THE TWO BIGGEST ANOMALIES of the Terror War are that so many feminists (and leftists in general) support Islam despite its theocratic tyrannies and misogynistic horrors, and that even though the Left is feminist-dominated, it stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the root cause of Islamic rage: the genuinely liberated (and liberating) role of women in Western Civilization and America in particular.

Several days ago I set out to write, mostly from my own background as a former leftist, an explanation of the Left’s perverse behavior in these matters, and though the cause seemed obvious – three decades of incessantly chanting “abortion now” render you blind and stupid – the protocols of editorial exposition soon mired me in the necessity to explain my mental shorthand to those who had not been adults (or were not conscious) during the 1960s and ‘70s. These were allegedly the Left’s halcyon years, when Richard Nixon was still in peak form: when the intellectual requirements of Marxism, other forms of socialism and especially liberalism all proved too demanding for Baby-Boomer faddists; when the initial libertarianism of the feminist renaissance was suppressed and supplanted by matrifascist zealotry; when the Old Left dwindled and died and the so-called New Left rose up angry; when the New Left subjugated itself to authoritarian-feminist leadership, embraced the feminist doctrine of “the personal is political,” and as a result promptly began deteriorating into a coalition of victim-identity cults. Yes indeed: “those were the days, my friend; those were the days.”

As it turned out, what this writing needed more than reminiscence was a preface adequate to support its conclusions. The trouble was that no other essayist, at least as far as I could tell, had critically explored the political realities arising from the historical fact the matrifascist brand of feminism (aka female supremacy) is now the core ideology of the entire Left here in Enron Nation – and has been so for at least three decades. When the question is posed in such terms – that ideas have consequences – ten byproducts of matrifascist domination seem obvious, and since they all contribute to the two Terror-War anomalies, I will list them here (with apologies to anyone for whom they might be old hat):

(1)-that the Left’s call for “free abortion on demand” is the only non-negotiable expression of its matrifascist-shaped doctrine;

(2)-that from the perspective of matrifascism, one’s stance on abortion is the only valid political litmus test, replacing the old (and much more revealing) liberty-versus-authority yardstick – the debate about the proper relationship between the individual and the state – that formerly indexed one’s position on the Left/Right spectrum;

(3)-that (because even the most liberal forms of Christianity and Judaism demand abortion be considered from spiritual and hence moral/ethical perspectives) matrifascist absolutism on the question has forced the Left to a stance of unprecedented malevolence toward Christianity and Judaism;

(4)- that this malevolence is absolute proof of the extent to which the Left has been taken over by the matrifascist brand of feminism;

(5)-that the feminist/leftist support of Islam is the direct consequence of the matrifascist hatred of Christianity and Judaism that has arisen from the abortion controversy;

(6)-that the feminist/leftist hatred of Christianity and Judaism is so intense, it blinds its proponents to the many variations in Judaeo-Christian theologies, with the result that – unlike the Left of yesteryear – today’s Left is unable to distinguish between fundamentalism/orthodoxy and the other far more liberal, even gynocentric expressions of Jewish and Christian beliefs

(7)-that in America, today’s secular, matrifascist-dominated Left is infinitely more hostile to Christianity and Judaism than the theoretical Marxist Left ever was, proof of which is the national campaign of avowedly “feminist” vandalism and defacement of (even) mainstream churches that began in Seattle in 1975;

( -that the same intensity of matrifascist hatred combines with an abysmal ignorance of world history and especially Islamic history to blind the Left to the genocide and misogynism characteristic of Islam;

(9)-that the same ignorance of history – itself a deliberate byproduct of matrifascist-dominated public education – also blinds the Left to the functional radicalism of the ideals upon which the United States was founded, including the implicit commitment to perpetual revolution contained in the “Preamble” to the U.S. Constitution;

(10)-that because of the abortion controversy, matrifascist domination of the Left has elevated the victim-identity shibboleth of “the personal is political” beyond mere moral relativity to a doctrine of self-infallibility: unlimited sanction for any expression of leftist rage, and an impenetrable barrier against persuasive discussion, critical debate or even self-critical introspection.

Together these ten consequences of matrifascist domination have produced a Left unlike any other Left in U.S. history: viciously anti-intellectual, thus utterly immune to de-programming and therefore psychologically identical to certain movements of the far Right noted for their intolerance and violence: specifically the Nazi Party and the KuKluxKlan. Hence not only the Left’s ironic hostility toward the very principles of American liberty that facilitated its birth and growth, but also a Left increasingly distracted from traditional leftist socioeconomic and political goals – distracted by its own growing obsession with its alleged victimhood, particularly in the context of abortion. Indeed the Left’s operational psycho-dynamic – or perhaps pathology – is “I am (but) a victim (of patriarchy); hence (only) the personal is political.” The ultimate result is the infinite irony of a venomously secular Left supporting a vindictively theocratic Islam: not at all akin (as some commentators have mistakenly suggested) to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but rather more like the curious and pathetic co-dependent attachment that sometimes develops between two sociopaths, one a brazen bully, the other a coward and a weakling.

Thus too the unimpeachable accuracy of my terms “matrifascist” and “matrifascism” – female supremacy (with all of its Nazi implications) disguised as a movement for female equality.

But surely anyone with the proverbial lick of sense recognizes that, if Islam triumphs, the very first people dragged into the streets and beheaded or drawn-and-quartered or stoned to death would be the secular leftists themselves – especially the women.

The inner circle of matrifascist ideologues addresses this issue by rationalizing the triumph of Islam’s proposed global caliphate as the final, terminal stage of the despised “patriarchy.” With the seductive distractions of American liberty prohibited by Islamic law, with Western Civilization (not to mention civilization itself) reduced to blood-stains and ashes, life would indeed become unspeakably horrible, especially for women. But then – or so say the more esoteric expressions of matrifascist doctrine – humanity will magically rise up, turn against not only patriarchy but the entire male gender, and at long last enshrine “womyn” as the rightful rulers of the planet. Thus the New Order: “gynocracy,” the female-supremacist version of the Third Reich, with females as der ubermenschen and males as the Jews. (Google and browse “Mary Daly,” also “Sunera Thobani,” “Grace Shinell” and “Valerie Solanis.”)

As I have noted before, when you believe “the personal is political,” you can justify anything: the extermination of unborn or half-born children for even the most trivial or selfish reasons, the genocidal reduction of the entire male gender, giving aid and comfort to an enemy who would hack off a woman’s clitoris, enshroud her in a sweltering burka and stone her to death for so much as glancing at a man who is not her father, brother or husband.

The above combination of factors – all of them stemming from matrifascist domination and matrifascism’s pro-abortion absolutism – is why the Left cannot allow itself to acknowledge either the suicidal nature of its flirtation with Islam or the real reason for the atrocities of 9/11.

Before I say more, let me state for the record I favor legal abortion. But I also know beyond any scintilla of doubt that abortion is murder – this from the indescribably moving experience of sensing the spirit of our son-to-be hovering in the room waiting to incarnate as my second wife and I formed his body with the passion of our love. (That our son was later born dead is one of the great losses of both our lives: how we would have relished getting to know someone whose spirit was so powerful its presence was felt by each of us even before his physical being was real. May his tiny unnamed body rest in peace in whatever sadly unknown grave the hospital assigned it; may his soul fare better in all its remaining lifetimes. And may my former wife Adrienne find all the blessings she seeks in this life and afterward: as is sadly typical in such cases, our marriage did not long survive the emotional trauma of the death of our anticipated child.)

Ask a hard-core feminist to describe religion – “hard-core” defined here as a feminist who has been thoroughly brainwashed by matrifascism – and even if she claims to be a proponent of feminist spirituality, she will probably tell you that as far as “patriarchal religion” is concerned, Marx was right: that it is the opiate by which “the patriarchy” attempts to terrify (or seduce) the world’s oppressed peoples into compliance with patriarchal edicts and capitalist enslavement schemes, and that all the adherents of "patriarchal religion" should be mercilessly exterminated. The test of a religion, she might say, is “whether it recognizes that the personal is not only political but theological: in other words, whether it encourages wife-beating versus whether it encourages free abortion on demand.”

