Rogue Columnist

The ambition deficit

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood... — Daniel Burnham

Hard as it is to believe for someone my age, it's been 50 years since construction began on the Space Needle, the iconic symbol of Seattle and the centerpiece of the 1962 World's Fair. Seattle leaders elbowed out much better-known cities, including New York, to gain international accreditation of the event, which was a coming out party to the world for the Emerald City. The site is now Seattle Center, a cultural mecca in the central core right down the monorail from downtown. It was actually Seattle's second world's fair and had initially been developed to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, whose grounds became the University of Washington campus. Another one of my adopted hometowns, San Diego, also held two world's fairs, in 1915 and 1935 — their legacy was magnificent Balboa Park.

My real hometown never did one world's fair, even though it passed the population mark to be a big city more than half a century ago. It may be just as well. Unlike Seattle or San Diego (or even Knoxville, Tenn.), Phoenix would have built something out in the middle of nowhere and, unlike Seattle lucking out with the timeless Space Needle, suffered the worst of modern architecture. Maybe the dusty streets for an empty subdivision would have been left behind. Indeed, I was approached by a group of well-meaning folks in the mid-2000s to promote a world's fair in the former gravel beds of the Salt River. That it was far from downtown never seemed to have occured to them.

Still, this is another sign of Phoenix's astounding lack of ambition. It plays in the majors. It just doesn't want to admit it. I recall hearing from someone who moved to Phoenix and tried, within his modest means, to push forward a project of civic betterment. He was taken aside and told, "People move to the Valley to be left alone. That's the way they like it. You either have to live with that or move." He moved.

His to lose?

I've tweeted Al Gore's must-read "Climate of Denial" several times. This eloquent piece goes in depth about the media's complicity in keeping climate change out of the degraded public square. Yet nobody re-tweeted it. People have stopped listening to the former vice president (even as his vile successor's policies remain in place). Yet I wonder if there's anything more important than this for progressives.

Gay marriage? A historic victory in New York, but the cultural right has been losing this one for some time. Wall Street contributions helped, and why not — gays are a very lucrative demographic. Some of Seattle's anarchists trashed Capitol Hill early Sunday, ahead of the Pride Parade, to protest the co-option of gay rights by commercial culture. So it's an easy gimme by the oligarchy, while it continues to destroy the planet. Should climate change be for the left what "tax cuts" are for the right?

President Obama is happy to let it lie. He's the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush. Yet he faces re-election in 2012 and I don't buy the meme that he's a shoe-in because of the craziness of the right.

Rules of engagement

Last night, I finished the late Alan Bullock's magnificent book, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. It's a reminder that no matter how much one has studied a topic, he or she can have vast new landscapes opened by the best historians as tour-guides. The book was completed just as the Soviet empire that Stalin built was falling apart, and the moment was marked by the greatest hope. Yet Bullock also reminded us of the bloody paths that contingency can create, particularly when broad social, economic and cultural forces and destabilization ("history from below") are harnessed by evil genius ("history from above"). The book ends with a deeply moving coda of promise. But that comes after a thousand pages examining the two greatest mass murderers in history; worse, men who could move nations to do their killing.

I think about all this as we sit seemingly becalmed, summer opening. Americans could be forgiven a moment of desire for, as Frank Fukuyama put it, the end of history after the long standoff of the Cold War. But this is not 1989-90. Now we are a nation of simpletons in denial. Thus, President Obama could make a speech about Afghanistan where the media report it as if we're actually leaving this hopeless morass. He can say, "it's time to focus on nation-building here at home" but he lacks the conviction to build even one — just one — segment of true high-speed rail. We treat Randian ravings as serious policy options and allow the cruelest policies to be passed by those who also brandish their "Christian" values at every speech. One of our two major political parties' platforms is essentially based on returning America to the 1880s, without a frontier and with more than 300 million people in a complex society.

As I write this morning, I see headlines for stories saying the United States and its allies will "release 60 million barrels of oil to offset supply disruptions caused by unrest in Libya." And presumably also to help keep gas prices down for the trip to Wal-Mart (recent acquisition: the U.S. Supreme Court). And they note oil prices fell. I want to scream, "America uses 20 million barrels of oil every day and China is fast catching up, you fools! Prices are falling because of fears of a new recession!" But, in a calmer state, I think, maybe it's me. I don't understand the new rules of engagement:

Off the edge

Yet another pipe dream has exploded in the Phoenix Depression. This time Steve Ellman's Westgate "City Center," — the Republic story pimped the development as "the flashy dining and shopping complex that anchors Glendale's football stadium and hockey arena" — is facing foreclosure.

This is time to revisit my 2010 post on Glendale's folly. It's also relevant coming directly after the popular Phoenix 101: Malls. Yet more needs to be said; not to make thin-skinned Phoenicians feel depressed, as is the usual criticism, but to learn something from these costly debacles to move the metro area forward into some kind of broad, non-heat-island-scorched uplands.

The only ones that could be surprised by the Westgate mess are those millions who drank the developer-speak Kool-Aid ("flashy dining and shopping complex" blah blah blah). Every time I was forced to go there for an event, the place was dead. It was far from anything else besides a too-narrow freeway, unless you wanted to farm some cotton or throw up the frames of subdivisions on former farm land. Nor is it flashy, aside from the sun blinding you when it hits the bumper of some jacked-up truck in the parking lot. It is off-the-shelf suburban stuff found everywhere, with the unfortunate distinction that all the asphalt and concrete, besides being ugly, adds a special hellish ambiance even when the surface temp is not 140 degrees.

How malls remade old Phoenix

Sing a city of malls. Actually, the first modern mall west of the Mississippi was built in Dallas and the first suburban mall was Northgate in Seattle (now closed and turning into a dense development around light rail). But it's easy to imagine Phoenix invented them. They were not good for those of us who loved shopping at the great stores downtown, and how they contributed to the central core's collapse.  But most Phoenicians loved them.

When I write "mall," I don't mean the beautiful 19th century Arcade in downtown Dayton. I mean a shopping complex built around the automobile. Park Central was Phoenix's first, developed by the Burgbacher brothers on the site of the former Central Dairy and opening in 1957. It was anchored by Diamond's, Newberry's and Goldwater's, the latter closing its downtown store two miles south and beginning the end of downtown retail.

Even so, in the early- and mid-1960s, downtown held its own as the state's busiest shopping destination — but the die was cast. Most natives don't even remember when Phoenix was more than a city of malls.

I grew up within bicycle distance of Park Central (had my bike stolen there, too). It was open air (the city was not yet devastated by the heat island), convenient and wildly popular. It anchored Midtown, along with the twin towers across the street, the taller of which sported an outside glass elevator and the shorter being home to the Playboy Club. Old Park Central was semi-urban, contiguous to the city and human-scaled.

It was followed by Biltmore Fashion Square, which until Westcor turned it into another lookalike suburban soul-killer, was also open air, with plenty of shade and in a pleasing scale. Across the street was the open-air Town and Country shopping center (which was not an empty name, for the city around it was still meshed with citrus groves and horse properties). Chris-Town became the first enclosed, air-conditioned mall in 1961 — the property has been a farm owned by the Chris family.

Prudish please, we're Americans

Toward the end of my time on the ambulance, we got a young rookie whose last name was Weiner, pronounced like the hot dog, the vulgar grade-school slang or the congressman from New York. Into this den of testosterone, black humor and hazing landed poor EMT Weiner. As "Buford" said at the time, "If he were smart, he'd at least pronounce it VI-ner..." For all I know, EMT Weiner went on to become a Nobel physicist. And we know, dear lord, how we know, about Rep. Anthony Weiner. He was sending women online photos of himself garbed only in what my parents' generation would term his skivvies.

Paralysis in Washington as the nation hurtles toward potential default. Fourteen million unemployed and the economy slowing, again. Wars without end — indeed, a new one in Libya. Further consolidation of power by the Oligarchy, where Elizabeth Warren and a (real) Nobel laureate Fed nominee are left twisting in the wind by a cowardly President Hoover. The national security state grows unchecked, no matter that bin Laden has assumed room temperature and been tossed into the Indian Ocean. Climate change consequences before our eyes in eastern Arizona. Further warnings of the Great Disruption with OPEC owning up to the fact that it can't fill the gap between demand and output this year. Posh! It's all about Weiner's weiner.

Some might say, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, we can enjoy a mini-sex scandal involving a Washington poltroon while still addressing real issues. And that might be true for Rogue readers and a minority elsewhere. I'm not so sure about the rest of America, the place where a majority of citizens always scores so embarrassingly low on basic history and civics questions, and watches on average 34 hours of television a week. I didn't want to write about Weiner's weiner. But let me be, well, straightforward (because, as Weiner has shown again, the coverup is worse than the "crime"). The media carpet-bombing is not a coincidence. Keeping Americans ignorant and constantly distracted, preferably by sex, is an essential part of taking away our republic. With Weiner, it will help deflect voter buyer's remorse over the Republican House. Then there's the central contradiction in our national madness: A deep prudishness combined with an insatiable appetite for everything sexual.

The fire this time

As I write, the Wallow fire in eastern Arizona is at 607 square miles — larger than the city of Phoenix — and zero containment. I haven't been to Eager or Springerville in more than 30 years, but Google Earth confirms that this is still a part of the state that has not been consumed by the Growth Machine. All of Apache County has less than 72,000 people and grew only 3 percent from 2000 to 2010. It is magic country.

Unlike the Rodeo-Chedeski fire, which consumed 732 square miles along the Mogollon Rim, this doesn't appear to have the added risk of hundreds of tract houses built amid pine trees on land made private by secretive federal land swaps. It also lacks Valinda Jo Elliott, the accidental arsonist, who stalked away from a fight with her boyfriend carrying the essentials for the wilderness that every Boy Scout learns to carry: Cigarettes, a lighter, flip-flops and a towel. And be sure to light a "signal fire" in dry, windy country when you get lost. She is the perfect Arizona voter, if not member of the Legislature.

This is pure tragedy. It is also a taste of the future.

.357 to Yuma

As the world knows, five people were gunned down last Thursday in and near Yuma before the 73-year-old killer took his own life. Yet another person was left in critical condition. The mainspring of the violence was a nasty divorce, but, even though overall crime is falling, the tendency to reach for a gun is if anything on the rise. Especially in Arizona. This latest bloodbath comes a mere five months after nineteen people were shot, six fatally, during an assassination attempt on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a suburban Tucson shopping center.

The Arizona Republic wrote the predictable lines about the "killing spree that shocked the tight-knit farming community of Wellton, outside of Yuma" where the ex-husband killed the ex-wife. This, of course, is not true. Wellton, where the onetime northern main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad diverged for Phoenix from the southern main, was indeed once tight-knit and a farming community. The northern main has been out of commission for years because the state wouldn't help upgrade it to ensure continued Amtrak service to Phoenix and Phoenix has so few rail-bound exports now. The farming is mostly large-scale and industrial, much of it moving there after having been pushed out of the Salt River Valley. Wellton is now an extension of the Interstate 8 sprawl that trickles out from Yuma.

Yuma is rich in Arizona history; not just the territorial prison, but the 19th century steamboats that plied the Colorado River, the railhead into the territory from California, and the long political rein of state Sen. Harold Giss, one of the most powerful men in Arizona in the mid-20th century. It is also one of the bleakest locations in America outside of West Texas — near the end of a great river "tamed" to death and so hot it makes Phoenix seem like Seattle by comparison. Yet it has become a retirement magnet, especially for those with less money. Sun, it has. It is also a very poor place, close to Mexico to feed the farm economy with labor, and consistently suffers some of the worst unemployment, income levels, educational attainment and child poverty. It has about 200,000 people in a place with a carrying capacity for one-tenth that number. As elsewhere, sprawl and population growth have annihilated "tight-knit" and "community." Much less civic culture, a "we" society and the brain mechanisms that preserve the always-fragile wall between civilization and nihilism.

Rome or Weimar?

You know me: I am more of the school that sometimes history rhymes (Mark Twain) than history repeats itself. Nevertheless, as the Great Disruption continues and, as a conservative commenter wrote on my Seattle Times blog, "How's that hopey-changey thing working out for you," we are required to take stock. We face a mammoth debt and deficit, mostly because of the Bush/Obama tax cuts, the wars and the Great Recession. Speaking of which, no major criminal prosecutions have resulted from the greatest assemblage of frauds in history leading the world financial system to the brink of collapse. In fact, the banksters, hedge-fund boyz and other Wall Street playerz are doing better than ever. The 14 million "officially" unemployed, along with tens of millions of others, not so much. The middle class is imploding as the social compact is badly damaged. President Hoover, like his namesake, has surrounded himself with agents of the plutocracy — the difference being that the real Herbert Hoover never would have remained embroiled in two simultaneous wars and ruinous defense spending.

Every day the question grows louder for those paying attention: What the hell is happening to us?

Cullen Murphy, an editor at Vanity Fair, took it head on with his book, Are We Rome? As a review in Salon put it, "He argues that America, like Rome, is threatened by self-inflicted wounds — in particular our mania for privatization, our fading belief in government and the ensuing decay of civic society, our vast and unsustainable military, our ignorance of the outside world and our short-sighted attitude toward immigration and assimilation."