Skip to main content

I didn't vote for Raz

By



Fox and other conservative news outlets have gone out of their way to paint the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, better known as CHAZ, as an urban war zone that has descended into chaos, violence and extortion, led by the notorious Raz Simone, who now has his very own wiki page.  No one from their news crew has bothered to visit the district, I guess fearing what might happen to their Fox news truck if it tried to pull into the cop-free zone.  It they had they might find out it has been little more than a block party to this point with little or no harm inflicted on anyone, except maybe the ego of the Seattle police chief who was asked to vacant the east precinct office by order of the mayor to avoid any further conflict.  For now, the mayor is content to let the situation play out with the hope that local residents will eventually give up their "autonomous" status without a fight.

Anyone who knows Seattle knows that this has been the den of many of the protests that have rocked the city in recent years.  The biggest was the protest against the WTO when they came to town in 1999.  The Emerald City had heretofore been seen as a quiet little hamlet in the Pacific Northwest best known for coffee shops on every corner, particularly Starbucks, but this protest turned ugly real quick with police storming in to quell the unrest.  Seattle has never really been quite the same ever since.  I suppose this maybe one reason local police keep a wary eye on the Capitol Hill district, as this remains a favorite spot for local dissidents ever in wait of the next big issue to exploit.

The George Floyd incident seems to have reawakened the beast.  Local residents are not just angry at the police, whose brutality they have experienced themselves, but the municipality in general, which has allowed property values to soar with all the gentrification taking place in Downtown Seattle.  For decades, this area was largely neglected, but ever since the beginning of the new millennium the suburbanites have been moving back in and making it into their vision of a cool urban redux along the lines of the city's neighbor to the south, San Francisco, where property values have soared through the roof.  Many of these poor folks are renters and quite a few squatters, so they can ill afford their rents being jacked and their spaces being taken.  They want their own corner of the city.  Are four blocks to much to ask?

The short answer is no, but the current mayor is a patient woman so she is letting the protesters vent their frustration and anger before reimposing municipal control of the neighborhood.  Leave it to Fox pundits to call the president's attention to the matter, who was quick to chime in on the anarchy taking place and state that he would call in the troops if necessary.  Mayor Durkan told Trump to go back to his bunker.  This had to score her some points with CHAZ.

Since then Fox has gone into overdrive, posting a number of erroneous stories apparently taken from Reddit, with no one bothering to fact check them, leading to this amusing incident.  Not only has no one at Fox ever watched Monty Python but no one has any clue what goes on in Capitol Hill, much less Seattle.  They have tried hard to shoe horn this "block party" into their narrative of urban unrest all across the nation.  If it played well politically in 1968 then it can do so again in 2020, as Trump recasts himself as Richard Nixon.

Also gone appears to be any memory of the armed takeover of the Michigan statehouse by conservative protesters demanding the state lift the lockdown, which Fox pundits lauded.  The Michigan governor exercised the same patient approach as did the Seattle mayor hoping to avoid a nasty conflict, which was much more real in this case given the semi-automatic weapons many of the protesters had.  In the case of Seattle, very few of the protesters brandished firearms.

In fact, the protests in Seattle largely remain peaceful.  There is no wide-scale rioting or looting as has occurred in other cities, which all the news networks have copiously reported.  I guess Fox wanted to be first to expose the restlessness in Seattle, hoping to figure out who this Raz is and whether he is a member of Antifa.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more