Rogue Columnist

Eating the future

One of the problems of Phoenix's extremely limited media market is that reporting on such news as the city's new 2 percent food tax fails to go below the surface (and, of course, many vital stories are not reported at all). Funny how the grand new world of "citizen journalists" and "crowdsourcing" has not filled the yawning chasm of serious journalism done by seasoned professionals.

The tax is one of many bad options faced by a city that is at, and perhaps past, the tipping point. It faces a $241 million deficit through June 2011. The latest cuts total $140 million and more than 1,300 jobs, including eliminating 500 police officers and firefighters. But they are not enough. Thus, the food tax. In general, it's a bad idea. Sales taxes are very regressive, taking much more of the income of lower-income individuals than, say, income and property taxes. This is no small thing in the largest city with so many low-wage jobs. They also risk causing additional "shopping flight" to the suburbs (about which, more later).

And yet the city is in a bind. Or should we say, binds.

Teen Age Republican

The maxim holds that people move right as they grow older. I moved left. In each case, I was in the minority. Only one other child wore Goldwater buttons in 1964 at Kenilworth School, Barry's alma mater; LBJ buttons were in profusion. Later I handed out leaflets for state Rep. Betty Adams Rockwell. In high school, I manned the phones for Jack Williams and Richard Nixon. Even on a shallow, but oh-so-important level for a high-school boy (oh, I've grown up, honest...), being a Teen Age Republican was a lonely avocation. Back then, all the pretty girls, much less the pretty and smart girls, were Democrats. There were certainly no blond goddesses such as Monica Goodling, who led the hiring thought police at the Bush Justice Department. 

As a young columnist, I staked out what at the time was the Dead Career Zone in newspapers, as a supporter of free markets, free trade and limited government. Now I feel the need to put all of those goals in quotation marks. For I did move left, knowing, as Whittaker Chambers said in a different context, "that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."

I must say a few things in my defense besides "young" and "stupid." I was raised in a staunchly Republican family, where my grandmother never voted for a Democrat again because of the way Woodrow Wilson treated Theodore Roosevelt. My mother was involved in Arizona GOP politics. It was an intensely political household, with dinner-table conversations over public policy. My mother's rule was that one could take any position, as long as he could defend it with learning and logic. Barry Goldwater was an icon and seemed to embody the best of Arizona and the West, as did leaders such as Paul Fannin and John J. Rhodes. In a house of books, I gravitated to the ones that tended to support my positions — a fatal intellectual flaw, of course. Buckley and Goldwater conservatism encouraged independent thinking, as opposed to the rigid ideologies of the left, or so it seemed. Growing up in old Arizona, I was in a sparsely populated place where abstractions seemed borne out by everything around us. And the existential struggle of the Cold War towered above all else; here the Republicans seemed stronger, no small thing.

Freeway to hell

What will be the final nail in the coffin of the city of Phoenix? I vote for the Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway.

If the freeway is built, it will be a gamble for everybody. A bet that the old sprawl model can work one last time to generate short-term profits for the Real Estate Industrial Complex by turning largely worthless land into sites for tilt-up commercial space, subdivisions, shopping strips, In-N-Out Burger boxes and the entire dreary aggregation of suburbia. Some stand to get very wealthy off the deal, including, apparently, Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio. Like so many "local leaders," he is not a high-tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, stem-cell researcher, professor or clergyman -- he's a real-estate guy. But with so much leverage still weighing down the development game and higher energy prices just around the corner, one has to wonder if the ol' Growth Machine has one more go in it. Yet Arizona is like a dinosaur whose tiny reptilian brain hasn't yet processed that its tail is on fire -- so it will keep building out a 1965 transportation system.

It worked in LA in 1965 because Los Angeles actually had a real economy, not just a real-estate economy. And gasoline was still cheap; America itself had not yet hit its national oil peak. Now Southern California has destroyed so much of itself with freeways and, facing the damage, has embarked on rebuilding its once-great rail infrastructure. Thus, LA now has one of the nation's most extensive light-rail systems and commuter rail operations. In Phoenix (and this deserves its own Phoenix 101 post), freeways were mostly about maximizing profits for landholders and developers whose property was otherwise good only for agriculture or worthless desert. The real economy always lagged, and finally stopped trying to keep up entirely. But the biggest loser from the freeways was the city of Phoenix.

