MISCmedia for 5/9/01
A Darker Shade of Pale

I CONTINUE TO RECEIVE letters and emails asking me to stop using the word "yuppie" in the online column.

So, at least for today, I'll use a different term to describe the only people Seattle's political and media elites care about--the Monoculture.

In the Monoculture aesthetic, everyone who lives in Seattle (or at least everyone who deserves to live here) is affluent, childless, in an office-type profession, educated yet decidedly non-intellectual, "culturally aware" yet relentlessly middlebrow, "active in the community" yet devoutly pro-business, a devout attender of high-volume, high-priced restaurants, and a strong supporter of "diversity" just as long as everybody looks and behaves identically blandly.

Entire retail empires, publications, and political campaigns are built on this dubious premise.

And now, there's a slick free monthly, Colors NW, showing that you don't have to be of pale Euro descent to be part of the Monoculture.

The magazine's second issue, out now, has a Bon Marche ad on the back (why, by the way, doesn't the Bon still have a real website?), smaller inside ads for mortgage consultants and liposuction clinics, and features within about the Film Festival, a dot-com executive, and pricey restaurants.

The Bon model is Asian American. The liposuction ad's before-and-after model and the dot-com exec are both African American. The restaurant reviews hype "upscale soul food" and "down home Japanese." Otherwise, they're hard to distinguish from similar features in Monoculture-obsessed media.

"Yeah," you might be saying if you've already read the mag, "but what about the cover story on the history of Asian American political activism in Seattle? Or the profile of Samoan hiphop DJ Kutfather? Or the little back-page essay by a Seattle U student advisor on the identity confusion resulting from her own half-white, half-Filipino heritage?"

Yes, the mag has all those things. But these three pieces depict their subjects as ideal citizens of Seattle-The-Good. Even the Asian-activism story is written as a tale of earnest progressives striving to rectify wrongs that all nice Reagan Democrats can agree are wrong (racist ad images, for example).

And in the context of the magazine's more consumerist material, the profiled activists get the same overall aura you see in corporate-sponsored Martin Luther King Day ads. That is, they become seen as out-of-the-box-thinkin' political entrepreneurs, the social-justice equivalents of "new economy" CEOs.

But that's not necessarily all that bad. After all, there's something to be said for the idea that ethnic striving oughta be about making it, succeeding in the melting-pot and taking pride in that success.

Even if it means conforming to the white-dominated zeitgeist of the Monoculture, and not to the "true diversity" zeitgeist of white lefties such as myself.

IN OTHER NEWS:A tiny news brief reveals what critics of "get tuff" welfare policies have long claimed--that draconian aid regulations cost more in paperwork and enforcement costs than they save in denied benefits.

NEXT:"The arts" as an economic development scheme.

ELSEWHERE:

Some folk in Boston are archiving those "we'll set your poem to music" records. The ones they don't consider good enough to reissue on CD, they've posted online (found by The Interstellar Cafe)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Some things I've been up to lately.
• A preview of our forthcoming photo show (opening June 2).
• Saving transit from the transit planners.
• Parts one and two of some reviews of sites who asked to be reviewed here.
• The possibly rose-colored memoirs of a former Seattle Weekly editor.
• Previewing the great Jewish-baseball graphic novel.
• Images signifying nothing.
• A partial defense of fast food.
• An attempt to save a beloved Net radio station.
• Turning off Turn Off TV Week.
• The real problem with delivery dot-coms.
• The Bush regime compared with the novel Underworld.
• A Chant, re: the art of Art Chantry.
• Joey Ramone reaches the ultimate sedation.
• John Keister gets canceled again, apparently.
• Tulipomania redux.
• Parts one, two, three, four, and five of a tour through every home I've lived in.
• Parts one and two of a guest columnist's reminiscences of beer, basements, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.
• Mulling still more potential changes to the site.
• Memories of the radio station formerly known as KCMU.
• Thanks to the Net, some folks are writing more. That's supposed to be a bad thing?
• A special offer on slightly-hurt Losers.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia