Rogue Columnist

The city in mind

As a native Westerner, my problem with "wide open spaces" is how many we've lost in my lifetime and how difficult it is to really live in what's left in a nation of 308 million. The constant move outward in metro Phoenix obliterates anything but the illusion. Today's wide vista out the window will be a Super Wal-Mart tomorrow. People who bought in Fountain Hills years ago — a development that annihilated one of the state's most lush saguaro forests, and it takes a saguaro ten years to grow an inch-and-a-half — are now partly surrounded by schlock. Same with Verrado, where the idiot David Brooks saw "the future." Prescott, a town with history and wonderful bones, is a planning and congestion disaster outside the old town. The same is true with Flagstaff, as with most small towns in America.

If you're rich and lucky enough to buy land adjacent to a National Park, maybe your panorama will have the illusion of the pristine, although we know the pollution, fire, sleazy land swaps and other stresses facing our public lands — and just wait for the GOP to privatize it. Move to the staked plains and you can find real emptiness, but good luck finding work. And if I want wide open spaces, do I profane them further with a new house, which by its very nature can't be "green," and total dependence on the automobile? Good luck finding a real, scalable, sustainable small town on a passenger train route.

For these reasons, as well as growing up in central Phoenix and for the eye-opening years I spent living in real cities, I choose to make my stand in the city. And it's a major focus of this blog. Most Americans don't "get" cities; they don't have urban values. Most want their imitation English country estates crowded together as lookalike tract houses in suburbia. The problems with this are manifold. First, the nation's population has doubled since Levittowns were first laid down. Thus, most suburbs suffer from urban problems without urban solutions. Second, they are artifacts of a moment in history defined by cheap gasoline, now passing away. Third, sprawl destroys vast tracts of valuable agricultural land, rural areas and wilderness, with numerous environmental strains. Fourth, for all the heavy subsidies to make suburbia work (freeways, flood control, etc.), it's a highly inefficient spatial arrangement. Suburbia is not merely boring and filled with anomie (American Beauty, etc.), it is now the epicenter of the housing crash, with attendant debt, poverty and very high carrying costs.

'The Mexican Detroit'

Talk about burying the lede. Last week's Arizona Republic story on the Census started out by reporting on how "Hispanics led Arizona's changing population over the past decade." It's only if one reads deeper, which most people don't, that the real news is found. This was the decade in which Phoenix set its trajectory to become a "majority minority" city. Phoenix added 140,000 Hispanic residents — and this is the official number, for a Census taken during the white-right and the Badged Ego's persecution of brown people. The city also saw the Anglo population decline by 64,000.

Read that again. Read it a third time, and realize, along with the failure to maintain the fifth-largest city position, that Phoenix has finally reached perhaps the most profound tipping point in its history.

You know that during the boom, I was told by more than one smug north Scottsdale toff that "Phoenix will become the Mexican Detroit." My response was usually along the lines of, "We'll be the center of the most important industry in the world, with high-skilled and high-paid jobs, and the richness of Hispanic culture to boot? Sign me up." Or, being a realist about the disaster that has pummeled Detroit for decades, "Do you think that will be good for your property values, even up in Troon North?" They didn't care. I do.

War (huh!) what it is good for

In trying to understand what seems to be, well, I don't know a delicate way to put it, the growing goatfuck in Libya, I turned to Professor Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog is one of the best sources of analysis on the Middle East. He lists ten ways that the Libyan intervention is not Iraq 2003. Among them, the action has UN Security Council authorization; the Libyan people "had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds"; civilians were being massacred and worse was to follow, and the Arab League calling for action.

Maybe. But I can't help this nagging feeling that Uncle Sucker has once again been lured into a Wilsonian/Bushian "make the world safe for democracy" swindle, while more complex, hypocritical, realpolitik, cynical and sinister forces are at work. It is no surprise that France pushed hard for action, not wanting to be on the receiving end of a million impossible-to-assimilate Muslim refugees, but Mr. Carla Bruni will publicize this with Liberté, égalité, fraternité. No surprise, either, that Arab League members started to squawk once the cruise missiles began landing. It's reminiscent of the days when the United States would take out some dictator in Latin America, bringing instant public condemnation of "imperialism!" by leaders in the region who were saying, sotto voce, "Thank God they got him!" And how nice to make our Chinese debt-holders squirm even a little at the prospect that the next popular uprising just might show up outside their politburo meeting. 

Still, what's the end game here? No Fly Zones are well and good and militarily...what? Actually, the only NFZ I know that was working was the one we maintained for a decade against Saddam Hussein. Otherwise, the intervention must expand or fail, for the good colonel is not committing most of his civilian killings with air power, but with ground forces. So, as Sir Sean Connery's character demands of Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, "What are you prepared to do?" One can't escape the conclusion that President Hoover and Mrs. Clinton didn't really think that one through, and Bob Gates was just too damned tired or distracted to intervene. Instead of World War III, we'll just have three wars in the world, sapping America. Forgive me for imagining the cynical Europeans and Perfidious Albion (the Royal Navy fired one cruise missile on the day the attack began) are just itching for a way to hand the mess off to us.

Rumors of moderation

Editor's Note: I especially urge you to check out the comments thread on this post. It veers a bit off-topic, to our beloved, ill-starred central Phoenix, but it's some of the best stuff our fine contributors have done.

The narrative surrounding the defeat of five anti-illegal immigrant bills in the Arizona State Senate goes like this: "Business leaders" finally weighed in to stop the worst excesses of Russell Pearce & Co., worried about their effect on the economy. As the New York Times put it, "In an abrupt change of course, Arizona lawmakers rejected new anti-immigration measures on Thursday, in what was widely seen as capitulation to pressure from business executives and an admission that the state’s tough stance had resulted in a chilling of the normally robust tourism and convention industry."

It's nothing of the kind. When Evan Mecham was forced from the governor's office in 1988, it was indeed driven by the business leadership — because there was one. Valley National Bank and Dial, for example, were still independent, major corporate headquarters, located in the central city, carrying the role of civic stewardship one expects from giants in their hometown. In addition, the Real Estate Industrial Complex saw that Mecham's brand of craziness and racism were badly damaging the state's reputation and ability to draw capital. The Arizona Republic was still locally owned, the flagship of a major newspaper chain headquartered in downtown Phoenix, and it both thundered and investigated, bringing questionable campaign contributions to light. The Legislature still had a Republican Party with a brain, as well as a robust Democratic competition.

Mecham, in some ways a tragic figure, was always an accidental governor, a product of the circular firing squad of the Democrats Bill Schultz and my mother's dear friend Carolyn Warner, and complacency by mainstream GOP candidate Burton Barr. Mecham was proudly ignorant, hostile to education, drunk on all manner of Bircher propaganda. He was, however, a warning of what was coming: The Big Sort bringing reactionary Midwesterners to Arizona who, allied with much of the LDS, promised a new kind of Arizona politics embodied by Pearce and today's state Republican Party. In any event, his undoing was a real example where Arizona came to its senses, led by a business leadership that still saw its interests twined with those of the broader state.

The Great Disruption

I am suspicious of all unified field theories, including my own. Still, we have entered a new age and must try to explain and understand it. I am with James Howard Kunstler's "Long Emergency" in many areas. But I don't think the federal government will collapse anytime soon; crises tend to centralize power — even the Roman Empire took centuries to fall apart in the West, longer still in the East. Nor do I think small-scale food production and small towns will replace cities; cities have the power and wealth to draw resources, and metropolitan areas will be the economic and organizing entities of the 21st century, barring a major nuclear war. Nor do I accept Dmitry Orlov's theory that America will collapse along the lines of the Soviet Union.

