1920s feminism; 2020s city council budget hypocrisy; 2024 antisemitism

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#52

1) I’m half way through a novel called Ex-Wife, written and initially published anonymously in 1929 by a real-life ex-wife, Ursula Parrott.

As documented in the recent biography, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, Parrot has been unjustly omitted from the literary canon of female authors who first established the Sex and the City template, a genre that puts women’s POVs, particularly the metropolitan woman’s perspective, front and center.

A 1920 Radcliffe grad-turned city newspaper reporter, turned successful novelist (Ex-Wife sold 100,000 copies in its first year), turned lucrative-Hollywood screenwriter, Parrott was eventually (and sadly) demoted to the role of a scandal-sheet-plagued anti-heroine. She died of cancer, penniless at the age of 58 in 1957.

Like the contemporaneous pre-Code Hollywood flicks I’ve obsessed about before—Young Desire, Kept Husbands, Discarded Lovers, Borrowed Wives, Tangled Destinies, etc.—Parrot’s novel Ex-Wife is a risqué and radical romp. (It was, in fact, made into a pre-Code movie itself, Norma Shearer’s 1930 Best-Actress, Academy-Award-winner, The Divorcee). Parrott writes in strikingly modern prose (“cabs, hot nightclubs, parties…They were not real…Neither was the office…”) while dramatizing both the one-night-stand liberation and the morning-after loneliness of “the new freedom” as a tricky one-step-forward-two-steps-back moment in the bid for female equality.

Indeed, her contemporaneous account of Flapper-era Manhattan seems to predict (40 years prior) “the Pill” ennui of 1960s sexual revolution feminism: “Chastity, really, went out when birth control came in. If there is no ‘consequence’—it just isn’t important,” Parrott writes early on.

There’s a candid abortion scene in the novel’s patient exposition as well.

A scandalous best seller, 1929

All of this is not so much a lament in Parrott’s telling. The novel is narrated (often comically) in first person by Parrott’s witty author-avatar, a 25-year-old department store ad copy-copywriter, the “ineffably slim” working-girl Flapper, Patricia (Pat), who drinks boozy Clover Club Sodas at Uptown Harlem dance halls in the evening and does calisthenics before work in the morning.

The freedom and joy are palpable in Pat’s dizzying day-to-day account of frenetic, jargon-heavy workdays, rooftop waltzes, choice frocks, suede gloves, “silly gay jewelry,” and private parties where a hostess—in one instance, “the world’s greatest authority on Arab love songs”—serenades tipsy guests.

“In three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four nightclubs, two operas, and a concert where a negro [sic] sang spirituals.”

Pat’s “We” is not a reference to a beau (they come and go), but rather it’s a reference to Lucia, her older (29-year-old) Greenwich Village roommate, an ex-wife herself, who serves as a cynical patron sage to Pat’s “calflove”-stricken-life. Lucia is quick with jaded aphorisms that foresee doom in Flapper feminism, often pointing out how the larger patriarchy remains, with its crushing double standards, fully intact.

This downcast air doesn’t detract from the acid eloquence of Ex-Wife’s liberating Jazz-Age consciousness, though:

“If a woman has been asked into twenty beds, and managed to stay out of 19 of them, on the purely percentage basis she is a good deal more virtuous than a woman who has only been asked into one, and went,” Pat notes to herself.

My dip into Parrott’s Prohibition-era Gotham parable was amplified by two other 1920s artifacts this week: First, on Sunday night, I used the rhythms of a static-heavy pre-Code crime drama, Alias Mary Smith, as a default books-on-tape lullaby; and second, I’ve been learning the piano part to 100-years-ago crooner Russ Columbo’s signature jam, “You Call It Madness, but I Call It Love,” with its ghostly vocals and odd jazz chords.

My heart is beating/it keeps repeating/for you/constantly

2) It’s city budget season in Seattle which means you can’t miss Erica C. Barnett’s invaluable city hall reporting at PubliCola.

Going deep into the math this week, Erica extracted the defining story of Seattle’s current conservative city council: Clownish hypocrisy.

It’s not just that last year’s backlash slate of candidates-turned-current-council members ridiculed the previous council as tax-and-spend liberals, only to turn around this year and support massive, unsustainable spending on new programs themselves, such as cops and surveillance cameras.

It’s also that the biggest symbol of the previous council's leftist politics, progressive former council member Teresa Mosqueda’s JumpStart tax on wealthy corporations, has become this conservative council’s go-to source of funding for their law-and-order priorities.

In 2020, then Seattle city council member Mosqueda (who sadly left last year for the supposedly more important King County Council), proposed and passed what amounts to a tax on tech bros: A payroll tax on the largest Seattle companies with employees who make more than $150,000.

Revenues from that tax, which have been robust—$315 million in 2023 (way more than the $223 million originally projected)—were specifically earmarked by Mosqueda and her communard colleagues to exclusively fund affordable housing and related programs that would help insulate working people from the impacts that our current tech boom is having on Seattle, namely the city’s out-of-whack housing costs .

