Yup, it’s Seafair Cup time. And Seafair Cup means Blue Angels.
And that means someone at the Slog will take this and this and make it equal this.
It’s silly, of course. But it’s another part of the blue-collar Seattle that existed just ten years ago sinking beneath the continuing waves of wealthy young liberals and the condos they’re overpaying for.
I was talking to a friend of mine over the weekend that works for a sign company; he’s getting another job because his employer is packing up and heading for Marysville. The neighborhood the company is in is now high-density residential and retail storefronts; they’re getting complaints about the noise, and in the end it was just easier to move to a larger space an hour north of here, taking their blue collar workforce with them.
And this sort of conflict is leaching out all over the city. Look at the issues with night clubs and how they’re getting vilified. Seattle is changing.
But four days a year, old Seattle, wearing its real trucker hat and toting its union card and six of Rainier, comes back to town, with the subtleness of a sledgehammer and the passive-aggressiveness of a New York bus driver. And the noise is tremendous. Trust me, the Blue Angels turn over my office, I know what “filling-rattling” sounds like.
And yet, the whining always come back. Stupid military-industrial complex evil blah blah blah why do we let them in town my poor virgin ears were so mortally wounded let’s all hold hands and petition the government to form a sub-committee to form a working group to tell them that maybe they should just move to Marysville.
And that’s all great, you know? And next week, we can call chortle over the theater section of the New York Times while drinking our soy lattes and having our witty banter with our gay lovers at the neighborhood coffee shop that has free Wi-Fi AND valet parking for our Prius just before heading off to Whole Foods for our organic arugula and fillets of wild line-caught Yukon River coho so we can have our wine-tasting party on our third-floor condo deck. Yes, the new Seattle is nice, isn’t it? Land of young, rich, upper middle class white folks with the best things money can buy.
But this week… stick a sock in it already. The THUNDERBOATS are back, and by God, we’re going to wear our wifebeaters, load the kids in the station wagon, pick up as much Rainier and Oly as we can find, and remember the union carpenters that built the houses that were knocked down to build your condo, or the Boeing guys that built the planes you flew on when you moved here just a few years ago, or the other working class slobs that worked in the warehouses and industrial spaces you know live or work or see your gallery shows in. And those Blue Angels? While you scorn them with as much liberal rage as you’d muster, they’d be saluting them, proud to be Americans, tears in their eyes, remembering how Americans died in the name of freedom and justice, the very ideas that Dubya has removed in the name of his endless war and Constitutional-optional government, because that noise is a reminder to all of us that despite our vapid, dishonest, ruthlessly incompetent government we have, the idea of America — the truths we hold to be self-evident — are still right on and true. And they, our old Seattle brethren with their cutoffs and their Washington Huskies Rose Bowl shirt from the Don James days, would stand tall and proud in salute of the great cacophony of freedom itself, the Blue Angels.
Yes, they’d do that, just before puking all that beer up.
God bless old Seattle.
