The Housing Phenomenon on Capitol Hill

We have lived on an area of Capital Hill for over thirty years. We came here to defray our taxes, buying what was for us a very expensive house so as to maximize our tax deduction. What an investment! In the last three decades our $75,000 has become something like a $million.

There is a price for anything. The community we joined was wonderful .. a mix of working class folks, often African American, pioneering Yuppies, UW types like ourselves trying t find housing we could afford near the YooDub, nunneries, priesteries, Rajneeshees, Gayfolk, and the wonderful arts community. Block parties were held at least three times a year.

As time has past, the diversity has declined. No one comes to block parties. Today's owners of homes on our block now range from a few docs, a couple of profs, some Microsoft biggies, a few oddities (us?) left over from the old days and one heir to a major American corporation.

Now we may have gone assymptotic. The house next door used to belong to the O'Briens. A Catholoc family in a neighborhood built for catholic families., Lots kids. dad an ex basketball star from Seattle Univ who went on to a baseball career and ended up as associate manager of the much missed Kingdome. Johny O'Brien was a Seattle Icon. The O'Brien house, a Tudor built on the bones of a Sears' catalog house seemed to be a beauty.

Now for $1.5 million some investors bought Johnie's house. The agent told Johnie that he had hit the Jackpot. What about the investors??? They seem to be afficonadoes of Capital Hill, maybe with romantic ideas about this place. But, as nice as they may be the new owners found a lot of problems .. rot, house built to close to ground ..and now they have utterly gutted the place. All that exists is the framing. The real estate agent tells me they expected most of this! Talking to neighbors .. it seems the investors expect to make a profit! How??????

How can this be? They need to lower the lot by a foot and a half to raise the foundation, replace a lot of the framing, build a new house in the old shell. They MUST have spent a hundred thou just on the disassembly. What is the framing and foundation worth? Do they expect to sell the house for 3 million? Nothing on this street has ever sold for the $1.5 they have already spent. I am not sure what to hope for. I they succeed we could be forced out by the taxes. If they feel, our property values could be hurt. What of they decide to abandon the the project?

Funny thing .. someone emailed we, "Will" claiming I had misspelled "Capitol" as "Capital". Typoes aside, perhaps Freud was helping?

A Funeral

Yesterday we attended a funeral at St Joseph's Church for Bruce Gilliland. Bruce was a Professor at our medical school and one of the calmest, wisest figures i have yet met. This entry is not about him, it is about the funeral.

A lot of people came, many of whom I recognized from the UW Medical School. There was a bagpiper and a priest, 2 daughters, 1 son and a wife named Collins. My understanding is that Bruce was Presbyterian, so the use of St. Joe's .... I assume ... was to comfort Bruce's wife. The odd thing about this is that most of the service was about Jesus and about Bruce going to be with Jesus. This is such a beautiful image. Certainly for the living person it may be a great comfort. Was it Dr. Gilliland's wish as well? I don't think he had converted but perhaps it does not matter. The wish, at the very least, was well meant.

Of more concern to me was the passage from the Roman Bible chosen by Father Paul Fritterer. The choice was Matthew 8. In this passage, Jesus is approached by a Centurion. A Roman Centurion, kind of like a Lt Colonel in Iraq. A Commander of 80 men, Roman soldiers, occupiers of Jesus' homeland.

This Centurion asks Jesus to help, "Et dicens Domine puer meus iacet in domo paralyticus et male torquetur," his servant it seems was ill and the Colonel wanted to ask Jesus to heal the sick person. Jesus was willing but the Colonel demurred, claiming that the home of a Roman Officer was not grand enough to host the great healer. The Officer went further and pointed out that Jesus, as a great man, must have same ability to command that the Officer had himself. Couldn't Jesus just command the healing?

These verses follow:

8:10. And Jesus hearing this, marvelled; and said to them that followed him. Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel.

8:11. And I say to you that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven:

8:12. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

8:13. And Jesus said to the centurion: Go, and as thou hast believed, so be it done to thee. And the servant was healed at the same hour.

The good priest saw this as a wonderful message of the faith of a gentile in Jesus. To Father Fritterer the Centurion was being humble about his home, though I wondered if the Roman may have felt unease at asking a Jewish holy man into the hime of an occupier. Perhaps the priest was sending a message to Dr. Gilliland's wife that Bruce's life, while not Catholic, would be seen by Jesus as a life of service and faith?

In that way, Mathew 8 was appropriate and loving. As an aetheist and a Jew I am jealous of those whose loved ones live on in Heaven.

