King County Logo Revision Passes

Well, it happened. In a 7-2 vote that was never extended to the public, the King County Council agreed to spending at least $500,000 to change our logo from a crown to the likeness of Martin Luther King Jr. And to add to the surreal ludicrousness of this move, Ron Sims is designing the new logo. The jesters are now running the castle, Seattle.

The people of Seattle didn't approve of the idea when it was first raised by Ron Sims nearly 7 years ago. But as with the Monorail, clearly the council thinks we're a bunch of imbeciles that don't mean it when we vote for something, so they decided to take this decision (and all the taxpayers' money it requires) into their own hands.

A commentor over at Sound Politics, while remarking on the overwhelming revisionist history bender by the council, revealed a more interesting tidbit about King County's original namesake, William Rufus Devane King:

Place names for this region were given for a reason. They're one of the few things left that tie us to founders of this state who first came here in the 1840's and 1850's. Did any of these councilmembers even bother to stop and think why King County was named after a Democrat Vice President who died in office? I can give you a hint. His support for land bills that helped stimulate settlement of western territories attracted pioneers to come to Washington state to claim homesteads is a place to start. With all due disrespect towards Sims and the Democrats who pushed this on the county council but I trust the decisions made by Seattle's pioneers. They wanted to honor someone who was directly responsible for settlement of our region. Reverend Martin Luther King, great as he is, has absolutely no historical ties to this state.

As the saying goes, history is written by the winners. And in this case, the council is the big winner in our city's PR war of political correctness and shameless fawning. The money they will spend on this project belongs elsewhere, planting more tangible, long-term seeds. In 1961, when Dr. King made his only visit to Seattle, he visited Garfield High School; at the end of his visit here, he praised Seattle on being what seemed to him a very progressive city. But then, as now, was that simply how Seattle wished to be perceived?

We can't even afford yellow school buses or enough classes for the students at Garfield, jamming them onto city buses each morning and offering them administrative tasks instead of elective classes so they can meet college elective requirements. Meanwhile, the Seattle school district faces a growing multi-million deficit and continues to agonize over what more to cut in order to find $2MM to simply be able to offer 6 out of 7 class periods to all students. And as for the discipline gap recently reported by the School District, where black students are disciplined or even expelled 2.6 times more than white students: is the council simply blind to racial divides that still exist in our city? Or, as one African American man said when interviewed by the Seattle Times in 1965: “The biggest fault most Negroes find with the Seattle white-power structure is that it doesn’t seem to recognize the problem even exists.” With our new logo, perhaps it never did...