What's Andy Cooking?

Scandal in the Shadow of the Mountain

As many of you are already aware (if you've been keeping up with my site in the last month), Tacoma City Council was recently the forum for debate concerning a proposed 'spire' to accompany the new convention center. Proponents for the spire claimed that it would help with a new look for the city, as well as bring in business in the form of tourists who might happen to eye the tower on their trip along I-5. Skeptics, on the other hand, felt that the $7 million proposed cost (which was enough money to keep many big lenders from promising funds) was far too much to pay for something that could easily be misconstrued as 400 feet of 'penis envy.'

In a surprise turn of events, Ms. Sarah Kershaw of the New York Times, decided that our poor, backwards town with it's misguided ideas for revitalizing itself would be a good topic for a short article.

The article, titled "A City Seeks Its Identity Atop a Spire of Debate" began with the statement, "It was always the lesser city on Puget Sound: smelly, crumbling Tacoma . . . a dusty, dying, pulp-mill mudhole with an understandable ego problem." It then goes on to discuss a few of the problems that Tacoma has faced in the past few years: loss of business, serial killers, and that awful "aroma of Tacoma."

Now, I'll let you in on a little trick of mine. See, when I watch the Mariners play the Yankees in the playoffs, I always shut off the tv sound and listen to the local radio broadcast. Why? I've found that the national announcers there in the Big Apple get every dig in they can about my boys, while they always seem to have convenient excuses about why errors were made on the part of the damn Yanks.

What's the connection here? The east coast news/media sure does seem to feel good about itself at the expense of us backwards, inbreds out here. Check your facts, though, boys and girls - half the time you don't even have the story right!

As Kits Merryman pointed out in her response, "Tacoma's got more soul than The New York Times has snooty," many of the facts Sarah was relying on in her journalistic back-hand of my city were way off. For example, Tacoma was once the major northwestern hub for the railroads and still has the largest, most productive port on the Puget Sound. The problem is, neither of these facts reflect Sarah's 'always lesser' evaluation of Tacoma.

And then there's the little digs she gets in. Calling out the Tacoma Dome as "a sports and entertainment complex that looks like a giant white blob," she forgets to mention the fact that the geometrical blue-fading-to-white pattern has been specifically painted that way to reflect the mountain that hovers majesctically over it as you look from downtown. She also totally fails to mention that it's actually the world's largest free-standing wooden dome, which couples nicely with the fact that my lost little town also boasts the second largest city-run park in the US. Second only to Central Park.

But I guess second doesn't count for much out east.

See, this "dusty mudhole" of a town doesn't suffer from that "understandable ego problem" that you think it does, Ms. Kershaw. In fact, it's not very often that you'll find people crying in the streets over the fact that Seattle has a bigger rep in the area. I guess there are those of us to whom size doesn't matter.

But I digress, penis envy is exactly the situation that brought this attention to my fair town. The funny thing is, the mayor indefinitely canned plans for the spire at least a good week before Ms. Kershaw published her findings . . .