Seattle Weekly's ex-editor-in-chief Knute Berger has penned his final Mossback column, my favorite alt-news column for years. His brand of honesty has been my weekly city-roundup fix. And, for one thing, I love my fixes. Giving up Mossback will be difficult. And there's no hard and fast detox for it, either.
But anyone who's met him might have predicted the tone his last column would likely assume. For he is, and I mean no disrespect, the epitome of old-school Seattle. And not even the opportunity to give a few final words of hopefulness to a captivated audience could lift him up past this lean toward pessimism, a trait I find in many that have grown up here and now must endure the city's growth spurts while they struggle to make themselves feel safe.
Maybe, in the long run, it's less painful to have a city like New York as a reference point, where the land was pulverized into the maximum per-capita square footage in terms of living space way before I was born, and where one grows up to believe a city will never, ever be anything other than noisy, intense, addicted and problem-riddled.
In all honesty, Knute would be mistaken for a homeless man in my old blue-collar Lower East Side neighborhood where men are clean shaven and smell of aftershave always. But here, he is an icon in a city that still admires a scraggly beard, especially when it fronts a brilliant mind. Which, in his case, I believe it does.
Still, exiting on a direful note about the future of Seattle is not a "humble" opinion as the Mossback claims, for he has far too much influence for that. It is a curmudgeonly one, however, and maybe that's why he praises other curmudgeons in his closing paragraph instead of uplifting the city that gave him such commentary status in the first place.
And though I think I'd enjoy the civic-minded group he is now gratefully a part of because, frankly, I need more of their un-PCness, proactive commitment and righteousness in my conversations around my condo where most are more interested in the best happy-hour deal than what the city is up to politically or otherwise.
Back to my point: Knute chose to leave us skeptical about the fate of Seattle, which, if one reads between the lines, seems more like a personal sense of diminution because he is at a loss as to what else to do with it.
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