In the last Republican debate, Trump began by displaying his hands to prove they weren’t really small and then made a point of telling us he also had no problem in the other area to which hand-size is usually connected. The next morning I read the headline, “CNN’s Reality Check Team inspects the claims at Republican debate,” and I suddenly felt very sorry for the people stuck in that job.
The scariest part of the debate was the part where the others agreed to support Trump if he became the nominee. Would-be leaders who would not lead their own families out of a burning house if Trump were the one who set it on fire.
Speaking of scary, Kim Jong Un has ordered North Korea’s military to be ready to use its nuclear weapons. If it’s not one crazy demagogue, it’s another. I reach for my anxiety meds.
It’s at times like this that I look for a way to distract myself from the certain impending doom. If global warming doesn’t get us, something else will. Whatever door you pick has the hell-goat behind it. There is no car. We need something to entertain us before we’re strapped to the hell-goat for the final ride.
All paths lead to the same place. I was reminded of this reading how the fire department won’t respond to a fire in Seattle’s homeless encampments in The Jungle without a police escort.
Well, pretty much the same conditions held true at one time during the history of Pioneer Square.
Now, Pioneer Square is a tourist destination. That tells me the future of The Jungle is looking good for entrepreneurs.
There’s no such thing as bad history, there’s only history and more history. What I’m suggesting here is not just tours of the physical Jungle, but period re-enactments.
There are jobs to be had.
There’s clearly public interest in it. Until The Jungle was found out to have a violent history, the general public wasn’t even aware of it. The Jungle was just an expanse of woods and those presumably empty spaces the elevated freeway was elevated over.
Suddenly people are talking about how they might safely inspect the area and see for themselves the conditions that are there.
In the mid-1960s, I was one of a group of high school kids who volunteered to help excavate Seattle’s Pioneer Square underground under the direction of Bill Speidel himself, the main man behind that effort and behind the tourism business that followed.
During breaks in the work, we gathered at Speidel’s office. If memory serves me right, it looked out over Washington Street between First Avenue South and South Occidental Street.
The walls were bare, unplastered brick, and Speidel drew our attention to them.
He said that, in the years of Pioneer Square before the regrade that created the underground, the walls were, of course, plastered and wallpapered. But, he said, we’ll leave them bare like this when we open the underground up for tours. Because (I’m paraphrasing and condensing a bit), people don’t want to see what was, they want to see history.
So instead of fencing The Jungle off with barbed wire, let’s make up a history for The Jungle and hire homeless people to be extras and re-enactors of it.
Did you all see the photo of the outhouse in The Jungle neatly built from scrap wood?
Hire architects to build more of those, but with running water and regular plumbing and all, so no tourist is actually inconvenienced when using them.
Staged shoot-outs are always a big draw at historic sites, and children love them, so long as there’s no special effects and people just fall down make-believe dead clutching their chests.
We can have a Disneyfied version of The Jungle to entertain us and help take our minds off the mad careening trajectory to disaster that we are all sharing.
And most importantly, the people who run the venture will make money off it. Which is what it’s always been all about anyway.