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Seattle isn't dying, but homeless documentary is

Seattle is dying.

Really? If so, then why aren’t there more available parking spaces?

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Personally, I don’t see it. But Eric Johnson insists the Emerald City has one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel, a particularly black and moldy one, no doubt left on the street by one of those horrible homeless people.

Johnson wrote, produced and narrated “Seattle is Dying,” an hour-long documentary on homelessness first aired by KOMO-TV, a Sinclair Broadcast affiliate based in Seattle. And his work has, as the kids say, “gone viral.”

The documentary was referenced several times April 9, when the McMinnville City Council played to a packed house of aggrieved local residents. They made it clear they’ve had it up to here with homeless people camping on the streets.

For many viewers, “Seattle is Dying” sums up the homeless problem for communities everywhere. They find it a powerful piece of filmmaking.

I have since viewed the documentary myself. “Powerful” is one way to describe it, but several other characterization first leap to mind.

In my view, “Seattle is Dying” is to people concerned about homeless people what “Birth of a Nation” was to people concerned about emancipation of the slaves.

How can I explain it? Maybe I should do so in the style of Johnson himself.

So listen to me. Take the time to really let the words sink in. Contemplate them. Embroider them on decorative pillows and give them to your friends and relatives as Christmas presents.

For if you have any love in your heart for your community and its newborn kittens, these next five words will chill you to the very marrow of your being: “Seattle is Dying” is ... overwrought!”

Let me say repeat, lest you think I am being anything other than completely, absolutely and entirely serious. “Seattle is Dying” is overwrought!! It is so overwrought, I needed to add a second exclamation point.

If that observation seems disingenuous, know that surveys were sent to people who think the documentary was hysterical, but are too afraid to say so publicly.

Of all the anonymous responses received, every one — that’s every single one — said the documentary was overwrought. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

Now, no surveys were actually sent out. However, if they were, the results would have been nothing more or less than shocking and appalling. You read that correctly. Shocking. Appalling.

That cannot be overstated. Then again, it can. (Psst, that’s the point.)

Johnson could have wrapped his maudlin script in bricks and pitched them through viewers’ windows, which would have been more subtle.

The documentary appears like something Johnson undertook to impress his high school English teacher with his command of adjectives.

This class project is apparently designed to represent a new trend masquerading as “solutions journalism.”

In fact, investigating solutions to problems is as old as journalism itself. What makes solutions journalism a term is reporters giving it a name and deciding to be smug about it.

The way it works, in its trendy form, is this:

You find a “solution” in another part of the country that seems to be working — under completely different conditions, of course — and suggest it can be applied universally.

Johnson discovered authorities in Rhode Island supposedly prosecute homeless people, then keep them under lock and key as they undergo addiction recovery.

Recovery involves this amazing wonder drug called “methadone,” which transforms addicts into clones of Ward Cleaver. Taking methadone for the rest of your life — a necessity, because it’s addictive in its own right — is supposedly no bigger deal than taking lisinopril for blood pressure.

Not really.

I recently rode with a group of recovering addicts who leave at 3 a.m. daily to bus themselves to a methadone clinic in Salem. The people on the bus might feel somewhat peevish if I suggested our situations were analogous because I take lisinopril with my breakfast every morning.

Johnson intimates that homeless equals criminal and criminal equals homeless.

Well, that’s not really true. He doesn’t intimate it. He says it flat out.

All the out-of-work truckers and other legitimately homeless people are off quietly suffering somewhere else, it seems. The people sleeping on the streets — every one of them — are drug-addicted criminals.

They care not a whit that your grandfather gave you that Rolex. These lawless scum are defecating in our streets, looting our stores and addicting our children.

They deserve our help. That’s why we must lock them away behind high fences laced with razor wire and slip them methadone with their bread and water.

We’re nice people. We’re just here to help.

To carry out our good works, we need to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate people for various minor offenses. Sleeping on the sidewalk or urinating in public will do.

Incarceration for a long period of time won’t be a problem, as our county jails and state prisons are notoriously roomy. The personnel in those places are practically begging for more inmates.

In the unlikely event of jail overcrowding, we can just build massive new facilities. Taxpayers love major multimillion-dollar public construction projects — especially jails and prisons supplying vastly expanded drug addiction and mental health services.

Did you know that most people arrested by police are never prosecuted? What is happening to our once-beloved society? There was a time when ... when ...

No, come to think of it, only a fraction of the people arrested have ever been successfully prosecuted. That’s the nature of the justice system.

Prosecutors must always pick and choose the cases that can be brought to court. That was as true in 1955 (or any other Golden Age year you care to name) as it is today.

Sorry, but you can’t arrest people for just being scary or unsightly and toss them into the Chateau d’if like something out of “The Count of Monte Cristo.” (See? I can impress my high school English teacher, too.)

All people — yes, even those of the homeless variety — have rights. That can really muck up your ability to throw them in a cell and forget they existed.

However, if we give police the authority to do that, we’re going to be looking at problems far worse than homelessness.

None of this negates the validity of people’s frustrations. I understand and appreciate most people’s views on homelessness.

It’s a difficult issue. I’m glad I’m not in the business of proposing policy.

McMinnville definitely has a problem. So does Seattle.

However, neither city is dying. Not even close.

Poverty and homelessness are nothing new in the Pacific Northwest. After all, the term “skid row,” a corruption of the skid road used by loggers, originated in Seattle.

To insist Seattle is dying isn’t journalism. It’s fear-mongering.

Johnson started with a thesis and built his documentary to support that thesis. That’s not honest journalism.

However, he apparently comes by his views “honestly,” based on the reputation of KOMO’s corporate parent.

Sinclair, controlled by the family of founder Julian Sinclair Smith, is the largest television operator in the U.S. Its 193 stations populate more than 40 percent of American households, particularly in the South and Midwest.

Sinclair Broadcast is best known for engaging in questionable business practices, currying favor with the Trump administration and imposing its conservative political orientation on its legions of viewers. That led a former Federal Communications Commission chair, from the Bush administration no less, to dub it “the most dangerous U.S. company most people have never heard of.”

Of course, most people don’t really want unflinching journalism. They prefer propaganda affirming their biases, which is what’s made “Seattle is Dying” so wildly popular.

I cover homelessness for the News-Register. Readers occasionally criticize me for being sympathetic to the homeless because I include their comments in my story.

The way I see it, we shouldn’t talk about people without first talking to them. That’s not bias; it’s good journalism.

“Seattle is Dying” is something else. It’s propaganda stuffed with overblown and florid rhetoric designed to propose simple answers to complex problems while simultaneously generating fear and pointing fingers.

I hope that technique is still considered bad journalism.