Birthers, unicorn-haters and paranoids of all stripes are celebrating this week as Kansas’ legislature — both chambers — takes a bold stance against the application of a foreign, bronze age legal code in the state’s courts. No, not that foreign legal code — the other one, the one with the gall to not recognize corporate personhood. So Mosaic and Napoleonic Codes, the Roman Twelve Tables, the Magna Carta, NAFTA and treaties with First Americans: all kosher, until they aren’t. Which reminds me: Hittite law is totes cool, too.

This earnest, statewide snipe hunt was opposed by exactly three legislators — Tim Owens, John Vratil and Marci Francisco — who deserve nominal praise for being reasonable in the way my friend Bill Brownlee identifies himself as “Kansas City skinny.” Imagine the bricks that will be shat when the legislature discovers this tenet of Sharia law already on the books. Awkward!

I have a hoodie; I’m wearing it today, though not intentionally. I also have a little bit of ink and poorly developed de-escalation skills, and the right dog could probably find traces of marijuana in my murse. None of these things will breach the deep economic gulley in this country, the one coursed through with resentment and race.

With all the changes coming to Little Saigon in the next ten years by way of the streetcar and the redevelopment of Yesler Terrace, it’s not hard to imagine the very integrity of the neighborhood being threatened. But while taking things of value from the poor is a sad, time-dishonored tradition, I’m optimistic that the potential exists for a much happier ending this time.

Rainier Valley was in a similar position a hundred years ago, when redevelopment came by streetcar to the ethnic enclave disdainfully known as Garlic Gulch. Today, but for Borracchini’s, you’d barely recognize its Italian roots. I worry that if the city has its way, that’ll be Lam’s Seafood in fifteen years, a hard-bitten, privately owned survivor from the area’s utilitarian glory days, while the rest of the community scatters to diasporas on MLK, in Renton or on North Aurora (such was the fate of Seattle’s Filipino community after its social core was razed for Hing Hay Park forty-odd years ago).

In the 1960s, as the sun set on Jackson Street’s vaunted jazz nightclub scene, the area uphill from the underpass became an urban eddy of low rents, few services, and transactions negotiated in back alleys. I’ve emailed a friend to confirm this, but I suspect there weren’t many celebrity restaurants here at the time.* Not until after the fall of Saigon and the tide of boat people a generation later did a distinct character emerge here — a natural spot for new immigrants with little material wealth to set down roots.

Now that character will be forced into clear focus, which is why the coalition Friends of Little Saigon recently sent out an RFP for the design of a big splashy wayfinding kiosk. Here are the finalists for you to vote on. Here too is an entry that didn’t make the cut. It’s noted, with a faint puckering from the taste of sour grapes, that the most architecturally viable finalist is submitted by a firm that also answered the call for the Yesler Terrace remix.

Now more than ever — to coin a phrase — it’s important for the community of Little Saigon to step up and prove itself. The scale of the Yesler Terrace project, currently in rezoning phase, is ridonkulous: 30-story buildings, 50,000 square feet of office space, 5,000 parking spots. It’s like the Emerald City, rising straight up out of the plains outside Munchkinland in gleaming Deco perfection. You’ll recall that in the first book, people who agreed to enter the Emerald City were made to wear green-tinted eyeglasses, obstensibly to protect them from its blinding brilliance, but in fact this requirement was a “humbug” to protect the illusion that the city was greener and more magnificent than its surroundings.

Despite the brilliance of its plans in overview form, the city (Seattle, not Oz) has yet to address some core inconsistencies between word and deed: the net loss of very low-income housing on site, for example, or the devastating impact on Little Saigon’s small business owners. In addition to your standard environmental vetting of projects like this, what they need is an agreement that includes citizens, particularly immediate neighbors, in redevelopment plans at every stage: design, construction, and eventual habitation.