But, I am Jew. I read this differently from Father Fritterer and, that reading is part of the last 2000 years of antisemitism. Why? Imagine that Jesus was a Chassid, a holy Rabbi, in Russian occupied Poland and the Centurion was a Commisar. The Russian is there, and proud of his duty in suppressing the religion and freedom of the Poles. Yet, Jesus not only praises the Comissar for his faith but goes on to exult about the horrors to come under Communist rule. Mathew's Jesus says,

"And I say to you that many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

in simpler words,

"Your faith is well meant to me and I will welcome all gentiles to the worship of the true God, but the Jews will be cast out and suffer pain."

These are the words of the Church of Rome. They are words that forgive the Romans, and their heirs the Church, for what would be millenia of hatred. In the Jewish tradition, the tradition of Hillel the great Pharisee, Jesus may well have said to the Centurion that all good people, even a the lowly servant of a Roman Officer, have equal rights before God. Those words would not have been followed by the prediction of a cruel future for the Jews.

These are words that justify the Jewish wars, the Arch of Titus, the Crusades, the Inquisition and, perhaps, the Holocaust.

I hope it does not offend my Catholic friends to point out how hateful this verse is to a Jew.

The Perils of a Professional Army

Take a look at this blog entry at Huffington on the conditions for Iraqui vets at Walter Reed.

But why is anyone upset? When we did awy with the Draft, we hired a professional Army. We pay these guys and gals to die and suffer and be glorified for doing so. Why pay attention to those who have been injured on the job?

We should have mandatory, universal service. Everyone should serve, not just to be fair but to share responsibility.

Think of the opportunities for service and the effect of knowing that OUR kids were in service. A Teacher Corps might revolutionize education not just be droppi9ng the labor costs (conscripts are cheaper then Union members) but be raising awareness of the crappy conditions in many of the schools these soldiers who serve in.

Imagine the good it would do to the polity if American Peace Corps kids safety depended on the support the receive while distributing AIDS drugs in the Congo!

And howsa about them illegals? You snuck in? Now you wanna be a citizen? Kool ..sign up here for your two years in Baghdad!


The image was taken at Fort Lewis. Seems to be a soldier, a boy in drag? Don't ask and I won't tell!

Decline of Radio Talk

Seattle once had pretty good talk shows. Then something happened. The right erupted with tabloid vitriol ... Rush Limbaugh, the drugged voice of anti feminazis everywhere, engendered Medved, Lapin and Savage. KIRO remained an island of middle roadism. Some of this reamins ... their all star property is Dave Ross, a voice of reason. KIFO also runs Ronnie Reagan II, a pleasant voiced liberal apologist for his Dad. Then there is a guy called Monson, more or less Rush without the hate speech. Otherwise KIRO this has gone down the tubes, so to speak. Now we have hosts whose erudition is well represented by Ron and Don ...
These guys (the two book ends), prove that one can look as dumb and dumber as one sounds. They chase each others inane comments ... pitying each other for having fled from Katrina threatened jobs in N'Awlins' Big East for the Big Wetness of Seattle. If these guys have abny cultural value it is growing as a fungus on the walls of their former apartments in the French Quarter.

This began with an email from a colleague of mine, Gina. She is an African American with a great deal of concern and commitment to her community. Gina knows I am interested and shared some legislation she was interested in. This legislation, if passed would allow use of State funds to help AA students attend traditional Black colleges.

My response:

Gina

Thank you for sharing this. I respect you a great deall for participating in this sort of activity.

I would like to share my own, rather negative response to this sort of legislation. Personally I would disagree with this bill and even if it were passed I suspect it might have serious constitutional issues.

A. Concerns

1. From An AA Perspective

I apologize if this is presumptuous. I am obviously not an AA. However, as it happens my life has often become intertwined with your community and I do have feelings about tha AA community. Crudely put, I admire many AA and feel an identity between the modern AA story and my own people’s story over a longer period.

a. The choice of one of these schools is something I would applaud BUT it is a very personal one. Asking the State to support it has a supplicant flavor that I think looks bad because it makes it appear as if AA wish to be treated not only as a minority but as having special needs that do not apply to other under represented minorities.

b. Rather than recognizing these special schools for their unique qualities, the act singles them out as places for dealing with a minority problem. If it is desirable for an AA t g to Morehouse, why isn't it also desirable for a Lumni person or for that matter a farmworker Hispanic kid? Or .. why wouldn't some rich white kid from the Highlands benefit as well?

