Rogue Columnist

Second time around?

If Arizona was a 'clean slate', how would you do it the second time around?

This challenge, from commenter Rate Crimes, is too tempting to avoid. But it risks being the kind of temptation found in the bars of history at closing time: A pointless counterfactual fling that will end in regret or even worse. No place can be separated from its moment in history, the larger forces at work upon it, the larger-than-life people who mold it, and the masses of people who live there. Arizona and Phoenix were always going to be exactly what they are. Maybe.

Yet here's one imagination exercise: An Arizona with 2 million people, about the population of real-life New Mexico (rather than 6.6 million). Most live in relatively compact versions of Phoenix and Tucson. Every city and town in the state has maintained its distinct identity, look, feel. The larger cities have kept and enhanced key industries while drawing high-value, leading edge sectors proportionate to (or disproportionately favorable to) their population. Housing is a much smaller part of the economy. Smaller places especially have scalable local economies. Multiple universities, federal laboratories and a robust technology cluster are a draw for international talent. Incomes are higher than the national average, as in real-life Washington state or Colorado. Most people are literate and educated, engaged in the community, committed to preserving the environment, part of a vibrant two-party political system that veers to moderation whomever is in power. This outward-looking state is a major trade hub for Mexico and Latin America, comfortable with its Hispanic part, but largely insulated from a huge illegal alien influx by its high-end economy and the cohesion of its cities.

I could get even more specific about Phoenix.

Arizona depression III

I'll wrap up my trip back home with the question that started it: What now?

In numerous conversations with the well-connected and just average 'Zonies, nobody has an answer. "Every time things seem to be improving, we take a step back," said one prominent player. "We have an unerring ability to shoot ourselves in the head." I would add: "And reload." While the state is very different from metro Phoenix in many ways, economically it has become an even less diverse mirror of it, depending on population growth, housing and tourism. The "plan," such as there is one, seems to be hoping the Growth Machine can sputter to life for one more good run. The white-right rhetoric about cutting taxes and regulation to gain business is nonsense: If that were the key, Mississippi and Somalia would be economic giants. The reality: There's no plan B.

In my old haunts, every little triumph is offset by a heartbreak or moronic misstep. Some new restaurants have set up along the light-rail line — wish some productive businesses or headquarters with high-wage jobs would do so. The historic districts continue to hold on, despite scads of "for-sale" signs. ASU downtown seems there to stay, no small accomplishment. Yet the number of empty storefronts is astounding, a sign of the lack of capital coming to the city. The city can't afford to keep up iconic Encanto Park while what was the shady oasis adjacent to the Viad tower has been turned into a horrid faux desert radioactive zone. Every time someone throws down rocks and removes shade trees and grass from the old city, it only increases the heat island and decreases the livability. "We're in a desert!!" No, Mr. or Ms. Transplant, old Phoenix was always an oasis.

Arizona depression II

My favorite hotel, adjacent to the Willo Historic District, is full. Two large conventions are downtown. This was all booked before Arizona passed its Jim Crow anti-immigration law. Now every restaurant owner and person associated with the tourism industry I speak with is terrified about the growing backlash against the state. Many here are outraged about boycott calls. But it's fair game: Without the boycott, Gandhi, King and Chavez would not have had a key weapon against a grave moral injustice. I wish people would boycott by legislative district, while spending money and time in central Phoenix and Tucson, as well as with Hispanic- and progressive-owned local businesses. The rocks come with the farm, and the residents of the state allowed the Kookocracy to run wild, not only with SB 1070 but a host of madness.

Phoenix is in trouble anyway. Mayor Phil Gordon, a good man who loves the city and came into office seven years ago amid such hope, seems adrift. The composition of the city council has changed and for the first time since the reforming Charter Government movement took power six decades ago is becoming politicized. The ability to do the big things accomplished by Skip Rimsza and seen through by Gordon appears gone. Huge swaths of the city look like Dresden after the rubble had been carted away. The largest business, based on signage, remains "Available." Light rail (we built it, you bastards) is a big success; for example, I see many guests at the hotel taking it to restaurants, the convention center or to and from Sky Harbor. Yet the fiscal crisis is causing cuts in frequency, which will hurt ridership. The bus system has already been reduced to service levels seen in small cities.