These words are not a hypothetical construct: something very close to this precise quote was the statement of a feminist whose froth-at-the-mouth hatred of Christianity I had inadvertently challenged simply by pointing out several historical facts. Call the feminist Klarissa; she had flatly stated the only “real” Christianity is Fundamentalism – viciously oppressive, infamously misogynistic and homophobic, often vehemently racist as well – and that the more liberal forms of Christianity were merely deceptions: bait-and-switch advertising designed to trap the unwary. In response I had noted it is only Judaeo-Christian culture that gave birth to liberty, only via the American Revolution, and that this selfsame liberty has since hosted not only feminism but the resurrection of the female elements of the Divine within Christianity and Judaism. I added that beyond the doctrinal boundaries of Christianity and Judaism, American liberty had encouraged the resurrection of a genuine goddess: in truth, the modern counterpart of humanity’s first and oldest vision of the Deity. Klarissa had answered that none of these facts mattered, that “even with a goddess, patriarchy would remain patriarchy,” just as Christianity “with its history of inquisition and witch-burnings” would still be “the most murderous religion on the planet.” Klarissa freely admitted she was implacably hostile to anything remotely Christian or Jewish: she said “female divinity that is part of Christianity or Judaism can only be false divinity,” no doubt ultimately “like the Virgin Mary – something to belabor women with guilt and help outlaw abortion again.”

Because my acquaintanceship with Klarissa spanned the Gulf War (which she vehemently opposed as “another oil-grab by the White Patriarchy”), the subject of Islam invariably came up in our conversations also. Much to my astonishment, Klarissa said Islam was the one organized religion she could enthusiastically support. She had belittled Buddhism and Taoism as “harmless superstition”; she had denounced Judaism as the source of “all that Old Testament violence, especially in the modern Middle East”; she had condemned Hinduism for its long-outlawed practice of suttee; she had damned American Indian spirituality as “no use against the white man’s guns”; and she had ridiculed the pagan renaissance as “an embarrassment to feminism.” But now she was telling me that Islam is a vehicle of liberation, “a true religion of the oppressed”; that Islamic violence is genuine revolutionary violence, “a politically correct response to imperialism and capitalism,” that Islam is “not really patriarchal at all, because its only enemy is the White Patriarchy,” and that Mohammed was the Third World’s equivalent of Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Zee Dong and Che Guevara all rolled into one. I was literally speechless.

The evening of Klarissa’s astounding dissertation on Mohammed was the same night she and I had planned to go for a long moonlight walk along the undeveloped shore of Bellingham Bay, enjoying the salt wind, the sound of the breakers and the intermittent tolling of the gong-buoy at Post Point. But now Klarissa complained bitterly my dog LeeRoy was “just too wild” and demanded I take him home before we went anywhere. Never mind LeeRoy always accompanied me on walks – especially walks after dark with a woman so anti-gun she insisted I leave my sidearms in my gun cabinet. (In any case, LeeRoy was magnificent: more than compensation for the defenselessness resulting from compulsory disarmament. The quintessence of formidably protective canine, he was 100 pounds of rippling ebony-coated muscle and keen-eyed tooth-on-bone intelligence: half Rottweiler/half Golden retriever, colored and shaped like a big-headed Rottie, he strode through his world with undocked tail assertively high and nut-sack proudly swinging, handsome beyond description and normally an eager friend to all womankind. But not to Klarissa, a cat-lover who made no secret of the fact she despised him.) So I did the right thing: I took Klarissa to her home instead. And as LeeRoy grinned and climbed from the back seat of my Honda into its right passenger seat, I bade Klarissa a last good-bye.

I should have known better than to get involved with Klarissa, even superficially. In all my years as a self-defined leftist, roughly 1963 (when a viciously false arrest prompted me to give a summer to the Civil Rights Movement in East Tennessee) through 1988 (when my allegiance to the Second Amendment prompted me to vote Republican in the presidential election), I met dozens of Klarissas, perhaps even hundreds of them. Though I always found libertarian/conservative women interesting (my second wife, for example, was a Goldwater supporter), I also dated Klarissas aplenty – it is hard to avoid them when your romantic interests are mostly artists or writers. In my New York City years, I even knew several of those especially hateful Klarissas who steered feminism away from its initial “women’s liberation” libertarianism and into the matrifascist miasma it tragically became. Thus I can write with some authority about the archetype.

