My extremely subtle effort to register my annoyance with the City of Seattle’s bureaucracy through careful selection of postage stamps continued today. I got a parking ticket for parking in front of a curb ramp last week, which was annoyingly placed mid-block, and, even more annoyingly, apparently not a crime unitl last week. I’d been parking there for 3 years with no problem. You’d think they’d start with a warning.

But of course, I have no real case and no time to fight it, so I paid the ticket. Consider Darth Vader to be my extended middle finger to the arbitrary enforcement of parking rules in the Emerald City. But listen, Seattle, there’s a way you can make this right. Just build me a citywide monorail with my thirty-eight bucks and all is forgiven.

And that’s where the silliness of this “advisory” vote really comes through: you have to look beyond the questions and base your vote on a complex calculus of what you think will happen, what’s politically feasible, etc. And I think that’s why most of the local editorial boards are endorsing the “no-no” position.

Anyway, in order to register my utmost disgust with this whole absurd process, I stuck a Sugar Ray Robinson stamp on my ballot, indicating my desire to punch our local officials in the metaphorical face. Go get ‘em, Sugar Ray!

Also recommended: This Friends of Seattle post, which reminds us that cities are for people, not cars.

With Ford Mustang owners in his pocket, can the White House be far behind?

Anyway, despite all the talk of $4 million earmarks and “bringing home the bacon,” none of the speeches were as good as the pulled pork. Nevertheless, I did what any self-respecting blogger would do, and snapped some pics with my phone cam:

This is the kind of ceremony you get when your project has political heavies willing to go to bat for it. Meanwhile, in less-politically-favored transportation news, this is what the Seattle Monorail looks like these days:

So sad.

I’m not an archecture critic, but I am a big fan. And the first thing that hits me about the courthouse is its obvious Asian overtones. The green roof and awning tilted upward immediately make me think of Asia. I don’t know how many other U.S. Federal buildings are designed like this, but the symbolism is profound. Washington, D.C., was built in the image of Paris. Most Eastern U.S. cities were similarly constructed with Europe in mind. But that’s all in the past. “That’s old Europe,” as Don Rumsfeld might say.

To see this building is to see our country doing an about face. We’re looking West across the Pacific Ocean, to Asia. It’s a reorientation (pun intended) that speaks volumes about where America’s future lies.

The degree to which China, Japan, and India will shape America’s future is only starting to be understood. Over the next 100 or 200 years, our Trans-Pacific relations will absolutely dwarf our Trans-Atlantic alliances. The West Coast will become America’s front door, and Ellis Island will be a quaint little artifact in the backyard. Already, the Asian immigrants streaming into Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, often aboard cramped shipping containers, are paving the way.

This all came spinning into my head over the last couple of weeks after finishing Robert D. Kaplan’s wonderful book, An Empire Wilderness, and finally seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, vol. 1 on DVD. Kaplan talks about how America first re-oriented itself from a North-South nation to an East-West nation. I won’t go into detail about the book, but it got me thinking about the long-term future of America. He writes that the only thing separating America from previous global empires (Britian, Rome, etc.) is that technology has changed rapidly under America’s watch, whereas it remained more or less static for the 1,000 years of Roman rule, for example. We will be saved by our ability to adapt to change.

Kill Bill is a collage. Tarantino is riffing on Japanese kung-fu movies. A former video store clerk, Tarantino’s main influences are not real life, but other movies. He’s a DJ: borrowing other films’ styles, stealing actual scenes, casting certain actors purely for the meta-theatrical joy of putting them on screen because of who they are. He even references his previous works (the black-suit-white-shirt-black-tie combo). It’s no surprise than, that he got Wu Tang Clan’s RZA to do the soundtrack. Tarantino is a thief, and thievery is the future of art.

Finally, my generation grew up under the spectre of a rising Asia, notably Japan. We didn’t look to the painters of Europe for cultural salvation. We looked to Tokyo, where Super Mario Bros. 3 was being developed under tight security. All the cool stuff was happening in Japan. We just had to wait for the English translation.

I’m not really sure where this is all leading except to say that it’s powerfully clear that America’s survival, in the long term, depends on whether we can find a niche for ourselves in a Trans-Pacific world. I realize I’m not the first to observe this. But staring at that courthouse brought it all into sharp relief.

I was at Seattle’s wonderful MOHAI museum yesterday, where they have an exhibit celebrating the first round-the-world flight, in 1924, which took off from Seattle. One of the pilots wrote this passage in his journal en route from Belgrade to Baghdad. In case you can’t read it, here’s what it says:

From Baghdad to Belgrade, July 9 – July 12, 1924

We crossed the snow-capped Taurus by the route of the Berlin Baghdad Railway. When the airplane comes into its own, it is destined to have an immense influence on the peace of the world. it will bring all peoples into contact, and war will soon be out of date.

Keep in mind that this is just 10 years after Belgrade was the epicenter of World War I, and only a couple years after the creation of the state of Iraq, and the first Iraqi kick-the-Brits-out revolution.

There’s a joke in here somewhere about Social Security and the “third rail.” I’ll leave it to those clowns over at the Cato Institute to fill in the blanks.