I call the new age the Great Disruption. It is on display in Japan, where one of the most advanced nations in the world is struggling with a devastating earthquake and an unfolding nuclear disaster. The planet is at 6.8 billion people, at or beyond its carrying capacity. This will amplify the natural disasters that are a normal part of the world, bringing much more widespread death and misery to the Haitis and Indonesias, but not sparing advanced nations. The United States has nearly doubled its population in my lifetime. This not only adds huge costs that we have not addressed, in infrastructure to use one example, but also vulnerabilities (and lack of spending on infrastructure to soften disasters, e.g. New Orleans). A major earthquake in Seattle or San Francisco today would be catastrophic, and both are inevitable. And lest Phoenicians feel smug, they are downwind from the largest nuclear power plant in the nation, one with a highly checkered safety record, getting older, and whose water supply in an emergency should be question No. 1 for the press. This on top of (over) populating one of the most hostile desert valleys and basins in the world, a totally manmade environment, totally vulnerable to tribulation.

Overpopulation is a backbeat for most of the other elements of the Great Disruption. But most of all it is about discontinuity The next 30 years are not going to be a replay of the past 30, only with cooler personal tech toys. Why not?

We're Number _ ?

The most telling aspect of Phoenix being surpassed by Philadelphia as the fifth-largest city in America — news that was broken first on Thursday by this humble blog — was the utter silence at the time in the local media. The Arizona Republic story on the Census numbers merely stated that Philadelphia had "retained" its position as No. 5. That's it. The situation was far different in the early 2000s when the Census Bureau officially stated that Phoenix had overtaken the City of Brotherly Love. The Republic had front-page growthgasm stories. My pal Montini, who came from near Pittsburgh so already had a grudge against the big city in eastern Pennsylvania, wrote a gloating, twist-the-knife column with a "Yo, Philly," headline. Now...silence. Cue chirping crickets. Philadelphians were not fooled. One tweeted: "Suck it, Phoenix." Indeed. (Update: the Republic finally produced a non-page-one story on Sunday...or was it Monday?).

When Phoenix began its brief reign as No. 5, the local triumphalism was loud and deep. I tagged along with Mayor Phil Gordon and City Council members who traveled to Philadelphia to meet with their counterparts. The latter were full of praise for my hometown, full of contrition about their corrupt, underclass-ridden city. Full of hubris, we had a grand time in the Center City's restaurants, shopping, parks, historical landmarks and architectural splendor. Back home, top officials talked about Phoenix inevitably overtaking Houston as No. 4 and soon catching up with Chicago. I am not making this up. "Then we'll be a world city," said one economic development leader, and then, presumably, Phoenix would magically create all the elements of such a place.

I take no pleasure in this development, although I warned about it last year. It's hard to shake the culture one grew up in. Bored in school in the 1960s, I would draw maps of the Salt River Valley and sketch avenues, freeways and developments yet to come. It was as inevitable in my ten-year-old brain as in those of John F. Long and the other Phoenix leaders that we would, indeed, become something great. As if a mass of people alone would make that happen. It's tempting to shrug this milestone off. A blow to what little prestige Phoenix enjoyed, to be sure, but what do these rankings really matter? In fact, this is a profound turning point — and not merely because the Texas cities have yet to have their counts revealed and Sheryl Sculley's San Antonio might still surpass Phoenix and knock it down another notch. (Addendum: Phoenix is officially No. 6: San Antonio came in at 1,327,407; this is cold comfort).

BREAKING: Phoenix has lost its crown as the nation's fifth most populous city. Latest Census numbers: Phoenix 1,445,632; Philadelphia, 1,526,006. And San Antonio's numbers aren't in yet. Population growth alone does not a quality city make, but this is a huge blow to Phoenix's prestige and ability to get federal dollars. It will also add to the political power of the white-right suburbs. And, the city has no Plan B beyond "growth." So much for the bragging I heard mid-decade about how Phoenix would pass Houston in 2010 and soon overtake Chicago. One unknown: How much did the climate of fear from SB 1070 and other anti-Hispanic measures contribute to an undercount?