2. From a WA state perspective

a. Our interests as a State should be in improving the numbers of Americans who represent our mixed heritage who want to live and work here. This does the opposite. In effect it says, we can not serve this need at home so we are sending our kids away to other states.

b. These schools are only unique because of theoir relationship to the AA community. There are other similar schools that apply t other communities. To cute an extreme example ... Dartmouth was FOUNDED esp for indigenoous Americans and still has a special scholarship for these kids. If WA state has historic ethnic debts, as we do, this has to be #1.

3. From a Jewish perspective

The term "people of color" is to me, a Jew who has been persecuted for crimes unrelated to my skin color, intrinsically racist. I feel we ... not Jews but all Americans .. need to get out of this "people of color trap." The term raises a false issue. America's race issues are NOT based on color, bigotry is a lot more complex than that and we have under and over represented groups whose prejudicial issues certainly do not reflect skin color. Here are a few examples:

a. Appalachia
The US still has not recovered from the coal-mining era. We have a sizeable community of poor whites whose children have little hope of ever being educated in a competitive way. Washington state has what I fear are the beginnings of a similar issue with the unemployed folks of former lumber areas.

b. Caribbean and African immigrants
I think you know what i am going to say. Skin color is NOT a gtood criteria for defining a deserving AA. 75% of the "black" kids at Harvard are now of non-american parentage. As an effort toward diversity, this means this group is way OVER represented at Harvard. In my experience with the STAR program, the same is true here. Of the URM students I see every summer, it is RARE to meet someone whose parents are both of American descent and frequent to find kids whose "colored" parent is not of American birth. Statistics form City College in New York also show that "colored" Caribeans and Africans folks achieves right up there with Koreans and SE Asians.

c. Hispanics

This irritates me greatly. I have met Brazilian immigrants who are receiving help because they are Hispanic. (Actually the case in my mind was a Brazilian-African). By what weird perspective are Hispanics more people of color than Italians or Iranians? Are white skinned Hispanics of US origin less deserving than dark skinned ones?

d. "Asians"

Isn't this obvious? Equating Japanese Americans with their high level of success with Pacific Islanders is absurd. The US really abused the Phillipino people. In my own lifetime, the US Navy enlisted Phillipinos as personal servants to American born (I assume this include AA) officers.

4. From the perspective of other “people of color.”

Why would this be more reasonable than supporting a Catholic American, esp. a Hispanic, in her desire to attend Gonzaga? Color is poor criteria for meeting Dr. King's dream.

B. An Alternative

I think the AA community has not yet understood one wonderful change. Many Americans regard the AA as leaders. Barack Obama is not an aberration nor is his success simply an issue of his being African/American vs. the descendent of an AA family. In many ways, AA have taken on the mystique of Asian immigrants and before them of my people. There is an intrinsic American respect for a people whose immigrant vigor drives them to success. This is the clear message of the silliness of the reaction to Senator Biden’s words. What I am sure he meant to say is that Obama, along with Mfume, Bill Gray, Condy Rice, Norm Rice, Duvall Washington, Ron Sims, and others of their generation have climbed to a new level. Unlike previous African descended Americans who we see as heroes because of their are fights as blacks or for blacks, these are all folks admired by other Americans because of the values of an African heritage. This is similar to Asian and Irish and German heritages of similar folks in the past ..it makes these people better Americans. I believe all these Americans represent the success of Dr. King’s dream speech.

The contrast with previous Black candidates for President is obvious. Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson were articulate candidates. But their candidacies were not seen as credible in the sense that no one took the possibility of Jesse or Shirley seriously. There as no one who wondered, would ALL Americans benefit from Jesse or Shirley’s backgrounds? I won’t mention Sharpton. As someone who identifies more than a bit with your community, he is an embarrassment.

Let me give you some historic examples form other peoples, Brandeis is widely seen not only as a great Justice but as having brought his heritage as a Jew, our struggle and beliefs, to the Supreme Court. The elder Kennedy brothers are seen asparadigms of the contributions of the Irish to America. Thurgood Marshall is seen as much more than the first AA Justice, he brought his experiences to the court in a way that served all Americans.

What I am trying to say to the people behind this legislation is that they diminish themselves by trying only to serve the needs of AA kids. I would propose something like the following instead:

Realizing The Dream in Washington State

In the years since the Dream Speech, America has come a long way toward achieving Dr. King’s vision. Today’s Americans treasure and benefit from cultural diversity. This is especially true of the contributions to all of us by underprivileged groups who have had to transcend the prejudices of our society based on differences in religion, race, or ethnicity.