The citizen groups have one particular high-profile success to crib from: the agreement that came out of talks over redevelopment at the Goodwill site on Dearborn. Many of the same line items should also be agreed on for Yesler Terrace to be a healthy, sustainable expression of what Seattle values: traffic mitigation in surrounding neighborhoods and on site; the use of contractors that hire local residents, pay prevailing wages, and mentor another generation of workers through trade apprenticeships; affordable rents to community nonprofits, and material contributions to a community center and local small businesses. If all the players can manage this, they might avoid having to destroy the neighborhood in order to save it.

*UPDATE: My Seattle-born friend Ray (far left) wrote back to paint a different picture of the neighborhood in the 60s and 70s. He went to Bailey Gatzert at its old location at the north end of the José Rizal bridge. He says it wasn’t deserted at all, but rather more of an industrial area, with a chicken processing plant, some restaurant supply stores, and a place that made gloves (Macpherson’s Leather?), as well as the state liquor store and sweatshops for REI and Eddie Bauer (who in the 20s had a retail store on 2nd & Seneca). Ray also says he remembers seeing the sign for the Black & Tan, but never went in.

(h/t friend and semi-professional wag Yoko.)

So Guv’nah Brownback (R-Koch) has floated the idea of restoring some funding to the state arts commission. Naturally there are strings: the restored budget is less than a third of what was cut last year, and the proposal makes no attempt to approach the money needed to qualify for NEA grants. It also combines the arts agency with the film commission, an agency whose work is by nature temporary and project-based.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, at least not without baking the cake first. Like, with heat, man. You know? Okay, my point is this: is it so implausible that a flat $200,000 budget was the plan all along? Here’s an idea that seems like a reasonable compromise, and the man who floated it, a shrewd negotiator. The effect, though, is that not only is the bar for measuring compromise now lower, but as a bonus, the public discourse about the virtues of public arts support has shifted rightward. Rather than celebrating the obvious economic, educational and long-term benefits of a functional arts life on a state level, supporters have to use the words “essential” and “non-essential.” If you’re a person who nickels-and-dimes all public expenditures, this is a juicy plum indeed: long after you’ve replaced one fool with another, you can still ask people which they’d prefer: a jarful of piss, or a jarful of peanut butter. As if the person holding the position of politician — or artist — were more important than the institution. (This point is articulated beautifully here.)

Unsure which side of the line dividing advocacy from paranoia this lands me.

Kudos too to the Examiner for choosing sides in so many of the important issues in our community. After braving the great Utopia-vs.-Groupon battle, it’s a wonder they have any energy left. As their fig-leaf disclaimer indicates, they reserve the right to decline to publish abusive articles. But if you’re not going to exercise that right, you could at least do your readers the favor of reading up on both sides of an issue before handing the mic to just one of them. That’s how a newspaper would do it. Those folks have really taken to heart their mission of out-Weeklying the Weekly.

Max doesn’t like lima beans. But Max lives in Limabean County, where the lima bean farmers, the menu at the local diner, and the annual Lima Days festival make it hard for him to express his true nature. So, to fit in, he chokes down the mealy little booger-beans as best he can. This doesn’t make Max a lima bean lover. It makes him a guy who alters his behavior to gain acceptance. His behavior doesn’t change his basic orientation as someone who doesn’t like lima beans.

All this pretending depresses Max. So he seeks out a man named Marcus, who runs an operation that promises to help people learn to love lima beans. (The farmers love his work; also, he accepts Medicaid.) They school Max in plant biology, and in the glory of the Green Giant’s wondrous bounty, and tell him that while savoring a delectable (yet imaginary) pinto bean is tempting, it is sinful and wrong. They feed him pinto and ipecac salad. Lo and behold, Max feels even worse than he did before he came to see Marcus. And he never does learn to like lima beans. But because he continues to eat them, especially in Marcus’ presence, Marcus claims Max as a convert and crows about his success.

Max feels defeated and continues to live his life miserably as a grimly self-identifying lima bean eater, forgoing the pleasures of his beloved pinto bean. He dies withered and alone — and canonized.