Phoenix 101: Indians

The many faces of the Pima tribe. In the center is Ira Hayes, the decorated Marine who was among the famed flag raisers on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Phoenix has the largest population of urban American Indians in the United States. It's also the only major metro area that is flanked by reservations: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community east of Scottsdale, the Gila River Indian Community to the south and southwest, and farther to the east, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. With casinos and water rights, the tribes enjoy the greatest economic power in their modern history. This is a story that's only beginning. But of course it's a very old one, too.

The city's name comes from its location atop the ruins of the Hohokam civilization. Like the mythical Phoenix bird, it rose from its ashes (and it is by far the coolest city name in America, which makes it a shame that the suburban mandarins resist using it to describe the metro, as is commonplace in every other major city in America). When the first Anglo settlers came to the Salt River Valley after the Civil War, they cleaned out some of the Hohokam canals and resumed the region's oldest human activity: agriculture. The Hohokam were the most advanced hydrological civilization north of Mesoamerica. The sophisticated dam and canal structure built for today's Phoenix is simply an extension of the Hohokam's work.

Growing up in Phoenix, I was constantly aware of the Hohokam's ghosts -- but I was an odd child, enchanted by the place and its history. For most in the 1960s, American Indians were not a common sight there. The reservations were relatively far away then. The stereotype of the drunken Indian was on tragic display in the Deuce. Prejudice was common, even as we romanticized the tribes, particularly the Apache and Navajo. It had not even been a century since the Apache wars had ended. Phoenicians mostly came in contact with the tribes passing by the Phoenix Indian School, an institution now reviled by scholars for destroying native culture but one which may deserve a fresh revision someday. Today's phenomenon of an urban Indian population was very limited. We had a Navajo boy, John Rogers, in my class at Kenilworth School: he had been adopted by a Anglo family. Not to be blind to the challenges he faced, but in the crucible of cruel children he seemed to garner a special respect. After all, in playing cowboys and Indians, we all wanted to be the latter. And growing up in the center city, I drank in the magic of the Heard Museum.

The Full Kook

Gov. Jan Brewer is pulling Arizona out of the coalition of Western states and Canadian provinces trying to make some regional progress in limiting greenhouse gases. J.D. Hayworth is taking on John McCain in the Republican Senate primary (make your own gasbag jokes). For awhile, I worried Arizona might be denied what I call "The Full Kook," where the Kookocracy implements its most cherished and dangerous proposals, rather than being the crazy aunt in the attic down at the Capitol whose ravings are muted by the adult in the governor's chair. Now I'm more hopeful. Why? Because the Full Kook is the only way I can see that Arizona might save itself. For decades, the creeping growth of the Kookocracy has slowly been damaging every part of the state's social and economic health. But still, the Kooks kept control of the Legislature because most eligible voters stay home. Only the Full Kook might shake most Arizonans out of their torpor -- and we'll see if there's what Saint Janet called the "sensible center" majority -- or if the Big Sort has turned Arizona into the nation's largest insane asylum.

Brewer is falling into line with the successful reactionary effort to halt any measures to address climate change -- or even to accept its scientific legitimacy. Even the New York Times has strangely bought into this. The deniers of established science are "skeptics." What next in the flagship of the liberal media: "Evolution skeptics"?  Thus the big snowstorm in the East is a sign that "global warming is a hoax," when in fact it is confirmation of the destabilizing weather patterns we were told to expect from climate change. In Seattle, we just had our warmest January on record. (Stephen Colbert has a great retort for the deniers, in media most Americans can understand). No matter. The strategy is to keep arguing and prevent action. In D.C., any meaningful action to limit emissions is dead, another casualty of the Hoover/Carter/Obama malaise. What is barely reported is how much money Exxon/Mobil and other corporate giants are pouring into not only lobbying against action, but to prop up the elaborate propaganda machine of the "skeptics." Nor is there ongoing, serious discussion of the costs of inaction, whether because of what's coming from climate change or because we're abrogating opportunities to create new industries to help slow or reverse its effects.

