Jonathan Raban moved from London to Seattle in 1990. His recent books include Hunting Mister Heartbreak
, Bad Land
, Passage to
Juneau, and the forthcoming Waxwings
. An earlier work, Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth
, was published in 1979. This article originally appeared March 22 in the Guardian
of London.
michael doucett
British ex-patriot and Seattleite Jonathan Raban.
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US public hardens behind war but radical fringe finds its voice, read a headline in the Guardian last week. Not trueor at least not true in my corner of the U.S., where the leafiest and richest suburbs were thickly placarded with No Iraq War signs, and where, on weekend protest marches against the Bush White House, prosperous bourgeois families, more usually seen tramping around the downtown art galleries on the first Thursday evening of each month, hugely outnumbered the bearded peaceniks of the radical fringe. A couple of weeks ago, Speight Jenkins, the general director of the Seattle Opera, told Seattle Weekly that in the course of a season of heavy fund-raising he hadnt so far encountered one person who was in favor of the war: Fringe radicals are not usually people who can fork out seven-figure checks to keep the Ring Cycle going. At the private elementary school attended by my daughter, No Iraq War bumper stickers adorn the Range Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers of the soccer moms, along with slyer, milder protest slogans, like Carter for President in 04. At dinner parties and in public meetings, the prevailing mood before March 19 was pitched somewhere between aghast hilarity and downright despair as Seattle awaited a war in which it appears to want no part at all.
Some of this might be put down to simple provincial isolationism: Squatting on its deep backwater of the Pacific, walled-in by mountain ranges, 2,800 miles from Washington, D.C. (known here, without affection, as the other Washington), Seattle is congenitally suspicious of enthusiasms hatched inside the Beltway. But its view of the larger world is shaped by a different ocean. When Seattles sleep is disturbed by geopolitical bad dreams, it is more likely to be visited by the specter of Pyongyang (to which it is the nearest big city on the American mainland) than Baghdad. For Seattle, militant Islamism begins in Indonesia, not North Africa or Arabia, and Indonesian container ships dock at a terminal which, from the point of view of an Al Qaeda operative, is conveniently located right next to the downtown business district. The city is a potential sitting duck for terrorist dirty bombs and for North Korean nuclear warheads, but the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction seems remote.
Seattle is a liberal-Democratic stronghold. The 7th Congressional District, which includes the city along with a good chunk of its suburbs, is a constituency so comfortably settled in its voting habits that the congressman from Seattle can afford to voice left-leaning opinions that would have most of his House colleagues quickly booted from office. The incumbent, now in his eighth term, is a cheerfully uninhibited exchild psychiatrist named Jim McDermott who rather resemblesif you can imagine such a thingTam Dalyell with working-class cred. McDermott has been known as Baghdad Jim since last autumn, when, interviewed on live network television from Iraq, he lectured America on the number of infant deaths caused by sanctions. He seems to rejoice in the nickname. The states senior senator, Patty Murray, born and raised in the Seattle suburbs, got into big national trouble when the Drudge Report publicized her meeting with a group of high-school students in Vancouver, Wash., where she asked the kids to consider the very Seattleish question of why Osama bin Laden should be widely regarded as a folk hero in the Middle East. (Answer: He invested in the local infrastructure in Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and we havent done that. For a few days, all hell broke loose on the right-wing talk-radio stations.) Long ago in the 1930s, FDRs postmaster general, James A. Farley, remarked that there were the 47 states and the Soviet republic of the state of Washington, and Seattle likes to deliver occasional reminders that it was once the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobbliesas it did in 1999 with the WTO demonstrations.
That said, Seattle is by no means anti-war in general. It houses the main plant of Boeing, the company that made the city rich in World War II. Its ringed with large military basesthe naval air station on Whidbey Island, naval bases at Everett and Bremerton, the Army base of Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force base near Tacomaand military spending of one sort and another puts $8 billion a year into the state economy. There was an almost-daily slot on the local TV news for pictures of tearful farewells on the bases as the forces deployed for the Gulf and of toddlers waving handkerchief-sized American flags at the receding sterns of aircraft carriers sailing north up Puget Sound. The signs saying Support Our Troops and No Iraq War are complementary rather than oppositional. It is this war for which Seattle has little or no stomach.
Theology comes into it. When I first moved here, I cherished the fact that Seattle has one of the lowest churchgoing rates in the nation, and when it does go to church, it likes its religion to be on the cool and damp sideLutheran, Catholic, or Episcopalian, for preference. On his Web site, McDermott cautiously admits that he attends the Episcopalian cathedral of St. Marks, which diplomatically excuses him from owning up to any particular belief, or disbelief, in God.
