We live in a commerce-driven culture.
It wasn't always thus.
My father considered himself a "working class" man. In his day, in our German-Irish neigh-borhood, that was not an insult.
He also considered himself an American of German descent. Both sides of his identity were important to him.
Most importantly, he considered himself a citizen of these United States. He would have laughed if you called him a consumer, and pitied you if you identified yourself as such.
"Things are just things," he used to say, and other than wanting a bigger house, with places where he could hide from his noisy brood, and more money for his beloved dream of retirement, he didn't talk much about material goods.
He wasn't alone. Business was considered a secondary career for those who couldn't be generals, fighter pilots, novelists, or simply be born rich enough to jet-set before there were jets.
Sinclair Lewis, America's first Nobel Prize winner for Literature (1930), even wrote a novel satirizing a pathetic, chamber of commerce-type go-getter, "Babbitt," whose mythical environs of Zenith were rumored to be our own hometown - Cincinnati.
Of course, bemoaning what the corporatization of this country has done to American culture, and to the deluded majority who judge their own and everybody else's worth by what they drive, where they live and how they dress, isn't anything but the revival of an already-lost cause.
It would take a disaster of unknown proportions to really make Americans wake up and take notice of what has happened to them. You might as well be writing about how Christ has been all but mar-keted out of Christmas, another annual stalking horse for news- paper pundits.
But just because it has been said many times before doesn't make it less true, or less sad.
I was driven to these picked-over recollections by something I read in The Seattle Times last week. Mayor Greg Nickels, the former populist who has hitched his mayoralty cart to the biggest businessmen of them all, shelved his planned proposal to charge developers fees to create open space in six of the city's fastest-growing urban areas.
Nickels cited the fact that there was little "enthusiasm" for the plan. Of course, Nickels proposed these so-called impact fees during his reelection campaign of 2005. Anyone carefully auditing Big Boy's performance wouldn't be chastised in this corner for doubting His Rotundity was ever serious about taxing his developer buddies in the first place. Sounded good on the campaign trail, though.
The green spaces would have been placed in Uptown, downtown, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill/First Hill, the University District and Northgate - areas expected to add a combined 45,000 residents in the next 20 years. All jammed into the build-fast and sell-high boxlike condos sprouting up like sickly, evil mushrooms in Capitol Hill and along my own Valley Street as I write and you read.
Business is about making money and making money and making money. That's why this culture is in such deep waters morally and spiritually, and is viewed as dishonest in many corners of the world where others, not quite as blinkered yet by corporate greed, suspect many of our freedom excursions for what they are: moneymaking schemes for already-wealthy individuals and their pet corporations.
And that's why parks paid for by developers didn't stand a chance.
But don't believe me. Listen to the logic of one Joe Quintana, chairman of the Seattle Business Coalition, as reported by The Seattle Times, no hotbed of provocateurish liberals.
Quintana told the Times his group opposed the fees because they would have charged business for something enjoyed by the general public.
And here I thought business was our friend. They said they were.
And I thought we, the general public, were their reason for existence. They say that we consumers are their biggest concern.
Maybe we just don't need anything green as bad as business needs the long green.
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