Arizona depression I

Traveling around Arizona, it's difficult to imagine how the state can turn itself around, even if a majority understood the term. For most, a turnaround would mean a return to 40-percent population growth every decade, more sprawl, more "active adult resort living -- with championship golf!," more spec retail development and office "parks" to house the real-estate outfits, mortgage boiler rooms and call centers. The dirty secret is that as an economy, Arizona outside of Phoenix and Tucson is "the Third World," as a prominent booster economist once told me, not for attribution. An overstatement of course, although the Third World also has its gated enclaves of the super-rich and depends heavily on tourism. But among the states, Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson performed dismally on almost any measure of economic well-being except for housing starts and population growth, the latter a mixed indicator that carries huge costs, too. And this was before the Great Recession.

Now tourism is in freefall, even before the Jim Crow anti-immigration law (and a Tea Party 'buycott' is of questionable help considering the bulwark of the "movement," New York Times spin notwithstanding, is economically distressed whites). The exurban and rural sprawl building of the mid-2000s is dead and decomposing. Even tony Sedona is suffering. Another striking fact is how dependent rural Arizona has become on everything from food to gasoline to Wal-Mart Chinese goodies trucked up from Phoenix, even as it has added huge gobs of new people. This region was once the epitome of localization, along with distribution via railroads. Now Flagstaff's rail yard has been ripped out and the two tracks of the BNSF "Transcon" run through alone, heavily ballasted for speedy passage as if this were the middle of nowhere. It's not merely that Arizona produces little now, but that such a layout is highly vulnerable, not least to the future of peak oil and its much higher gasoline prices. The forest looks sick despite the wet winter. Climate change is bad enough, but one wonders whether this miracle of creation can withstand more than 6 million people and their cars in a place far beyond its carrying capacity. Then there's the once-magical Verde Valley, profaned by sprawl around Cottonwood that makes Phoenix look like a model of planning, all sucking water that will be needed by the Salt River Project.

In Phoenix, one of the most arresting aspects of the depression -- for the city has never been through anything like this -- continues to be the relatively light traffic. I drove from Sky Harbor into midtown, hitting the Papago/Red Mountain/51 merge headed to Seventh Street at 5:45 p.m. on Thursday. Easy motoring. Three years before, it would have been an impossible mess. The air was relatively clear, even though the ozone and other vaporous car-vomited poisons congregate in north Scottsdale and Fountain Hills (awww). Not much looks different. This is the trick Phoenix plays on its residents, although the world is changing fast. Again, I don't see how this place recovers.

Screwed 3.0

Now we enter the next phase of the Great Disruption, where political dysfunction meets unsustainability. The Greek debt crisis is helping prepare the way for American panic about the federal deficit and national debt. These two maladies are a cause célèbre for the Tea Party. The supposedly left-wing media are on board. USA Today headline: "Nation's soaring debt calls for painful choices." Tom Friedman of the New York Times: "After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics." Isn't he cute? I can't wait for the idiot David Brooks to weigh in. (He's already written about how "as government grew, the anti-government right mobilized. This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class...As government became more threatening..." Funny, he means the Obama administration, not the Bush wars, shredding of civil liberties and crony capitalism leading to trillions in federal bailouts, i.e., government growing.) You see, we're just like Greece — a profligate nation that needs to tighten its belt, cut government.

The reality, of course, is very different. Whatever his failings, Bill Clinton showed that seemingly intractable red ink could be turned into surpluses. The present deficit and debt is almost entirely a creation of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars and the Bush bailout of Wall Street (for which Sen. Obama voted). The fiscal situation was made more severe by the worst recession since the Great Depression. It's as if FDR fought World War II twice as long, cut rather than raised taxes, and did all this in the worst part of the Depression while using federal money for the banksters rather than the people. It's a wonder the deficit is so low as a percentage of GDP. It is not a cause for hysteria.