Washington State has, in some ways, not had the full benefit of these changes because our ethnic mix does not represent the mixture of all Americans. At the same time we have our own unique history due to the recent advent of non native peoples in the Northwest. It is in all of our interests, as citizens of this state, therefore to seek cultural diversity in education. The purpose of this Act is to develop a pilot program designed to increase the diversity in our institutions of higher education by supporting exchange programs between our State institutions of higher education and American schools with traditional focus on minority groups that are under represented or underserved in our State. Our hope is to encourage attendance at these other schools by Washington State students fro all ethnic groups and to encourage students form those institutions to attend Washington State colleges and universities.

To achieve this end, we will establish a fund to support Washington State Dream Scholarship Grants. Any Washington State Institution or group pf Institutions may apply for one of these grants along with a participating traditional minority school located in another state or territory of the United States. Institutions applying for these grants must agree to accept exchange students from the partner schools with full academic credit for course work completed at either site.

Sister institutions participating in this program must agree to accept tuition as paid to each other as covering the full non residential costs of education during the exchange.
Washington Sate students participating n the State prepayed education program would be
free to sue those funds to apply for positions in the exchange program. Degrees will be
awarded from the sponsoring school.

Use of Dream Funds:

Programs will be developed at the discretion of the partnering institutions subject to the following guidelines:

a. Priority for financial support for students while in the Dream program, must go to students on the basic of financial need. This is intended to allow those students
not in need of additional support to participate in the exchange. b. Funds may be used to cover costs of tuition differences between institutions as well as travel and housing costs incurred by students during the exchange. c. No more than 20% of the entire fund may be used to administer the program including fund allocated to faculty exchanges ot promote the interaction.

d. The Dream program will not include institutions explicitly religious intent that would violate the Washington State Constitution.

e. The Dream program may be used for professional education including the health sciences, law, business, and technology lading to advanced degrees.

f. Priority will be given to a matching fund meant to assist Washington State and the partner institutions raise private funding to support the Dream effort.

On Public Sevice

The Seattle POst Intelligencer ran an editorial on Feb 19 endorsing a raise in judicial pay to levels more competitive with the private, legal sector.

Unfortunately, The editorial misses a fundamental
accounting issue: the current value of having a life time salary!

200,000 dollars paid for a lifetime is an lot more valuable than
200,000 dollars per year. A Justice would need about 4 million
dollars in an annuity fund to provide comparable value. I doubt many
law firms offer that sort of recompense.

While I sympathize with Chief Justice Roberts, an appeal based on the
excessive pay to recent law graduates is not as convincing as a free
marketer, like the Justice, should know. When we hear that candidates
are turning the job down or when any of the justices leave for better
pay, then we may need to worry.

A better issue may be financial issues other than salary. Moving to
DC, as one example, may make huge demands on a Justice's housing
costs, especially if she or he wishes to maintain their original home
as well. There are also likely costs in the form of loss of business
opportunities due to ethical concerns. The latter issue may be
unsolvable, but we obviously can deal with the former issue by
offering a generous, non taxable allowance for housing and
transportation. We already do just this for the heads of the
Executive Branch and I have not noticed a deficit of candidates for
those jobs.

This is a general issue in paying public servants even without the life time service. Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House with the minimal finances of a General. he left as
a multi-millionaire. Similar magic enriched Bob Dole, Harry Truman, Bill Clinton, etc. Clearly high office entail financial benefits not immediately obvious on the W2.

I also suspect President Obama or President Clinton would be pleased
to see some of Mr. Bush's appointees seek better pay in the private
sector!

Witness to a Crucifiction

I was recently in Ventura California where I spent the afternoon photographing in Grant Park ... atop the hills above this coastal town. As I drove into the park there was disclaimer posted by the city .. in effect claiming no responsibility for the cross in the park. It appears that the cross is somehow on private land, a slip of land just 30 feet or so from the western edge of the park and conveniently overlooking the city. Ah, the Constitutionality of it all.

Anyhow, while i was there this guy crucified himself .. or seemed to. He stood before the rough hewn cross, absorbing the rays from Apollo, sometimes stretching his arms, lost in a trance most of the time. He saw nw raking pictures and smiled.

I have never understood the mystery of all this. "What would Jesus do?" Crucify himself? Suffer? Glorify inhumanity of man? Of course, if you are a polytheist or a believer in the Deity as multiple personalities, and accept the Jesus persona as a manifestation of The One Deity, then what Jesus would do is not your concern, all you need to to glory on the light of Jesus' care for you. The image of a loving God transends our objective vision of the reality of the world.


I wonder what sort of person crucified himself that day?