a Washington state resident responds to the ESPN poll result

William writes in reference to my amusement that Washington was the only state in the U.S. to vote for NBA players to play abroad during the lockout (in today’s ESPN poll):

“Just saw your post on our state’s dissention on an ESPN poll about whether NBA players should go abroad, or pull some sort of Chad Ochocinco stunt and keep themselves in the public eye some other way.

You’re not wrong to assume that our region is pissed off about the Sonics’ move to Oklahoma – that team was always a civic phenomenon in a way that the Mariners & Seahawks usually haven’t been. But you’re also right about this state’s love of all things foreign. For various reasons, this part of the world tends to love & fetishize other cultures. Part of that is west-coast hippie transcendentalism, but it goes way deeper than that: in my (post microsoft) generation almost everyone goes on two vacations, regardless of ethnicity & class: Tokyo and Victoria/Vancouver Island. The former is a sensory overload I’m sure you’re familiar with (I’ve actually never been there myself, but literally everyone I know has visited), the latter is a bit more of an unexpected foreign experience – the city of Victoria proper is some idealized version of England, right down to the accent in certain parts of town, and the rest of the island still has a very vibrant aboriginal culture.

Beyond that, we’re historically a port to Asia populated half by migrants from that continent, plus a ton of Serbocroatians, Finns and Scandinavians, and almost all of the immigrants that come out here intended to found semi-autonomous rural communities and towns that would keep the old language and culture as much as possible, so Americana didn’t have many cultural inroads. Blue-blooded Americans, though they did deftly guide the economic development of the region, didn’t come to the region en masse until this part of the world had already become a disperate cosmopolis in miniature.

The Scandinavian bit has been super relevant to the region politically: between WWII & the Regean revolution, WA state always had the same two senators, both of which were of Scandinavian descent, and one of them would kick off all of his reelection campaigns by going skiing on the fjords in Norway (can’t remember the names of the top of my head – last name of the one that didn’t go skiing was Magnuson).”

As for the Sonics leaving for Oklahoma City, pretty much the only funny response I saw to the LeBron James trauma last summer was the following reader post at espn.com: “Dear Cleveland: Boo-hoo-hoo. Signed, Seattle.”