’t be the last time we hear about the distinction between “green” as in ecological and “green” as in monetary, but my fellow Stranger refugee Geov Parrish thinks Mayor Nickels’s latest proposed development deregulation scheme ain’t the planet-saving move Nickels claims it to be.

(Here’s a respectful opposing argument.)

…who have sex with boys (or girls) really be perceived as less icky than men who have sex with girls (or boys)?

…is a longstanding advocate of inventive thinking and of progressive politics. It turns out that these two causes just might be more than coincidentally related. Some UCLA and NYU researchers now claim there are distinct “liberal” and “conservative” brain patterns.

If true, it would help explain why I, and most of my lefty friends, always fail to be persuaded by righty lines of argument, as seen in the op-eds, the talk radio, the Fixed Noise Channel, etc. Those screeds are meant to appeal viscerally to what conservative-bashing liberals call “the lizard brain,” via calls to fear, greed, and prejudice.

Still, I wouldn’t take this study as gospel truth. But then again, a healthy regard for skepticism’s a key component of the liberal brain…

Could the newest Bin Laden video be really a bad Milli Vanilli lipsync job?

Last week’s top TV network among US young adults? The one whose marketing managers are probably in their office this morning shouting “Gooooooooooooooooooal!”

…about women whom society initially judged as bad troublemakers, but who’ve since been revered as revolutionary heroines. This link isn’t about them. It’s about real bad women.

…to remember when Lou Dobbs was a square-but-sane weekend news anchor on KING-TV, what with his recent string of silly anti-immigrant, anti-brown-skin, faux-populist tirades.

…comes in the form of a federal court ruling against warrantless govt. eavesdropping, at least on Internet service providers’ customer records.

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.

The longtime state Republican party chief, later an 8th District Congress member for six terms, passed away five days after the passing of her former state Democratic Party counterpart Karen Marchioro. They can now eternally argue policy in Heaven’s most tastefully appointed wine bar.

I’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald’s new book,
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. As you might expect, it’s a mighty depressing read.

Salon contributor Greenwald’s thesis is evident from his title:

• Greenwald believes the whole BushCo machine is run by a cabal of pompous authoritarian dweebs suffering from delusions of Godhood. These dudes n’ dudettes have cynically manipulated politics, the media, and the whole social zeitgeist for their own collective power/money trip.
• One of their principal tools has been to spread fear–fear of the unknown, fear of the stranger, fear of the foreigner, fear of the brown-skinned, fear of what conservative-bashing liberals call “teh gay,” fear of the intellectual, fear of the different.
• In a related tactic, they’ve positioned themselves, at least in their own minds, as the guardians and sole assayers of all that is Truly Good. Anyone who dares to differ from or disagree with the BushCo line is, if not directly Evil, then at least Evil’s co-dependent, hence deserving of the most virulent insults and smackdowns.Everything that’s gone so titanically wrong in the Administration, and in the country and the world, is either a direct result of this mentality or has been markedly worsened by it.

That’s all fine and scandalous as far as it goes.

And it fits something I once wrote in an essay in which I attempted to become the next Robert Fulghum: “The really evil people don’t say ‘I’m evil.’ They say ‘I’m so completely Good, I can do evil things and it’s OK.”
But how accurate is Greenwald’s depiction?

What if the Bushies (or at least some of them, some of the time) aren’t really that inflexibly bull-headed?

What if some of ’em know they’ve been behaving like SOBs and con artists? What if they privately relish in this behavior, in a bad-boy “ain’t I a stinker?” way?

It wouldn’t change the horrible mess the Bushies have made of our economy, our ecology, and our Constitution.

But it would change history’s judgment.

And besides, as I’ve said before, demonizing The Other isn’t just something “Those People” do.

Just look at the comic strips This Modern World and Get Your War On, which conflate anti-war and anti-Bush protest with the most prejudiced hipster square-bashing, as if all short-haired necktie wearers were reactionary neocons and vice versa.

In reality, there are many “nerds against nukes,” and more than a few right-wingers with hip aspirations of one sort or another (fundamentalist punk bands, metrosexual CEOs, etc.).

America can’t defeat the influence of brutal intolerance by imposing it on our own people.

And the left can’t win over America’s hearts and minds if it practices its own reverse prejudices.

…autumn unofficially arrived last night, in the form of a spectacular thunderstorm.

This morning, the skies over Seattle have returned to their diffuse, impressionistic low-light pattern. It’s refreshing, it’s cool, it’s beautiful. Really.

I used to say that upscale, whitebread Seattle’s favorite “minority groups” were (1) upscale white women, (2) upscale white gays, and (3) dead black musicians.

When I said that, I’d forgotten about a fourth ethnic fave–the mythical Native American Symbol-Person.

Nearly every Seattle Caucasian loves this fantasy figure, in one pose or another.

Athletes and corporate-motivation fans love the Warrior.

Stoners and ex-stoners love the Wise Philosopher attuned with the Earth.

New Agers love the Healing Shaman.

Art collectors and interior decorators love the Anonymous Artisan. (I once met a young white sculptor who griped that no local tribe would let him buy his way into membership.)

All these groups tend to be somewhat less fond of actual, living, flesh-n’-blood indigenous men and women; particularly those who fail to live up to the symbols.

All this is a prelude to a plug for Native Seattle, a new UW Press book by UBC historian Coll Thrush.

Mary Ann Gwinn’s
Seattle Times review covers Thrush’s basic plot points well. To summarize: Amerindians weren’t just icons and muses. They were real people. And they still are. And they’ve remained a vital part of the city’s life, whether whitey’s aware of this or not.

Native Seattle is an important book, despite its shortcomings. Thrush has a stilting, academic writing style; he repeats the same arguments over and over. He admits to gaps in his research, particularly in finding actual living native folk willing to talk with him. And in the introduction, he audaciously compares his own “outsider” existence as a gay man with that of the First Peoples. (In real life, there’s no comparison. Trust me on this.)

In one sense, Thrush also stereotypes the local native people, as Tragic Colonial Victims whose story requires a Brave White Liberal to tell it.

But if Thrush fails to fully grasp the human side of his tale, the research-wonk side still fascinates.

He vividly depicts the seasonal camps and full-time settlements in and near the present-day city. He’s particularly fond of discussing the topography of these places, before Seattle’s great regrades, landfills, canals, and drainage projects changed it all.

And he rightfully notes that natives didn’t just “go away,” peacably or otherwise. They were integrated (sort of) into the urban economy from the start, as mill workers, cannery workers, sailors, cooks, maids, hookers/mistresses, etc.

Even as the reservation system developed, local Amerindians continued to live and work here, full-time or seasonally, through all of Seattle’s 156-year history.

They intermarried with whites and Filipinos. They came here from outlying tribal communities. They worked for Boeing, for construction companies, and for fishing fleets.

And they’re still some of us. Not ghosts, not apparitions, but actual humans, who live and die and think and feel and love and try to muddle through somehow.