YUPPIES WOUNDED IN DRIVE-BY
POLEMIC
I wrote the first draft of this sometime
in 1998. the idea was born of reading the phrase “drive-by polemic” (meant
metaphorically, not literally), and the growing culture clash in Seattle
caused by yuppie encroachment on traditionally more bohemian turf. I dug it up in the spring of
2000, revised it, and submitted it to Seattle Weekly. The revised version has
a few WTO references, and more lit-crit parody. The official location is on the Weekly site
but if they ever move it, the full text is below. For some reason, my
favorite turn of phrase in the whole piece is “...it was then that the works
of Herbert Marcuse were cited.” I
still prefer my original title: “YUPPIES WOUNDED IN DRIVE-BY POLEMIC.” Regrade rocked
by ideological assault.
BY RON FEIN DATELINE: BELLTOWN. Two dot-com marketing executives
were injured in a drive-by Marxist polemic yesterday evening. The
gangland-style ad hominem attack,
in which an innocent bystander was also lightly wounded, covered a wide range
of issues in contemporary literary criticism, semiotics, environmental
geopolitics, gender studies, and class consciousness. Police say they have no
suspects, although they are interviewing at least one lesbian. The
assault occurred at approximately 9:15pm. According to police, the
unidentified victims are both senior vice presidents at Real Networks
(Nasdaq: RNWK). The two had just emerged from Avenue One and were walking
towards Il Gambero for tartuffo and cigars when a 1983 Yugo swerved from
traffic and screeched to a halt on First Avenue, narrowly missing several
terrified valet parking attendants outside El Gaucho. Witnesses
report that the Marxists in the vehicle began to verbally harass the recently
minted millionaires through their open car windows. The assailants denounced
the materialism of the bourgeoisie, taunted their victims about police state
firing squads, and battered the surprised executives with an array of
statistics on NAFTA and Mexican illiteracy. "The
intellectual violence directed at those people was astounding," said one
still-shaken witness, who observed the incident while on a cigarette break
from her job as sommelier at the Flying Fish. "I haven't seen anything
like it since I read Franz Fanon in grad school." Seeking
to defend himself, one victim, who witnesses say may have been a Republican,
responded with a volley of historical and socioeconomic arguments regarding
the United States Constitution, and stressed a Hamiltonian--not
Jeffersonian--approach to democracy. According to one onlooker, the EMP
banners along First Avenue were "stained with the scarlet letter of
sexual hypocrisy" during this invective. Meanwhile,
the second victim, who had been emotionally wounded in the initial assault,
sought cover behind centuries of white male privilege. The two then began
lobbing explosive Ayn Rand and George Gilder quotations at the leftists--who
were caught off guard by the irreducible materiality of this fierce
rhetorical resistance. During
the neo-con counterattack, the Marxists held their position, and it was then
that the works of Herbert Marcuse were cited. Immediately thereafter, one of
the group--who police suspect may have been the leader, or at least a member
of the revolutionary vanguard--seized upon the contradictions inherent in the
global neoliberal vision by quoting Noam Chomsky's famous quip that
"Markets are always a social construction, and in the specific form
being crafted by current social policy they . . . serve to restrict
functioning democracy." HAVING DISABLED their targets with this vicious
citation, the attackers brutally pummeled them with some extremely
problematic writings by Jacques Derrida. All witnesses later stressed that
Derrida himself was not involved, only the texts. About
thirty seconds later, the assault lost a certain je ne sais quois, and the perpetrators fled the scene. They
drove away rapidly, all the time firing accusations of economic exploitation,
Third World environmental racism, and literary phallocentrism through the
vehicle's shattered rear window. Towards
the end of this final onslaught, a software developer emerging from his
luxury loft home at the Pomeroy was knocked unconscious by a stray reference
to Jean-Paul Sartre. A café denizen who observed this crossfire from Lux
later told police that this existentialist diatribe revealed an incorrect
understanding of the relationship between pour-soi and en-soi;
this may provide clues to the identity of the attackers. Police
arrived at the scene within minutes and cleared the crowd, which by this time
included some low-income people who had wandered over from Third Avenue. The
two victims, who had retreated into Axis for safety, were rushed by Infiniti
to a nearby Starbucks for emergency frappuccino therapy. An
anxious Mayor Paul Schell quickly issued a short statement assuring concerned
citizens that the streets of Seattle were still safe for shopping and
e-commerce, and that the instigators were probably from Eugene.
"Certainly these people have a right to speak," he explained,
"but not so close to Pacific Place." At
police headquarters, a source close to the investigation privately doubted
the mayor's "Eugene connection" theory, suggesting instead that
"the unreconstructed statist orthodoxy of the perpetrators suggests a
reified, centralized view of political economy" not typical of the
anarchist Weltanschauung. Belltown
residents, meanwhile, are wary of a more class-conscious Seattle--a
development that some link to last year's anti-WTO protests. "When I
moved here four years ago, you could walk from Denny all the way to Pike
without hearing one word about Mumia Abu-Jamal, let alone Theodor
Adorno," sniffed one patron at Cyclops. Anyone
with any information about the attack is encouraged to contact the Seattle
Police Department or Norman Podhoretz. |