Ask a Klarissa to describe America today, and she will tell you “Amerika” is a “ rape culture” that is forever attempting to steal from her the right to control her own body. If she is at all conscious of other issues, she will probably say that “Amerika” loots the oil and natural resources of the less powerful, destroys indigenous cultures and supplants them with a mind-numbing “Amerikan” all-McCulture. She will likely add that “Amerika” forever exploits its own peoples and “oppressed” minorities (especially “African-Americans,” Hispanics, “Native Americans,” and of course women), and that the “gun culture” is patriarchy’s Phallus Rampant – the ultimate tool by which its oppression is intensified to the 50th power. If she is an eco-feminist, she will include a protest against “Amerika’s” wanton destruction of the environment, “the rape of Mother Nature.”

Our sweet Klarissa’s male consort (assuming she has temporarily anointed someone Resident Penis and allows him to speak) would probably attempt to demonstrate his political “correctness” by adding a few obligatory words about the new slavery of globalization. He would also probably condemn the Terror War as a “racist” or “imperialist” attempt to capture Middle Eastern petroleum, and foolishly (that is, without realizing the seditiously violent implications of his words) pledge to resist “by any means necessary” if the government were to resurrect the military draft.

Notably absent from this recitation of grievances will be any (save the most abstract) references to the human condition – or for that matter any of the genuine empathy and passion that formerly motivated leftist responses to socioeconomic issues. There will be not one word about the desperate economic struggles of the working-family underclass in the post-liberal, downsized, outsourced-job, sub-minimum-wages-for-illegal-immigrants climate of Enron Nation. This is because in Enron Nation, the Left now despises the underclass – that is, unless it is a politically “correct” underclass: an approved victim-identity group, an exotically alien culture, an allegedly conquered nation. And the American underclass is none of these things: it supports legal abortion if medically necessary, but it unequivocally regards abortion as murder. It is thus “hopelessly reactionary.”

The great (and mostly misreported) transformation on the Left, from the Old Left to the so-called (and profoundly misnamed) New Left, was an ideological reversal probably without precedent in history. It was a shift from ideologies that were expressions of humanitarianism and enlightened self-interest based on class solidarity and the notion of government as a vehicle of collective betterment, a shift to a core ideology – “the personal is political” – that despite its “progressive” vocabulary is ultimately an expression of meaningless fads and absolute selfishness. While its adherents are united by conformist fashions and the victim-identity solidarity of femaleness or vagina-envy or race and ethnicity, while they share the notion of government as authoritarian enforcer, while they are bound in the moral imbecility of (ideally unrestricted) infanticide and the institutionalized bigotry of quota-mongering and judicial presumptions of guilt, they remain ultimately forever alone in their temporal and cosmic self-centeredness: to paraphrase a present-day advertising campaign (an absurdly oxymoronic pitch to encourage Army enlistments), “ a movement of one.” Such is the New Left, which has since become the Only Left, at least in the United States: the Left of “free abortion on demand.”

Enlightened observers will recognize the ideology of today’s Left as but a perverse, carefully disguised variant of runaway “I-am-my-own-divinity” individualism and the same “I-want-it-all” avarice that characterized Enron – the latest expression of the impulses that formerly bred fascism, and with the addition of female supremacy, victim-identity politics and the notion of government as victim-identity avenger, undeniably a form of fascism itself. In other words, in a transmogrification so profound not even a medieval alchemist would have dared suggest it, the American Left has become a doppelganger of itself: the clandestinely rightist travesty of a liberation movement. All in the name of protecting its absolutism on abortion.

To expect the dunce-cap-blind proponents of such an intrinsically dishonest ideology to grasp the true nature of Islamic rage or to understand what really happened on 9/11 is to hope for intelligent conversation with a ventriloquistÂ’s dummy. (Though one can surely pray for miracles.)

And just what did happen on that dreadful day of September 11, 2001?

To respond adequately requires a brief journey through time and mythology.

While of course there is no way I can prove it – the official scribes of Islam like Mafia gangsters and corrupt politicians often claim convenient forgetfulness about past events – I have long suspected the origins of Islamic misogynism and the Muslim penchant for violence are to be found in Mohammed’s personal history. If this is indeed true, it makes woman-hating and genocide as much an integral part of Islam as individual human dignity and even the notion of the Divine as (at least partly) female are integral to Christianity. Moreover a number of East Indian sources confirm my suspicions, suggesting that the original inhabitants of Mecca – that is, the inhabitants who were later slaughtered or enslaved by Mohammed – were polytheistic but primarily worshiped a goddess who was probably akin to Ishtar, the Babylonian moon-goddess. A Vedic story of the early history of Islam and the city of Mecca is available here. If nothing else, the Vedic text expresses a Hindu view of the thousand-year Moslem-Hindu conflict that by the mid-1700s had so decimated the indescribably ancient civilization of Hindu India, the tiny mercenary army of the British East India Company was able to conquer the entire subcontinent. Undoubtedly the Vedic text is part propaganda, but in this case (largely because of its rational assertion that goddess-worship sustained the egalitarian roles and proud independence of women in pre-Islamic Mecca) I believe its is probably more factual than not. Moreover it closely parallels the pre-political- “correctness” portrait of Islam that obtained during my undergraduate years – that is, before multiculturalist censors rewrote the available histories to conceal Islam’s intrinsic murderousness. (For additional information on Islam’s origin and nature, including accounts that contradict the Vedic sources, Google “history of Mecca.”)

Another reason I evaluate the Vedic description of Islam as “probably true” is that it explains perfectly the present-day behavior of Muslims as revealed in the outrages of 9/11, the recent shoot-hack-and-stab murder of the Dutch art-film maker Theo van Gogh, and the deafening silence of the global Islamic community’s failure to condemn specific Islamic atrocities or even to repudiate Islamic terrorism in general. Moreover, I have seen Submission – the 10-minute film, based on a poignantly poetic script written by a former Muslim named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is available here. That a brief, graceful and exquisitely poetic portrait of the true plight of Muslim womanhood would evoke such a singularly murderous reaction – the film-script’s author is herself under an Islamic death threat and is in hiding as a result – strongly suggests my hypothesis as to the real cause of 9/11 is indeed correct: that it was an attack not on oil-whore America (about which I will have much more to say in a subsequent essay) but rather on the America semiotically represented by Our Lady of the Harbor, the goddess Liberty: the America of women’s suffrage, the America of the libertarian feminist renaissance known as Women’s Liberation, the America of equal-pay-for-equal-work, the America where popular dance resurrected the proud exquisite choreography of female sexuality that was once only mirrored on Minoan murals and vases. And with that choreography came the other resurrection – of the notion God is a woman, or at least partly female – the true “revolution in consciousness,” the most important human development of the past 2600 years. Which vexed Osama bin Laden and his ilk to homicidal frenzy of a kind the modern world had never seen. Thus 9/11.

Thus too this essay’s title, drawn from one of the longer works of Taliesin, the half-legendary Celtic poet who lived just after the time of King Arthur. The source-poem is a 237-line piece called “Cad Goddeu” or “Battle of the Trees.” The battle after which the poem is named occurred approximately 600BC, a fight between devotees of the god Bran and devotees of the god Belin; the outcome is said to have determined not only the fate of the Britons but the name and gender of the principal British deity until the advent of the Christian Era. The passage from which I took “Conflicts” is as follows:

I was in Caer Fefynedd
Thither were hastening grasses and trees
Wayfarers perceive them
Warriors are astonished
At a renewal of conflicts
Such as Gwydion made.
There is a calling on heaven
And on Christ that he would effect
Their deliverance,
The all-powerful Lord.
If the Lord had answered,
Through charms and magic skill,
Assume the forms of the principal trees,
With you in array...

Gwydion was a leader in the original battle. He is the warrior-son of Don, who is Danu, as in Tuatha de Danaan, “Children of the Goddess Danu,” who were among the ancient peoples of pre-Christian Britain. Gwydion is thus, by some mythographic reckonings, a knight-errant of the goddess, her sacred champion. But the purpose of Taliesin’s epic is nevertheless unknown. It is clearly not a recounting of the original battle: note the invocation of Jesus as lord-enchanter of the trees. The late Robert Graves believed the poem was metaphorical, a contest between poets and schools of poetical thought; these lines of Taliesin’s work (the lines in italic above and below) are taken from Graves' White Goddess. Others say "Cad Goddeu" is a lay of magic, a Druidical conjuration of deities and spirits of the land, a spell that invokes the Christ merely to conceal its heretical content. Still others, of whom I am one, believe it is genuine prophecy:

There shall be a black darkness,
There shall be a shaking of the mountain,
There shall be a purifying furnace,
There shall first be a great wave,
And when the shout shall be heard –
Putting forth new leaves are the tops of the beech,
Changing form and renewed from a withered state...

