Fuck you Horace Greeley!
The famous newspaper editor and politician Horace Greeley once called for the American people to “Go West!” I have a few thoughts on that.
Perhaps a cryptic message from the gods above, I’ve simultaneously found a new favorite columnist/correspondent and also discovered a contempt for the West. They’re connected. First meet Timothy Egan, Northwest Pacific Correspondent for The New York Times and casual op-ed columnist, and author of the Times‘ Outposts blog. He writes exactly the kind of journalism that I want to write. Although he currently counts himself as one of the millions of pundits sharing his two cents on the 2008 Presidential election, he also explores the Northwest and West. When we have a new president he says he’ll focus less on national politics. Many of his pieces consider the history of western cities and locations, like this one recognizing St. Patrick’s Day:
For a time, Gaelic was the common language in the mining warrens beneath Butte, Mont., and by the dawn of the 20th century the city had a higher percentage of Irish than any other in America – including Boston.Butte was a hard-edged, dirty, dangerous town on the crest of the Continental Divide, and if a single man lived to his 30th birthday he was considered lucky. Yet entire parishes left the emerald desperation of County Cork for the copper mines of Butte, fleeing a land where British occupiers had once refused to let mothers educate their children, and where famine had killed a million people in seven years’ time.
That alone strikes my history fancy, and there’s more! He loves reading and will take down anybody who says that medium is dying, even if it’s the technological visionary Steve Jobs:
Asked about Kindle, the electronic book reader from Amazon.com, Jobs was dismissive. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”This is nonsense on several levels. But before we get to reading, let’s stipulate that Jobs is deserving of his 2007 ranking by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. Anyone who can cause revolutions in five industries, as Fortune noted, is a titan — capable of touching a billion lives.
My hero. As Northwest Pacific Correspondent, he lives in Seattle and speaks reverently for the city and the rest of the region. Egan is a skilled journalist and because his passion is so great, it spills over into a readers’ interest. Reading his writing and hearing him speak (note, you have to skip to the second half of the podcast of the previous link to hear him) makes me want to learn more about the West.
But then I read Leigh Novak’s entertaining piece on The Beachwood Reporter about her move from her Chicago homeland to Seattle. Hilarity and perhaps fewer kind words about Seattle follow.
Because by the time the train passes through the downtown streets, it is 5 minutes to 6, and I get to the parking spots only to wait for Dipshits A through E to figure out how to back their cars into slots at at passable interpretations of perpendicular angles (they are artsy here – nothing is logical). Then my walk is that much longer, and there are that many more slow-walking Seattleans that I need to breeze by on the sidewalk because, in the city from where I come, people know how to pick up their feet. It’s a survival skill. Seattleans would be stampeded if they approached Chicago with the same head-up-my-ass assertiveness to foot transportation.
Seattle is about as edgy and diverse as a Death Cab For Cutie concert in Naperville. Most people have an image that they are striving to perfect – that Seattle cool.
Not too long ago (like a week) at the very mention of Seattle I’d almost mechanically chirp that it was the Chicago of the West. Now I’m not so sure.
