#sorry for many Hinterland quotes im just currently re-reading the book

[fatehbaz]

The thing that people get most consistently wrong about Seattle is the rain. [...] The truth, though, is that the rain hardly even falls. It just hangs in a slow drizzle, heavier in some areas, lighter in others, disappearing and reappearing at a moment’s notice as the whim of the many microclimates shifts unpredictably. In most seasons, it’s simply ambient -- a thin atmosphere of mist plummeting in slow motion. It doesn’t soak you in one large, catastrophic wave, like the torrential downpours of our sister rainforests in the tropics. Instead, it joins with the darkness of  the northern winter to grind you down with a miserable, slow indifference. Your clothes don’t soak through in a single storm, but after a month or two, nothing seems capable of fully drying, and you’ve forgotten when it got wet in the first place. Then the mold comes, and that deep, bone-cold you get from a winter  that hangs just above the edge of freezing. [...]

The last time I needed an umbrella was in the fall and winter of 2011 when Occupy Seattle was still Occupying something. At first the camp was in Westlake Park, in the middle of a “public square” that was neither public nor square. [...]  The umbrellas were as much for the pepper spray as for the rain, and between the evictions, the police started confiscating them en masse. Alongside the revival of obscure anti-mask laws to prosecute protestors in places like New York, the Seattle umbrella ban was justified in terms of vague wording about the erection of “structures” within the park. The umbrellas were technically “structures,” claimed the police, and thereby subject to confiscation. This was part of a good cop, bad cop game played by the city government, in which the mayor’s office and a whole array of liberal NGOs would flock to the camp in the morning, handing out leaflets and offering to “host” the camp at City Hall, where it could “speak truth to power” directly and “begin the dialogue.” Then, at night, the police would move in, also under orders from the mayor.

This is Seattle politics in a nutshell, and it is remarkably effective. Most unrest in the city is easily contained through continual police presence paired with abysmally long periods of “process” and “dialogue” that function like a war of attrition, similar to the way the judiciary process operates for the poor. [...] In Seattle, defeat also came like the rain. After the camp moved from downtown to Capitol Hill, it was slowly ground down. [...] Here the police never came in torrents. They just hovered [...] like a light, drizzling mist that slowly soaked through everything.

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Phil A. Neel. Hinterland. 2018.

#sorry for many Hinterland quotes im just currently re-reading the book