So Arizona needn't worry. America will remain paralyzed. Reality will not, and the costs, destabilization and even national security perils from climate change will continue to creep forward. Brewer doesn't even hear the contradiction in her statement, when she withdraws from the Western Climate Initiative -- hardly perfect but a start among serious leaders -- and wants to avoid California emission standards, but also wants green-tech jobs. Sorry, the two work together. This is why Germany is solar-power central. And notice that China is working furiously to corner the technology and manufacture of renewable energy. In the U.S., the best shot at ameliorating the effects of climate change are happening in the smart states, not the cheap states. Even if ASU makes some research breakthroughs, Arizona lacks the economic capacity to exploit most of them.

The Godot housing recovery

"Everybody" in the Arizona's limited cloud of good intentions believes the state needs to diversify its economy, particularly in suffering Phoenix. Unfortunately this doesn't include the two entities that could actually address this issue: the state government, which is controlled by the Kookocracy and can only cut services and taxes, and the Real Estate Industrial Complex. The latter is just waiting for the old reliable growth machine to wheeze to life once again. For both, rapid population growth alone has cloaked an array of dysfunctions and it's gone on for so many decades that few can imagine a future of discontinuity. In other words, nobody with real power has a Plan B.

As the Kookocracy has gone national, so, too, did much of Phoenix's delusional thinking during the years leading up to the crash. With so much of the economy hollowed out, more and more prosperity depended on house building and improvement, house selling and flipping, and mortgages — from generating and refinancing them to packaging them in elaborate swindles on Wall Street. No wonder that many days the national news sounds like the local land boosters giving a forecast at the Arizona Biltmore. Housing has hit bottom! A recovery is under way! Sales are up — ooops, today they're down, but tomorrow's another day.

None of these individual snapshots answer the fundamental question: Can the old housing market be restarted?

Mad hatters at tea

Now the meme is how we must show the "tea-party movement" more respect. After all, it was responsible for Republican Scott Brown's victory, taking a Senate seat held for decades by Democrats. The "liberal media" flagship, The New York Times, carried an analysis that said, "The remarkable Republican victory in Massachusetts demonstrated convincingly that the deep populist anger fueling the Tea Party movement has migrated from the political fringe to the mainstream, forcing both parties to confront how to channel a growing mood of public resentment to their own ends." Others have talked about the movement's "diverse" elements, and how we shouldn't judge it merely by its loudest advocates. Some liberal talk-radio hosts have urged progressives to co-opt the tea-partiers.

Anyone who has lived in Arizona knows this is nonsense. The tea-baggers are Republicans, not independents. They an ignorant, easily-led rabble that is energized, most of all, by the fact that a black man is president of the United States. Where, for example, was their outrage when George W. Bush was running up the biggest deficit in history? Gathered and ginned up by Fox "News" and talk radio, they are against government — all government. They are against taxes — all taxes. They are animated by all manner of strange fetishes, from President Obama's birth certificate to communist plots lurking in every element of public policy. They love to hate, no matter the large number who are evangelicals. Force is their first resort, whether dealing with the Muslim world or local gun laws. They make "low information" voters seem like Plutarch, with the most recent poll showing large numbers of Republican voters believe Obama is a racist, a socialist, and not an American citizen.

In other words, the tea party is the Kookocracy taken to a national level.

Spaced-out America

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win..." — John F. Kennedy, 1962

NASA's grand plan to return to the moon...is about to vanish with hardly a whimper. (Obama's budget) is also a death knell for the Ares 1 rocket, NASA's planned successor to the space shuttle — The Washington Post, 2010

China's "efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on... China." — New York Times, 2010

Tell me we're not a nation in decline. Not relative decline in the peaceful and prosperous world that a generation of American leaders worked to build from the ashes of World War II and all its poisonous causes. Absolute decline. The night I saw Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, I couldn't have imagined our country would be here 40 years hence. I was certain we would at least have bases on Mars, if not have embarked on some deep-space exploration. But, then, during the great panic of the fall of 2008, I thought we might actually turn away from an economy based on sprawl and financial speculation, face reality as a nation, and get busy making the Great Transition to address the Great Disruption that has only just begun.

And you say I'm not an optimist.