Rogue Columnist

While you were out

Obama's honeymoon, if it ever really existed -- remember, not one House Republican voted for the stimulus -- is over. Some have their theories as to the signs behind this turning point, but I have no doubt. It was the return of the Great American Freak Show, in the form of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of a song-and-dance man, once gifted, later creepy. If the triple-digit increase in television ratings are any sign, this is what you want from your news media. It is the "national conversation" you crave. Can a missing comely teenage blonde be far behind?

Obama's election gave us a moment of seriousness, to take stock of the troubles bearing down on us and make the urgent and consequential adjustments necessary to address them. Yet it is apparently not to be. Imagine if the outpouring for the song-and-dance man had been applied to universal healthcare or global warming? There would be no hopeless bottleneck in a Congress owned by big business, no Dianne Feinstein saying that criticism about healthcare legislation from the left "doesn't move her." No calling climate change a "hoax." As Paul Krugman pointed out in his Monday column, "The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected...And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course."

Our present course, sadly, is to find fresh distractions. If you care to take a moment, however, here's a bit of what you probably missed in the past few days, reported by that hopeless "old media."

The model modern city manager

One joke around Phoenix involving Frank Fairbanks was that he could never retire as city manager, because then all the scandals would come out. Of course, everybody loves Frank. Except for the ones who don't. Given the lack of curiosity and resources in the local press, we'll never know how true the joke might be. I never ran into evidence that Fairbanks was anything but clean. His problems were more complicated. Since most will be offering rapturous praise as Fairbanks is apparently stepping down, a more serious assessment is necessary.

The zeitgeist of Frank Fairbanks' City Hall was to move across the waters without making waves. He was not a creative thinker or a risk-taker -- think of the guy on the Shredded Wheat ad who says, "We put the 'no' in innovation." His career spent with the city led to an unavoidable parochialism, along with perhaps a fatalism that the city's trajectory couldn't be changed, or a willingness to drink the booster Kool-Aid by the gallon. He was in an awkward spot in a systemically dysfunctional city government, mostly trying to keep the peace, even as Phoenix hit a grave turning point. All this would have profound consequences for Phoenix and its future.

Phoenix 101: The Mormons

The Arizona Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mesa.

Growing up in Arizona, I found the Mormons neither strange nor mysterious, much less threatening. They were part of the wonderful mosaic of a state still tasting of the frontier, before it had been overrun by immigrants from the Midwest and miles of lookalike crapola subdivisions.

We had a Book of Mormon in our library, more a testament to my mother's insatiable curiosity than any desire to convert. My great-grandparents were among the first non-LDS farmers to settle near Mesa, and Grandmother reveled in telling the story about how the Saints pestered them to convert and "seal" their marriage in the temple, much to the horror of these former Presbyterian missionaries. But it was a story told gently and with affection for all.

The Mormons were revered among the great Arizona pioneers. They were known for their generosity, including to "gentiles," something our family experienced. Mormons were hard-working, reliable, self-reliant, patrons of education and the arts. Mesa in those days was a beautiful small city, a monument to the energy and far-sightedness of its LDS founders. We would regularly drive down neat and prosperous Main Street to see the beautiful Arizona Temple. The Mormon kids with whom I went to high school were among the most talented in one of the country's top high-school fine arts program.

The Mormons were also powerful. That was clear even at an early age.

America becalmed

For all the vigor projected by our appealing president, America sits strangely stuck. Healthcare reform seems all but dead. Even the whateverthehellitmeans "public option" is struggling. Tom Daschle, who proved such a formidable leader for the Democrats during the onset of the Bush calamity, is urging President Obama to drop it. There just aren't the votes in the Senate. Indeed, the Democrats seem in a dead run to lose the next election, which would be a certainty if a credible opposition party existed.

It's easy for the senators to be complacent. They are deep in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance industries. The wife of Sen. Chris Dodd earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock grants serving on the boards of Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living, and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals. And Dodd is one of the good guys? Daschle has his own conflicts. The for-profit medical and insurance industries, along with the U.S. Chamber and assorted business lobbyists can bring hundreds of millions of dollars to bear to maintain the status quo. The only people who think this is a good idea are the diminishing ranks of Americans who have good insurance. The suffering and fear of everyone else has no political power. Meanwhile, the media hype the costs of single-payer (ignoring that America pays twice as much for its system as any advanced nation) and the alleged horror stories of rationing abroad. Can you believe this trick is working?

The same Democrats who won a historic election are struggling to enact the mildest of measures to limit greenhouse gases, even as the government issues a historic assessment of the consequences we are already seeing and will see from climate change. The Southwest can kiss its ass goodbye. So can the Southeast, including the exurban office "park" where the rat bastards at NCR are moving, stabbing Dayton, Ohio, in the back.

Phoenix 101: Rugged individualism

Phoenix is built on many myths. Perhaps the greatest is that of the rugged individualist, standing in opposition to the statist and collectivist tendencies of "the East" and Europe. It's a familiar myth of the West, but it reaches levels of hilarious dissonance in my hometown.

In reality, Phoenix is the largest-scale example of government social engineering and public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy -- i.e. socialism -- in American history. Without massive government intervention, Phoenix would be a benighted little farm town of a few thousand, instead of a benighted migropolis of some 4 million, many raging along the public highways in their SUVs imagining themselves as 21st century range riders.

