Representing Washington… Barely

When a national publication creates a list of the top 100 whatevers, it plays into our sense of regional pride/inferiority complex to itemize the players who hail from our corner of the country.

Despite this year winning the race to reach autumn first, the Northwest is not well represented on the Vanity Fair 100, the newsy society mag that compiles an annual list of the big players in their sphere. Unlike, say, Forbes, which has made a business out of tallying up the wealth of the wealthies (and on whose lists we tend to do a bit better), Vanity Fair skews toward cultural impact, especially that conveyed by media. So naturally New York and Los Angeles will be expected to dominate.

Washington’s representation comes from just two (2) people. Amazon.com‘s Jeff Bezos clocks in at No. 5, although he’s mentioned because of the Kindle and how the sale of electronic books has already surpassed the sale of physical books. No word about Amazon’s cloud computing architecture, but we wouldn’t expect Vanity Fair to pick up on it.

And Microsoft‘s Steve Ballmer comes in at No. 46. His achievement? Tripling revenue over the past decade, even while the company’s stock price has been cut in half. No mention about any specific Microsoft product. In fact the only product mentioned in the short take on Ballmer is Apple’s iPhone, which Ballmer once famously said would never take off. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

There’s probably a case to be made for other local lumens to be counted among the cultural elite, but it seems we’re mostly getting outshone by brighter suns. For local rocker Eddie Vedder, no stranger to good causes, there’s Bono (No. 35). And while cultural meme mogul Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezeburger has made a local name for himself getting laughs, the national list has John Stewart (No. 29). Ballmer himself is outranked in his own sector by three rivals: Apple’s Steve Jobs (No. 2), Google’s Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (No. 3) and Oracle’s Larry Ellison (No. 8). And the top spot also goes to a Bay Area wunderkind, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whom Ballmer has wisely decided not to challenge head-on.

Every once in a while we in the Northwest get it into our heads that we’re out there in the vanguard driving change across the landscape, punching way above our weight. Usually it’s because of outlier success stories like Bezos transform the way we do this thing called living. But those are outliers. Eventually the market turns, the founder moves on, the air comes out of the bubble, and the buzz dies. We drift back into our somewhat uncomfortable anonymity. This applies to arts and culture as well as business. When WaMu imploded, it seemed equally a tale of jumping on the subprime bandwagon (being driven off a cliff by cannier Wall Street operators than our own) and the hubris of a local big fish mistaking his small pond for the ocean.

Ask anyone who played in an unsigned local grunge band in the 1990s after the record producers went back to New York and L.A. Ask Paul Schell, the former Seattle mayor whose dream of a “world-class city” ran afoul of the reality of not providing enough policing when the world came to visit. You could even ask Bill Gates, who in 1995 only narrowly avoided consigning Microsoft to the dustbin of history and rallied the company around this new thing called the internet. Our blips on the larger screen are just those: blips. We would do well to keep things in perspective in our corner of the country. It’ll hurt less if, next time, we don’t have so far to fall.