However, as Erica notes in her coverage, the current city budget proposes “using $287 million in [JumpStart] payroll tax revenues next year, and more every year after that.”

Here’s Erica:

The JumpStart tax, paid by companies that employ highly compensated workers, was designed to offset the impacts that companies like Amazon have had on Seattle’s housing market and economy by providing access to housing, jobs, and small-business development opportunities for people who haven’t benefited from the city’s tech boom. Now, it’s being used as a funding source for programs that arguably run counter to its original purpose, like jails, surveillance of low-income neighborhoods, and police.

I actually have a quibble with the tax: I think it obscures the real culprit of Seattle’s affordable housing crisis, our NIMBY land use code; I spelled this out in a PubliCola column back in 2022.

But as I also wrote in that same column, Mosqueda’s tax is not casuistry; there is a good deal of logic and justice in it: "The Jump Start tax teases out the nexus between surging tech job growth and housing prices by capturing nouveau corporate Seattle’s impact on the market. That is: As the hyper growth of tech companies like Amazon inflate local housing prices, the city is taxing them to help fund affordable housing. It’s a good look, and it seems like a logical offset for the influx of high-earning tech employees. And, let’s be honest: It also feels good.” 

For all the venom the current council directs at the previous council for being too woke, they sure have woken up to Mosqueda’s progressive JumpStart tax.

While I’m busy singing Erica’s praises for her budget analysis, a quick and loving anecdote: Erica rushed into PubliCola’s Pioneer Square offices last week after a city council budget committee meeting keen to tell me all bout endless blowhard council member Rob Saka’s inane speechifying on potential cuts to the SPD’s mounted horse patrol. As if the SPD’s stable of horses were being sent to the glue factory, Saka proceeded to anthropomorphize them, dramatically reading each horse’s name from the dais.

Hardly to Erica’s surprise, the Seattle Time’s fell for Saka’s drama and ran a sappy, bloated story the very next day on the horses.

Fortuitously, Erica had a long-scheduled interview with the police chief that same day and found herself waiting in the chief’s anteroom before the interview with the cops' media guy. As Erica was making small talk, she noticed, to her devious glee, an SPD horse calendar (like those fireman calendars) laid out on the coffee table. She started taking pictures.

Imagining the utter disconnect between the police spokesperson’s belief that Erica was (like the Seattle Times) evidently enamored with the SPD’s horse brigade and the actual mischievous expertise that was exploding in Erica’s brain when she spied this ridiculous gem, has repeatedly sent me into peals of laughter all week.

3) In my lifetime, antisemitism has never been as glaring, ubiquitous, and menacingly out in the open as it is right now. Like always, though—and Jews just have it super lucky this way: the hate comes from both the right (no, Jews are not behind Hurricane Helene) and the left (those Jewish capitalists).

And yes, I know criticism of Israel is not default antisemitic; and there are plenty of reasons to condemn Israel. I for one, have been doing it since I was 12. On the flip side, criticism of Israel is not a default get-out-jail-free card for voicing antisemitism. It’s easy to smell when the two things are intertwined. For Jews, it can also just be confusing and intimidating whether you have a sense of what’s behind it or not, like when I was 16 and one of the grown ups at the table where I was out to dinner with the high school theater club turned their attention to me during a political discussion. I hadn’t said much of anything during the conversation—this adult was holding court—yet he told me in knowingly provocative terms that “Israel is an Apartheid state.” This was in 1982, which is mostly to let you know that today’s heated debate is by no means a new one, particularly for Jews.

It’s just taking place in a new context. In 2024, despite centuries of consistent antisemitism, Jews are no longer seen as a historically marginalized and maligned group. This creepy amnesia is (no surprise) happening just as the age-old Jewish stereotypes are becoming fashionable, both flippantly and intensely, once again.

This Sunday night, I was reading a book at the pizza restaurant bar across the street from my apartment and the group next to me—a couple of 20-somethings and a 40-something—were talking about the Sean Diddy Combs sexual assault case. The conversation shifted, with topical logic, to talking about the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault case. But then, racist logic, this came out: “or is it Goldstein, or Weingold or Silverman or whatever? All those rich guys are the ones.”

If this had happened in the 1980s, ‘90s, 2000s, or during most of the 2010s, even in someplace like Iowa, I could have confidently called them out; that kind of hate chatter was once, universally understood to be un-American. And even if people harbored odious prejudices, which they certainly did, they likely recognized, as I did, that the the room would not abide by their ignorance.

Ominously, those days are past.

I’m mad at myself for not jumping in and challenging them—I definitely understand the implications of not saying anything, and I’ve certainly spoken up many times before (including at another bar in my neighborhood just a few months ago).

I don’t know why I didn’t say something this time. I’m fretting about that decision. And so now, in addition to obsessing about today’s rising antisemitism itself, I’m obsessing about my own faltering response this weekend.

Sadly, and subconsciously, I think there may be a relationship between the escalating and the faltering.