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| Friday, July 14, 2006 |
February 21, 2006
Governor Christine Gregoire
County Executive Ron Sims
Mayor Greg Nickels
Legislators, King County Council Members, Seattle City Council Members:
In reference to the mooted proposals to renovate the Coliseum in the Seattle Center (or whatever it is now called) . . . . it is deja vu all over again.
Some years ago when the decision was made to repair the Kingdome roof at more than the original cost of construction I had suggested to you and other assorted public officials and pundits (all of whom were unresponsive) that the miracle of modern structural engineering made it appear that we must forever abandon the hope that the Kingdome would be allowed to fall into ruin so as to attract some latter-day Edward Gibbon, who could sit musing among the rubble, much as Gibbon himself had done centuries ago surrounded by the stones of Rome, to be disturbed only as he was by the 21st or perhaps 25th century equivalent of bare-footed friars at their vespers or memories akin to those of earlier times recorded in 1430 by the Pope’s servant, the scholarly Poggius, whose diary (unearthed by Gibbon) related how “the forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates [was] now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes”—the Campo Vaccino, or cattle pasture of the Fifteenth Century, the likes of which I had suggested could have been recreated in the tidelands which once surrounded Yesler’s mill before our massive monuments were constructed in the last century.
Alas, it was not to be, and with a new leak-proof roof and a carefully crafted Certificate attesting to the eternal integrity of the Kingdome, we had to forego the anticipatory pleasure of contemplating our future observer ruminating on the meaning of history surrounded by our ancient stone-filled site---only to have it unceremoniously imploded to make way for an even grander and more lasting monument, accompanied subsequently by a yet more improbably pretentious and forbidding structure devoted almost exclusively to a dozen gladiatorial events annually.
But, as Ernest Lawrence Thayer so eloquently expostulated more than a century ago, hope springs eternal in the human breast. The Coliseum must be allowed to fall gracefully into ruin so that we can look forward with great pleasure to our future Gibbon casting a discerning eye over the grand spectacle before him where our gladiators contended, our politicians and lobbyists swarmed the basilicas of expensive luxury suites, where our rabblement hooted and clapp’d their chopp’d hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and utter’d such a deal of stinking breath, and where our patricians outdid each other in the splendor of their regalia and their chariots; and where he can remind us anew, as Gibbon did among the stones of Rome, that history is little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Perhaps with luck we may even be able to persuade some failed or failing firm such as Enron or General Motors to purchase the naming rights to such a lasting monument.
Yours, etc.,
Byron D. Coney
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Byron Coney |
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