The moral of the story: Don’t pray away what’s okay.

Hat tips to mi hermano David Virden, and to Edward Everett Horton for narrating the original Rocky and Bullwinkle FFT.

Here in Blogtopia, there’s nothing wrong with writing something just to pay off a nice alliterative headline. It should be different in the majors though. I’m not expecting a missionary discussion in Newsweek, but I do expect them to distinguish slippery parody from actual doctrine. We’ve survived a number of Mormon Moments already; by now we should be well inured to any predicted glory that might come from this one — or the next.

Formal complaints aside, there is a moment to savor here, though not the one Newsweek is talking about: Mitt Romney is at a point when past screwups are temporarily forgotten, and he has yet to re-yoke himself to the plow. Until the capitulation begins, he’s the most principled national figure the Republicans have right now — a bar set so low I guaran-goddam-tee you Obama loses no sleep at all. All it takes to appear rational among Republican presidential aspirants is to tell the camera that Sharia law will not be applied by U.S. courts. As Chris Rock says: what do you want, a cookie?

Also, sir, the devil is in the details. At Mormon.org, this tax-exempt group articulates its core values, many of which are hard to not share: strong families across past, present and future generations, education, freedom of choice and good citizenship. Setting aside the elevation of proselytism, you have to wonder about the fine print, though — that is, how you get from the glory of the immortal spirit to Bruce McConkie and his unique brand of self-esteem, or from “unselfishness, honesty and loyalty” to a concerted effort to deny millions of people their civil rights. In the nineteenth century, it took that tribe twenty years, give or take, to go from one end of the rifle to the other. If they had an Internet, they’d have been on both ends simultaneously.

Among religions, doctrinal nuttiness only differs in the language and the iconography, which makes Romney’s private practices and rituals irrelevant. He might as well identify himself as model minority and accuse Pawlenty of exercising white privilege. But honestly, even the Mormons’ ethnic cleansing at the hands of the very gangsters who ultimately started the Civil War* matters far less than the actual executive decisions of an actual 21st-century governor. As a citizen, what moves me is the extent to which an individual adheres to or diverges from political party doctrine. Measured thusly, Romney deserves credit for drawing the ire of those who would keep everyone on the same script, and taking mavericky stances on human-generated climate change or building a functioning statewide healthcare system.

* The Wiki does an excellent job of recreating Missouri’s 1830s political climate, and provides a lesson in how to breed a generation of thugs and victims: The governor, Lilburn Boggs, “passively saw community leaders and officials sign demands for Mormon withdrawal, and next force a gunbarrel contract to abandon the county before spring planting…anti-Mormon goals were reached in a few simple stages. Executive paralysis permitted terrorism, which forced Mormons to self-defense, which was immediately labeled as an “insurrection,” and was put down by the activated militia of the county. Once Latter-day Saints were disarmed, mounted squads visited Mormon settlements with threats and enough beatings and destruction of homes to force flight.”

Matt Wilkins makes movies the way a cheironomer makes music, or the way Kennedy plots against Castro: He assembles assemblies, describes contours and nurtures key plot points, but the title of director is ill-fitting and plausibly deniable. You could almost say his film company doesn’t even make movies — they make processes, one of which will have its Seattle premiere during SIFF this year.

Believe me, it’s not half as precious as it sounds. Marrow is dark and tough as nails. It’s about the all-too-familiar family conflicts and the backhanded way legacies are sometimes passed down.

Previous Sisyphus projects had smaller budgets and lesser visions. How small? Small enough to draw the titles for one in ketchup on a bathroom floor. That’s one reason why I’m encouraging you to see Marrow: Matt’s maturation as a filmmaker might have been inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less delightful to witness. Mainly, though, it’s a good movie, plain and simple.

Wednesday, June 1
7:00 pm
Harvard Exit, Capitol Hill

Saturday, June 4
3:30 pm
Admiral Theater, West Seattle

BUY TICKETS