More Wooden Nickels

The transportation debacle in Seattle will never end, at least as long as Mayor Greg Nickels is in charge. If Mayor Nickels isn't ducking the media, or dodging the tough questions, he's doing a great impression of Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons. Drunk on power, and bothered by his constituents, Mayor Nickels has decided that Seattle is going to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with an underground tunnel.

That's great, though I think he's strongarming the public by asserting that he'll push that project through when it has become very clear that the public doesn't want an underground tunnel. The bigger problem is that the project is underfunded by roughly a billion dollars or so. Guess who is on the hook for that money? Yeah, the taxpayers. And he'll keep soaking Seattle for every dime that he can move from the public to the private industries that pay for the juicy contracts that I'm sure he'll give away when that tunnel project comes up. And if somehow the tunnel isn't built? Well, then the Viaduct will go away, and there won't be any repair. Which means that over 100,000 cars will sit on the roads, going nowhere.

All of this would go away if the people of Seattle would stand up to him, and say enough is enough. But they won't, and he'll get elected again and again. And Seattle will only have itself to blame.

Now that's good satire!

On Thanksgiving night, David Goldstein was hosting the afternoon show in place of Dori Monson. As one of his guests, he had someone who goes by The General, and his pen name is "J. C. Christian."

I suppose at this point I should have been tipped off by the initials, but I was in the car, and not reading the text.

Anyway, the guy comes on talking about his War on the War on Christmas. He tells the story of going into a 7-Eleven and encountering someone of Middle Eastern descent. The guy behind the counter says "Happy Holidays." The General corrects him, "No, it's Merry Christmas." The two get into an argument, and the point is that The General wants everyone to be doing what he is; getting people to recognize that Christianity is the One True Choice, and to say Merry Christmas instead of anything else.

Again, red flags should have gone up saying that this is all a big put-on. But I'm buying into the whole thing completely, getting riled up about what hate speech this guy is spewing. The reason I'm picking up what J.C. is putting down is that it doesn't sound that much different from what actual people are actually doing.

To me, good satire is biting, insightful, and funny. The two programs that I cite most often as being good examples of satire, The Simpsons and South Park, make things work by blowing things out of proportion, but we also understand who they're skewering and why. In the case of J.C., not only aren't we in on the joke, the satire is so near to the truth that it's hard to pick up on.