What's missing, in much of what I read in the two daily newspapers I plow through seven times a week, is any written sense of the déjà-vu I'm feeling every day.
Is it because the columnists and reporters laboring in the fields adjacent to Elliott Bay, under the spinning world of the P-I, are too busy writing to read recent American history? That's a question I can't answer.
But rather than belabor other toilers in the local journalism vineyards, I will attempt to fill the need as I see it, as is my wont - some might say bent.
Washington's two distaff senators, Murray and Cantwell, recently voted to raise the federal minimum wage to a tad over $7 an hour. But they and other allies were defeated by a majority of the self-righteous greedheads currently running the country who think $280 a week is too much for the service jobs they would never deign to do.
Washington state, meanwhile, has the nation's "highest" minimum wage.
As I read attacks on this outrage of remnant Northwestern liberalism, written by tense little business shills and flabbily irate corporate flacks piteously bemoaning Washington state's "high" minimum wage (a whopping $7.35 per hour), I can't help but think back to my wizened German grandfather, my father's daddy, who told me, when I was a boy, about his struggles to secure gainful employment upon arrival in Cincinnati at the age of 10.
He came by boat, in steerage, from Hamburg, and was soon working in some factory, all day, for $4. He laughed, this grizzled nearly-80-year-old, who had "lucked out," got a job at the downtown Post Office, and then held on tight for almost 50 years. He'd retired, owned the duplex my parents lived in, occupying the other side of the wall until his death at 80.
I didn't talk enough to him, a regret many formerly young people have as they grow older and realize they missed a chance to know from whence they came. But I did listen some.
"We didn't have two nickels to rub together," he said.
This despite the fact that Grandpa was a hard worker. He had a much better "ethic" than yours truly. He was always working, even after his retirement.
One of his retirement jobs was as a volunteer for the local Democratic Party.
"They were the only ones who cared about us," my Grandpa Wilken said, when I asked him why he bothered with local politics. (Remember, I was a child of the '60s; we were the folks who replaced "Better dead than red" with "Never trust anyone over 30").
Anyone who wishes to see where American corporations and our bought-and-sold legislators wish to take us should read about turn-of-the-20th-century America, when the many worked for the few and received none of the protections, including Social Security - something anyone born after 1945 took for granted until the election of George W. Bush.
Domestically we seem to be hearkening back to those heartless child-labor days before World War I, the war to end all wars, according to our leaders then - which didn't end wars, of course.
Militarily we only seem to be revisiting the '60s, which may have been a good time for movies, music and marijuana but was not our proudest martial moment as a country.
People walking around on Earth always seem to think their moment in the sun is different from all sunny moments that have gone before. Maybe wisdom, however paltry, is merely surviving long enough to recognize what looks surprisingly like reruns.
Bad reruns.
Dennis Wilken is a freelance columnist living in Queen Anne.[[In-content Ad]]
