"City of Destruction,"

or, "What is Seattle?"

by Eben

Christian, flee the City of Destruction! That was the message to the man named Christian in Bunyan's classic, "Pilgrim's Progress." It was, earlier on, the message given Lot (Abraham's selfish relative) in Sodom. Do you find yourself in a modern Sodom or Gomorrah? Most of us do! We need God's leading, and divine protection, or we will surely be destroyed with the Sodomites who care nothing for God and His righteousness. They love unrighteousness--for that is darkness, when people prefer darkness over the light. Yet, while the Door of Grace remains open, light is still shining into their darkness. How much longer this will go on, only God knows.

1

A Northwest city has no shame,*

She flaunts her sins to make a name.

Old Nineveh is cast in shade

By the transvestites' motorcade.

Queens dressed by gay couturiers

Give passers-by free obscene tours.

2

Our Sodom on the Du-wam-ish**

Has everything that hell could wish.

Crowds of jaded cosmopolites

Break up Bumpershoots with fights.***

Police are bashed if they step in;

The papers brand them "brutal men."

3

These sybarites respect no law,

They want the jungle, tooth and claw.

Gamble, drink, sex, drugs too,

Then march for "Peace", and riot on cue.

Mayor, police chief, and city council

Prove powerless against mob will.

They fear this scum beneath their feet

Will rise and vote their sure defeat.

4

There's only one philosophy:

It's "What I want to do," you see.

Blame the woman who's axed to death,

It's not your fault you're high on meth.

Go wine and dine on the Mystery Train;

It's "fun" to stab, then plead "insane."

The same who protest McDonald's meat

Will chew a carrot and sushi eat.

They wouldn't think to call it rape

Whenever they assault a grape.

Countless vegies, alfalfa sprouts

Are slain to feed these "caring" louts.

Non-dairy latte? A liquid carcass--

Soy that's killed with a caffein buzz.

5

Infanticide is mother's right,

Moloch's courts have won the fight.****

It's okay, conceive and kill,

All you need is a French pill.

6

Not all that gleams here is emerald.

Ask an old man dead and cold.

Teens found him at his watchman's job,

Kicked him to death, when nothing to rob.

7

Flee, O Christian, towered Pride,

Her end is coming sure as the tide.

Not one of her crimes has gone by the Books

Into which only the Death Angel looks.

God bides His time, till Judgment must fall,

Lest one soul be lost, who'll yet heed His call.

Yes, there's a sword designed for this place,

But Love holds it back and makes way for Grace.

8

The Space Needle that now lights night sky

Will someday be threaded by waving rye.

You'll not find a city that once stood here,

Instead will be life that is righteous and pure.

9

Will someone remember this City of Vice,

Where wickedness thrives, like swarms of hog lice?

Only once will its name be brought up again,

With Sodom's, Gomorrah's, and Zeboiam's.*****

10

Where's Jonah when he's needed most?

He'd deflate most any boast.

Nineveh heard his terse death sentence,******

Then--everywhere--repentance!

11

But hearts are hard in Smooth Jazz City;

Beneath that gloss it's tough and gritty.

It's Nineveh, but something worse--

Witches drive this sleek, black hearse.

*A "Sister City" is San Francisco, California, because of the way the City of Destruction, the Queen City of the Pacific Northwest, apes San Francisco's worst features.

**"Our Sodom on the Duwamish" is Seattle, named after a wise and great Indian chief who did not want his name used for this white man's city. Duwamish is a small, polluted, tidal stream that flows in Seattle's seamy southern outskirts.

***Bumpershoot is a yearly, popular festival in a city that loves licentious saturnalias like Mardi Gras but has to shut own whole festivals and parades due to bloody violence and brutal beatings and killings by the Peace-sign waving participants.

The Supreme Court's infamous "Roe vs. Wade" decision legalizing abortion, which gave women specious and inhuman "reproductive rights" that included killing unborn children in the womb and even during the most barbaric, non-medical procedure of forced birth and murder ("partial birth abortion" is the euphemism for it).

Three of the five infamous cities of the valley plain south of the Dead Sea in ancient Canaan that were destroyed by God's judgment. In the Final Judgment, the people of these cities may well rise up against Seattle's libertines to condemn them, because Seattle had the advantage of Christ's Gospel and the Ten Commandments, which they did not.

Note: the murder incidents cited, except for the audience-partipation program on Seattle's Murder Mystery Train, were real crimes. Also note that "Christian" is the name of the major figure in Bunyan's classic, PILGRIM'S PROGRESS--hence the title of this poem. "Sybarites" were residents of Sybaris, a decadent Greek city of southern Italy famed for its luxury (pronounced lugs-sury in commercials nowadays), pleasure-addiction, and indolence (it was an easy place for the conquering Romans to take over, as you can imagine).

******"Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown!"

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