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Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Sophisticated parochialism

I have decided that the term "sophisticated parochialism" well encapsulates a strain that I periodically identify in the character of Seattle and its residents. You get a lot of people who moved here from little towns who, without much exposure to the wider world, have uncritically nursed on the "world city" pretensions of this place.

The sophisticated parochialism paradigm unites some of the occasional critiques of Seattle that I make in this blog. One manifestation is the way so many people here are convinced that this is a tremendously diverse city, when in fact it and Portland are the two whitest large cities in the country by a wide margin—and most in the white supermajority probably don't have any significant social interactions with any black people. Other manifestations include:
  • the idea that Seattle is a "great restaurant town"

  • the notion that this year's Mariners pitcher-du-jour—Ken Cloude, Freddy Garcia, Gil Meche, Joel Pineiro, Felix Hernandez—is the second coming of Cy Young

  • the idea that world-leading companies like Boeing and Microsoft arose here for reasons besides happenstance


posted at 12:47 AM

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