Modern Phoenix began with federal reclamation, the Newlands Act, which would begin the dam building that tamed the Salt River. It envisioned a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer democracy, with plots of 160 acres cultivated by citizens liberated from the dark satanic cities of the East. It didn't quite work out that way -- rich farmers emerged and poor farmers (like my family) struggled. But all were being subsidized by federal tax dollars long before the New Deal. Their endeavors would not have been possible without the federal investment.

No we can't?

Spring runs out and the American republic celebrates its societal strength and political will by regulating tobacco. That'll show the tobacco companies, long past their period of influence, and the diminishing ranks of smokers, primarily made up of the poor and disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, 10 big banks have begun repaying their bailout money to the taxpayers. Their primary reason is not to do the right thing or return to the business of funding productive enterprise. It is to gain the freedom to jack up the compensation of their 25 top executives. Like the Bourbons, the big bankers have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Unlike Big Tobacco, they not only retain their political clout -- defeating an effort to regulate dangerous derivatives -- but seem to largely run the federal government.

The consequences of this are manifold. The institutions that were "too big to fail" should have taught us that they are too big to exist. Instead, they have grown even larger. The secrecy of the Bush administration that led us into the Iraq fiasco has become the secrecy of the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke administration. We have only the tiniest sense of where the trillions in bailout money and "lending facilities" went, or who scratched the back of whom. We know, for example, that tax money went to help AIG repay Goldman Sachs which repaid...? You get the picture. Meanwhile, real unemployment is at least 16 percent, and millions may never regain their old earning power. Some may never be employable again outside of Wal-Mart.

Phoenix 101: Lost opportunities

My chief goal in writing the Phoenix 101 post about the old city was to dispel the notion that “there’s no history here,” spoken by the transplants as they file into the tract houses of their so-called master planned communities. More, to fight the canard that “Phoenix has no soul.” Well, maybe now in most places, but it wasn’t always so. Yet the post was so popular, it seems logical to follow up with a brief history on choices made and opportunities missed.

It’s important to make a distinction. People have sometimes dismissed my observations with words such as “well, everyplace changes” and “my hometown isn’t the same any more, either.” At the risk of being pedantic, that’s not my point. First, while every place changes, it doesn’t necessarily change mostly for the worse. Cities such as Seattle, Portland, Denver, Charlotte, San Diego and even Oklahoma City have undergone massive changes. Yet they have managed to preserve and revive their center cities, their civic spaces and enhance livability (and they have plenty of suburbs, so Phoenix isn’t special there). I miss the old railroad yards in downtown Denver – but what an amazing city it is now. It’s gotten better. Second, Phoenix is not just any city – so who cares if it’s no worse than Fresno or Youngstown? It sold its magic for dross. And its choices have set the stage for crisis, whether sudden or lingering.

Much was out of the control of Phoenicians and their leaders. Phoenix grew large after the City Beautiful Movement, so it lacked many great civic spaces; it was a modest farm town during the 1920s, so it had relatively few art deco towers. Worst of all, it came of age with the automobile, Levittown-style suburbia, and the savage city planning and dehumanizing design ethos of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier. Still, Phoenix made choices. It lost opportunities. Here are a few.

The old city

Phoenix in the 1950s.

I carry a memory of old Phoenix -- and feel its loss profoundly -- in a way that's probably unusual even for natives of my generation. It's not nostalgia; I know too much about the place for that. It's a more complex reaction, to history thrown aside, opportunities lost and the destruction of a very flawed paradise, but a paradise nonetheless.

It was not really captured in the Channel 8 documentaries on Phoenix in the 1950s and 1960s. As popular as those shows were, they were a classic example of telling history through the lens of the present. Hence, we saw much about sprawl (the start of Maryvale and Sun City) and Sky Harbor. They missed so, so much. What they missed are the things I describe in talks when I say, "If you arrived in Phoenix after 1970, I feel sorry for you."

I was fortunate to grow up in central Phoenix in the late 1950s and 1960s, fortunate, too, to be the offspring of a mother and grandmother who were Arizonans with history in their bones. We lived in a house built in 1928, in an old neighborhood close to downtown. I attended the same grade school as Barry Goldwater, Paul Fannin and Phoenix Mayor Margaret Hance. It was different from growing up in suburbia.

Peak oil — nevermind

One way to remain popular as a hip, iconoclastic media brand in America is to reinforce the conventional wisdom -- in a hip, iconoclastic way, of course. I've learned this from Freakonomics. Take the recent blog post entitled, "Has 'Peak Oil' Peaked?" Author Stephen Dubner asserts that with oil prices way down from their 2008 highs, the media "frenzy" over peak oil has faded away -- but without the media doing a reality check on this hysteria they were peddling to a gullible public.

Huh?

My memory of that time is quite a bit different. The mainstream media did little on peak oil and Freakonomics' partner, The New York Times, was nearly silent on the issue. All the air in the media bubble was being taken up by shrill blaming of the major oil companies (even though they were delivering a commodity prized by the world to American gas pumps with no lines or interruptions). Or it concerned sinister futures traders somehow gaming the market. Most of the discussion on peak oil was confined to sites such as The Oil Drum, the "doomer blogs" -- and inside the oil industry itself.