In mythology, the beech is the tree of the divine as female: the Holy Spirit, Wisdom, the Muse, the Goddess – the tree of all that has come back to life in American liberty, the mere thought of which enrages the bin Ladens and their Ted-Bundy-like followers to ever more violent orgies of murder. We fight – renewal of conflicts such as Gwydion made – so that American liberty and its most profound and sacred blessings "shall not perish from the earth." Cad Goddeu is now. It does not matter if you embrace its mythology as validly metaphorical or reject it as meaningless superstition: the historical facts are undeniable. And the American Left, in thrall to an unspeakable perversion of feminism that has reduced it to hysterical blindness and moral imbecility, has declined the greatest challenge in human history – and cravenly made alliance with the enemy of everything Our Lady of the Harbor represents.

Posted by: Loren at 03:55 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I’M OFTEN SURPRISED BY what prompts reader response, and seattleslew's scornfully accusatory retort to “Thinking Behind An Abscessed Tooth” (see below) is no exception. My toothache-rant was vaguely intended to be a parody on itself, an “I-might-live-despite-everything” expression of gallows humor and hyperbole, but obviously Seattleites are as vindictively thin-skinned as ever.

Hence, instead of the promised essay (a wholly arbitrary delay for which I sincerely apologize), here is a rejoinder that began as a few caustic lines in the “comment” matrix and then exploded into a full-fledged discussion of the Puget Sound area’s ever-worsening regional transportation crisis – nearly every bit of it the result of Seattle’s breathtakingly hypocritical policy of methodically obstructing rapid transit even as the city claims to be America’s most environmentally enlightened metropolis.

Apparently Sesl is profoundly in denial about the Seattle establishment's small but powerful clique of venomously anti-rail xenophobes and its four-decade history of frustratingly successful efforts to sabotage construction of both local rail transit and any regional commuter-rail system. The xeno-clique's tactics have even included agitating minorities enraged by welfare reform to demand – successfully – that a Seattle light-rail project be turned into a huge giveaway program, thereby betraying (and infuriating) voters who thought they were approving a public transport system – not an extension of the dole.

And then there's the spitefully self-protective opposition of Seattle's Metro Transit bureaucracy, which is so empire-builder greedy, its antagonism to the mere notion of an independent "regional transit authority" was the death of State Sen. Ted Haleys’s much larger, far more intelligently structured and far less expensive regional high-speed- rail proposal some 24 years ago – a death inflicted via typically Machiavellian maneuvers in the legislature – an outrage the Seattle media deliberately suppressed and most of the rest of the local press corps were too inept to expose.

Bottom line – and with but few exceptions – it will be mainly slow, stinky, uncomfortable (and above all slow slow slow) bus-transport-only here in Pugetopolis for many years to come, and the primary reason we are so cursed is the disproportionately powerful Seattle xeno-clique's reflexive, "we-don-wanna-be-like-Jew-York" hatred of any form of mass transit that runs on rails.

The resultant traffic congestion (not only on I-5 but on all the primary and secondary arterials in the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia metropolitan corridor) is described – depending on the source – as the worst, the second-worst or the third-worst in the nation.

These descriptions are probably not exaggerations. Admittedly I have spent very little time in California, and none of that time in Los Angeles, but I saw nothing around San Francisco, Marin County or Oakland that compares with the gridlock I encounter here nearly every day. Ditto for Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon. Speaking from the experience of my 10 adult years in New York City and its environs, the congestion in Pugetopolis is far worse – and many times more frustrating – than anything in the way of the traffic-jams I encountered anywhere in the NYC/New Jersey metropolitan area.

Fact is, New York City’s public transport is truly effective – so much so that even with its many and chronic problems, it reduces the privately owned automobile to exactly what it should be: an unnecessary luxury rather than the vital component of what – beyond Gotham – is the most painfully expensive transportation system on the planet: a system that is infinitely regressive and thus viciously discriminatory against everyone save the wealthy.