No way to run a railroad

No other issue personifies the dysfunction at the heart of America — or as they would say on Twitter, #AmericaFail — as much as the inability to move ahead with high-speed rail. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress never made a serious effort. The $13 billion initially offered is nothing compared with what's needed. By comparison, China is spending $100 billion a year. Much of the money here would go to higher-speed rail, not the 155-mile-per-hour-plus systems that qualify as genuine high-speed rail. And the choice of Florida for the nation's first HSR line was always misplaced: Florida is a car-culture, suburbanized state, especially in Orlando and Tampa, the destinations of the line, with little appreciation or habit of taking trains. HSR would better be tried in rail-friendly territory, such as California or the Pacific Northwest, or making the Northeast Corridor true high speed. Then Americans could see how well such a system would really work. Now, with Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida refusing the federal money, and the GOP-controlled House solidly anti-rail, it looks as if even this modest start will come to little.

The Republican fetish against trains and transit, so well articulated by George Will (and followed by priceless takedowns by Paul Krugman and Jim Kunstler) has always fascinated me. It was Abraham Lincoln who started the heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad. Republican presidents after him further subsidized more railroads through land grants. "Internal improvements" was a key Republican issue. No more. Republicans routinely refuse to even consider rail or rail transit as necessary options for the nation. They most of all wage war against Amtrak, keeping it too underfunded to succeed with frequent, convenient schedules (and it's still wildly popular). These "conservatives" had no interest in conserving what was once the world's most advanced passenger rail system. Is it that they represent the suburbs and exurbs, so are mindless creatures of car culture. Or is it the billions spent by the oil, auto and sprawl industries to ensure America stays mired in a 1970s transportation system? Indeed, the U.S. government gives oil and gas companies $41 billion a year, nearly 40 times Amtrak's annual budget. As usual, the fecklessness of Democrats enables the problem (oh, for a real opposition party).

In the real world, passenger trains are a major part of the transportation systems of advanced nations. The April edition of Trains magazine, a special report on HSR (not available online, alas), is quite an eye-opener.

City Hall

The first and perhaps only great mayor was Greek. He was Pericles of Athens, and he lived some 2500 years ago, and he said, "All things good on this Earth flow into the City, because of the City's greatness." Well, we were great once. Can we not be great again? — from the 1996 film City Hall.

Something strange is happening inside Phoenix City Hall, and I can't escape the nagging feeling that the ouster of police chief Jack Harris is part of it. Harris was removed as chief, but not as public safety director, after claims that the PPD inflated kidnapping numbers in order to get federal grants. Mayor Phil Gordon supported Harris, while Councilwoman Peggy Neely was a vocal Harris critic. That's the story so far, and the reporting has been disappointing. The back story has yet to fully emerge. (Here's a 3/11/11 update on council bickering; this is reaching Scottsdale levels of childishness).

To understand the modern Phoenix Police Department, you must go back to 1954, when Charlie Thomas was appointed chief. He was a rough equivalent of LA's William Parker, a modernizer and reformer who created a professional police force. PPD was never as corrupt or brutal as the LAPD that Parker inherited; it was a small force (149 officers for a city of 150,000) with a good-ole-boy culture in a mobbed-up town. It was still haunted by the 1944 murder of one its first African-American officers, "Star" Johnson, by detective "Frenchy" Navarre. Johnson and his partner were walking a beat in the Deuce when Frenchy, a notoriously brutal and racist cop, parked in a red zone off-duty and refused to move. He shot Johnson, who later died, and was acquitted by a Southern-culture Phoenix jury. Johnson's partner later came into Police Headquarters (on the first floor of the lovely, still-standing City-County Building) and gunned down Frenchy, who went down firing the two guns he wore. The bullet holes were in the walls for years. There was also the infamous World War II riot in "(racial slur) Town by soldiers, a rich historical event for some future scholar.

Misplaced power

Robert Gates, by all accounts, is as fine a public servant as can be found in Washington today, almost a throwback to a better time. He recently said at West Point that "any future Defense Secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it." Americans should have their heads examined if they think they can sustain the massive military establishment of today or the self-serving military-industrial complex behind it. As teachers are fired, infrastructure remains decades behind our competitors and the middle class is told it must bear the brunt of austerity, this is an urgent issue.

It's worth understanding the context in which President Eisenhower coined the term. In his farewell address, the retired five-star general said:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.