Seattle is quiet.
A little too quiet.
Is everyone feeling what I’m feeling? I’m not sure.
For the last fortnight, Seattle has been consumed by a building storm, a hurricane of Superbowl hype that brought with it an unexpected storm-surge of ad urbem invective.
In sports, trash talk comes with the territory. Even a sports-gene deficient bookworm like me knows that every rivalry includes some good-natured ribbing. We tease. We poke fun. It’s always done with a wink or an elbow to the ribs, and when it’s all over, the winner is lauded and the loser is congratulated for a good contest.
That isn’t what happened.
Instead, the lead-up to the Big Game saw ever-increasing levels of anti-Seattle vitriol that got so fevered they even drowned out the risible faux-furor that surrounded the Patriots’ Deflate-gate.
Admittedly, as a Seattleite, my pro-Seattle bias is pretty thick. I can ignore the gibes and jeers about our constant rain, our coffee-consumption, our snarled freeways, our monorail monomania, and our newly acquired reputation as the Pot Capital of the Pacific Northwest. I can laugh off these pokes at our Emerald City because, after all, they contain a kernel of truth, and a little humorous ridicule never hurt anyone. Besides, Seattle has always been the also-ran in the West Coast’s Best Cities competitions–we have neither the dramatic history of San Francisco nor the glitz of Los Angeles; even Portland thinks they’re better than Seattle (whatever, dude)–so we’re used to regular servings of snark.
This was different.
It started, naturally enough, with complaints against our team’s players. Marshawn Lynch won’t talk, and Richard Sherman won’t shut up. But then, last week, the timbre shifted and I started to hear blanket insults of Seattle’s denizens. One pundit called Seattle “chi-chi,” an appellation that I simply cannot reconcile with the laid-back, bed-headed, post-Grunge city I live in. Then I heard complaints that we are arrogant. Then I heard that we are whiny. (Try putting those three adjectives together. An arrogant chi-chi whiner?)
It went on like that, building layer upon layer. We were obnoxious (it seems that some folks find the fervor of the “12s” a tad irksome). We are derivative (ostensibly, we stole the 12th Man trope from a university in Texas). We don’t even have a real seahawk as our mascot (though from my research even master falconers in Washington State can’t own an osprey, the bird commonly known as the seahawk).
The dam burst when, in the last minutes of the game, the Seahawks lost, and the hash-tag #fuckyouseattle began to trend upward. I followed it for a while, thinking it was just Patriots fans but no, it wasn’t. It was everyone. Niners fans. Packers fans. Relatives of Packers fans. Friends of relatives of fans. Even some people who weren’t even football fans at all joined in.
Why this anger against Seattle? Everyone seems to like us just fine when we keep a low profile and don’t bother anyone, but when our football team has a winning season and we Seattleites have the temerity to get a little excited, suddenly it’s #fuckyouseattle?
For me, a big old FU still carries a punch, and when friends of mine began to chime in with that hash-tag, it hurt. Maybe I’m starting to fossilize. I dunno. What I do know is that the Pats played a very good game, and had us on the ropes for a long time. In the end, despite my disappointment at the loss, and despite my embarrassment at the fracas that broke out in the last seconds, regardless of whether we won or lost, never would I have taken to the ‘net and F-Bombed the Patriots, Boston, or New England.
Losing is bad. Being a sore loser is even worse.
But neither one is as bad as being a sore winner.
k (the arrogant, obnoxious, thieving, whining, chi-chi poseur from Seattle)
More.. http://seattleauthor.com/2015/02/03/f-bombing-seattle/
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