But, ah, dear reader, it will be used. "You never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste," said White House tough guy Rahm Emanuel, who is letting the real crises of the Great Disruption do just that. The extreme white-right — the idiot David Brooks' "yeoman enterprising class" — and the plutocracy will use the "crisis" of federal spending to their own ends. And if the effectiveness of their party as the minority in Congress is any indication, wait until they take the House this year from a feckless Democratic Party. And then the Senate and White House. Prepare for Screwed 3.0

Roll over, Gene Pulliam

The Arizona Republic on Sunday published a remarkable front-page editorial concerning the pile of feces into which the state has done a face-plant, otherwise known as its attempt to "address" illegal immigration. It was not remarkable for its placement — old-time newspaper publishers often did page-one opinion pieces, perhaps most famously the Republic's own Eugene C. Pulliam. Rather, this article, pretty as it was with the paper's current obsession with design, proved astonishing in its intellectual shallowness, dishonesty and desperate pretzel-twisting to cast "blame" equally in every direction. And all the while demanding "leaders." Rarely has an institution in the broad land of vapid corporate newspapers made such a gaudy display of its daft cowardliness. One is reminded of Lincoln's line: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

"Old Man Pulliam," who ran the Republic and Phoenix Gazette for decades, occasionally published — and even wrote, for he was a newspaperman to his marrow — thundering page-one editorials. They were not intended to compete in the Society for News Design. They were sometimes long, always trenchantly and even intellectually argued. I recall one from the late '60s (I believe) that was a fierce jeremiad against rising government bureaucracy. You always knew where his newspaper stood. Pulliam was a man of the right but he would not be allowed into today's Republican Party or corporate journalism club. He was too independent, endorsing LBJ over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and renouncing the idea of a newspaper as merely a business. It is said he wrote a trust to prevent the sale of his beloved papers to the likes of Gannett, but that's another story.

There's no doubt that were he alive today and running the Republic, he and his famed investigative reporters would make short work of Russell Pearce and Joe Arpaio.

Friday night lights

Joe Gatti's iconic Seven Arts mosaic on the old Coronado High auditorium

Everybody paid attention to the round, white clock on the west wall. The room was big and carried sound. We were suited up and while some sat silently preparing or exercising, others congregated, working off nerves with jokes and stories. Those tales of past exploits were entertaining in themselves, but they often contained important lessons. The jokes let off steam. Individuals handled the stress of these moments differently; a few thrived on it, others tried to set aside their self-doubt. As the hands of the clock moved, the payoff from months and even years of training and preparation would come — or not. What began in the new few minutes, and it would be over so fast, all you had was what you brought tonight. Except...except, those seconds of improvisational magic on which everything might turn.

The reputation of the school was at stake, its deep traditions, its prestige. Everyone was deeply invested in the event that was to come, but many of us had college scholarships at stake, a few even hoped to turn pro. As the time approached the noise in the room grew until Mr. Newcomer made his entrance, his customary clipboard in hand. Silence. In an authoritative baritone, he ticked off a few last notes to a quiet team. Then we all stood and clasped hands — as I recall it was arm-over-arm, so one's right hand held the other's left hand and so on, bringing the circle closer, making the fellowship unbreakable. And we all recited the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done... Afterward, one of the assistants opened the door and we filed out, ready.

This was theater at Coronado High School, in what is now "south Scottsdale," in the early- and mid-1970s. While many high schools had a "senior play," we have a theater season that usually consisted of eight major productions, including two musicals (one with faculty), spring repertory and a summer play. The fare was ambitious in its difficulty and scale: Twelfth Night, Fiddler on the Roof, Of Mice and Men, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, A Midsummer Night's Dream and West Side Story among them. Under the leadership of Jim Newcomer, the theater program's excellence was always at the college level, often surpassing it. Theater instructor Judie Carroll and Ralph Bradshaw from the fine English department also directed productions. Nor was the theater program unique.