Cineplex Odeon Films
Imagine if you will a Seattle City Council dominated ideologically by John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening — or more precisely the duplicitous fictional characters they portrayed in the classic 1990 neo-noir crime dramedy film The Grifters.
As of New Year’s Day that same year the freshly hatched Seattle City Attorney and John Keister sinister doppelgänger Mark Sidran launched a decadeslong campaign making the aforementioned film a municipal political prophecy of Puget Sound sorts.
As a Seattle native and longtime resident and academically branded linguist I’ve become queasily familiar with a certain linguistic abomination within although not unique to my presently tech-sector-troubled birth city.
Consider political discourse grifting the cynical appropriation of progressive activist language for the promotion of regressive legislative scheming — a truly creepy craft continuing locally as recently as last week.
At the June 3, 2024, Seattle City Council Position 8 candidate forum held in our city’s Haller Lake neighborhood, appointed incumbent and apocryphal thought leader Tanya Woo displayed virtuoso discourse grifting skills deftly seasoned with alarming amounts of the absurd adjective “amazing.”
At the following day’s full council meeting, erstwhile and presumably present city hall toxic boss Maritza Rivera pretended to rescind her attempted slashing of our city’s Equitable Development Initiative whilst obviously planning further promotion along with corrupt cop coddlin’ Bob Kettle’s law-and-order bait-and-switch permissiveness posse of the Sidranist program known as austerity budgeting ideology.
Concerning meanwhile the aforementioned Haller Lake forum held in a dilapidated church building, let’s groove together to the Good News that Tanya Woo’s 2024 challengers — namely, Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Saunatina Sanchez — both presented credibly as genuine progressive candidates with authentic lived underclass experience and specific policy proposals deserving local municipal support in the form of democracy vouchers and such as we slowly approach the critical August 6 primary.
You — yes, you — now know what to do.
