May 23, 2023
Ah, Seattle, that environmentally obsessed city where all is decorous, the sidewalks immaculately swept, the parks rigorously trimmed, proverbial for its shimmering lakes and charming rows of variegated tents housing those of no fixed abode - and recently, too, for a municipal government with much the same level of restraint as a bus being driven downhill by the Marx Brothers. Readers may be familiar with the strange phenomenon of a civic treasury that marries heady rhetoric about its prudent stewardship of public money with a cynical disregard for the suckers who actually foot the bills. Surely our bureaucrats know no greater pleasure than when it is given to them, as the poet has it, to scatter plenty o'er a smiling land and read their fortune in the people's eyes, or, failing that, to drop a million or two without any recourse from the hapless taxpayer. Our story begins in June 2020, that era of social distancing mandates and mass race protests on American city streets, when