It is savagely weighted against old people too. If Sesl has never been stuck behind an elderly, defiantly stubborn Pacific Northwesterner conducting his own version of a Lesser-Seattle-Society protest by driving 40 miles-per-hour in a 65-mph Interstate-5 fast lane, I am forced to suspect Sesl has never been on the real I-5. The situation I described is so commonplace it has been a staple of local humor at least since the 1970s.

And 70 mile-per-hour traffic through Seattle at rush hour? That's not just impossible fantasy -- itÂ’s clinically delusional.

Or maybe (to give Sesl the benefit of the doubt), Sesl's speedometer is broken, and in the interminable I-5 delays, Sesl dozes off and dreams of swift passage...thereby further obstructing the traffic that has given the "I" in "I-5" a new meaning: "impassable."

As for Seattle's nasty xenophobia – more malevolent (and, yes, far more violent too) than any standoffishness toward outlanders I have encountered anywhere else – Google "Seattle Sucks" and browse accordingly. Seattle is probably the only place in the United States where out-of-state license plates are genuine hate-magnets: notes left on your car telling you, "we don't want you here; go back where you came from" -- and all too often your tires slashed as well.

Or if you want more authoritative documentation, read the section on Seattle in the seminal study entitled Cultural Regions of the United States (Raymond D. Gastil, University of Washington Press: 1975), in which Seattle's own Battelle Corporation suggests Seattle's hatred of people and ideas from elsewhere is the worst and most intense xenophobia in America.

By the way, and to set the record straight on all counts, I love the Pacific Northwest with a passion that has fetched me back every time I tried to leave: I love its forests and its waters, I love how its mountains plunge to its seacoasts, I love its climate – including its seven-month winter monsoon. Most of all, I love its light: the eerily moonlit quality of summer shade in the backwoods groves of ancient alders, the slow blue lingering twilight of summer evenings – “in just such realms” (as I say in a poem I am writing) “are Higher Powers seen.”

But every Eden must needs contain its serpent, every Camelot its villain, and for me the Modred-snake is Seattle. For the very reasons I cited above, I despise Seattle, and I admit it freely.

I lived in Seattle during the middle 1970s, was active at the city’s cultural hub, and have never in all my life known such a frigidly exclusionary domain, a place where even those who were my peers and potential colleagues remained forever remote, covertly malicious if not overtly belligerent. The very few Washingtonians who were exceptions to this dismal and loneliness-breeding rule were people who grew up outside of Seattle; the handful of others with whom I became close were all outlanders like myself – people whose experiences were in fact exactly parallel to my own.

Indeed, I have heard native-born (and otherwise seemingly intelligent) Seattle Caucasians actually boast, “you could live here 40 years and if you were born somewhere else, we’d still reject you as an interloper.”

Which is precisely why I moved to Tacoma, where I lived for five years during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and precisely why I choose to live in Tacoma now: it is as friendly as any city in America, it is more pleasant than many cities, it is attractive and affordable, it has the best public park system on the West Coast (in park acreage, second nationally only to New York City), and it offers virtually the same cultural advantages as Seattle with none of Seattle’s xenophobic bigotry and snooty pretentiousness.

Moreover my best friends live in Tacoma – three people with whom I have been brother-and-sister close for at least three decades.

Just to show Sesl that Tacoma knows how to get things done, I should point out that the Tacoma portion of the Sounder light rail system is already up and running – within budget and on schedule – even as Seattle remains the One Big Obstruction, a bureaucratic train-wreck, a bottomless money-pit, an outrage that threatens to turn all of Pugetopolis into grid-lock dystopia.

And by the way, Sesl – thank you so much for wishing me a speedy return to good health.

Posted by: Loren at 05:04 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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...I COMPLETED IT UNDER the influence of dental painkillers and antibiotics, so I want to allow the text to slumber undisturbed for a day, the better for me to review it and ascertain it makes sense -- that it has not lapsed into Kerouacean stream-of-consciousness, cretinoid meaninglessness, archaic syntax residual from another lifetime, or perhaps sin tax from some penance too long undone. Patience! I promise I will post it tomorrow, or perhaps even late this evening, after I return from the dentist.

Posted by: Loren at 06:23 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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