Rogue Columnist

The exit interview

The urbanist Yuri Artibise left Phoenix last year, returning to Vancouver. It's part of a continuing brain drain, although to be sure such assets as ASU continue to bring in new creatives. I don't know where the tally stands, but I fear Phoenix continues to lose more than it attracts. Architect Taz Loomans recently conducted an interesting "exit interview" with Artibise. It made me realize that it's been five years since I got the first inkling that the Arizona Republic would take away my column, which would eventuate in me leaving town. So I thought I'd use Loomans' questions as a test for myself.

What do you miss most about Phoenix? My good friends. (I tried to select one "most"; for more, see my additions in the comments section).

What did Phoenix have that Seattle doesn’t? It is the repository of so much of my history, so many of my hopes. My mother and grandmother, long dead, are so alive on the streets of Willo, Roosevelt and Storey. The church where I was baptised is still going, as is my grade school, still in its inspiring, grand building, and enchanting Encanto Park. Union Station, where I spent countless hours as a child watching trains and dreaming of far-away places. The streets I worked as a paramedic, learning too much too young. The different mountain vistas that always orient me. Phoenix is the home of my heart, a place so mangled, mismanaged, raped and pillaged, but still worth fighting for. No matter how long I am gone, when I return I can drive the streets and walk the neighborhoods as if I had never left. The ghosts of the Hohokam still speak to me on winter nights when the cold wind blows from the High Country and the peculiar acoustics of the valley mingle train whistles and voices of the beloved dead.

Phoenix update

Back from a week in Phoenix, some observations:

1. The place still gives off the quality of a fallen souffle. Sure, a few projects are getting press out in some of the more affluent suburbs, but the utter collapse of four years ago still lingers. It's not for lack of trying by the Usual Suspects: Bottom has been hit, a turnaround is only (xx) years away, cheap land and sunshine will continue to be the basis of the economy, blah, blah, blah. But the old growth machine will not sputter back to life for one more run (with championship golf!). Too many crapola tract houses, too much debt, too few well-paying jobs, no speculative bubble driven by liar loans and securitized mortgages sold on a historic scale. What's Plan B? There is none.

2. A lack of seriousness pervades the state. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton tweets, "In Phoenix, we have a full commitment to sustainability: Sky Harbor Airport Dedicates Solar Power System." Space does not allow us to fully deconstruct these 104 characters, but we can make a start. Sky Harbor is a red giant of concrete and air pollution, contributing mightily to the heat island and dirty, unhealthy sky, and this is somehow redeemed by a "solar power system" that will power...the airport? No, the linked news story says it generates "enough to handle half the power needs of the rental car center, east economy parking lots and toll booths." Oh. (A real reporter might want to know if this includes generating electricity for the rental car center air conditioning, too, which seems unlikely, and how long the solar operation will have to run before it "repays" the fossil-fuel inputs it required and may still require).

Revolution 2.0

It is starting to dawn on America's press corps that the Arab Spring is not going to usher in Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East. The upheaval in Egypt, for example, has not led to rule by educated young Arabs, secularism, women's rights and peaceful pluralism. We find the same military control that has marked the country for decades along with the danger of an Islamic state inimical to Western values, as well as to stability in the region. Nineteen Americans face murky criminal charges. And so it goes. A world with way too many unemployed young men, a world facing scarcity, will fall back on the tribal, brutal and nationalistic.

In America, we await breathlessly the next phase of Occupy. Meanwhile, the super PACs and plutocrats continue to have their way. I return to a periodic theme: What happens here? What happens next? Jim Kunstler thinks we are ripe for a "John Brown moment." Some very smart Rogue readers expect big trouble at the Democratic and Republican conventions this year. And there is endless faith placed in Facebook and Twitter as tools to empower the powerless to overthrow the plutocracy.

I am skeptical but persuadable.

Paul Babeu open thread

By now, you know the allegation that Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu threatened to have his Mexican ex-boyfriend deported. New Times and the Republic have the stories. He's now wrapped up a press conference where he 1) Denied the allegations 2) Said he was gay and came out for marriage equality and gays in the military, and 3) Said he's staying in the congressional race.

That Babeu is gay is only relevant if he previously supported GOP policies against equality or that hurt gays. If so, he's not just a hypocrite but one who had power to hurt others. Now we'll see if Arizona still has a real press corps: Who will be investigating these allegations, and if nobody, why not? If this was planted by his political enemies, as Babeu claims, who are they? Dig deeper. Who are Babeu's backers and contributors? What are their agendas? How has his secret life informed his performance as sheriff? And how about him making his political name by immigrant bashing? What connections does he have to the for-profit prison industrial complex? Get every piece of every paper trail. Follow the money. And when Babeu laments the economic condition of Pinal County, remind readers that it has been under conservative control forever, its leaders allowed it to be victimized by a vast real-estate hustle, and this is the Randian paradise produced by the policies he's campaigning on.

Rogue readers may take it from here...

Statehood and its world

They couldn't pick a better time as that in life / It ain't too early and it ain't too late / Startin' as a farmer with a brand new wife / Soon be livin' in a brand-new state / Brand new state!

OK, I stole that from the musical Oklahoma!, about the 46th state, which entered the union in 1907. But the sentiments applied no less to the 48th, Arizona, the Baby State, the Frontier State, the Valentine State. At least for the Anglo settlers and not a few Mexican-Americans, especially in Tucson, statehood was a grand achievement, a validation of the efforts to build a new civilization in a wilderness. The government had declared the frontier closed in 1890, but it was very much alive in Arizona. The only photograph of my great-grandmother shows a grizzled, sun-baked woman standing outside an adobe hovel, my family's first home here. Air conditioning was decades away. She survived a Comanche attack as a baby — was scalped and wore a wig the rest of her life — when federal troops were withdrawn from the Texas frontier during the Civil War. In the 1890s, the family came to Arizona Territory. Plenty of heart and plenty of hope, indeed.

Many have been writing about the difficult path to statehood. I will only add that one big but largely forgotten impediment is that Arizona would come in as a Democratic state. Thus, it's no surprise that the Republicans who dominated Washington for decades after the Civil War would be loathe to give the opposition two new Senate seats and another in the House, along with Democratic electors in the Electoral College. Not only that, but allow statehood for a bunch of former Confederates and Southern sympathizers (Arizona Territory had a delegate to the Confederate Congress). And that's just what happened, with Henry Fountain Ashurst, Marcus Aurelius Smith and Carl Hayden beginning Democratic control of the state that would continue pretty much uncontested for 40 years. At his worst, Ashurst made Ben Quayle look like Pericles — he opposed a National Park for Grand Canyon, for example. Yet he also said, "When I come back to Arizona, you never ask me questions about such (international) policies; instead, you ask me, 'What about my pension?' or 'What about that job for my sons?' " Hayden, of course, went on to become one of the greats.

Things about Arizona

It's centennial week in Arizona, and the local media are doing their part. On Sunday, the Arizona Republic had a clever front-page display of wishes for the next hundred years from readers. My favorite was that Arizona enters the 21st century before it's over. Another asked for less conservative politics (good luck with that). The paper is trying very hard and doing good work. Inside were some quick hits by state worthies on what you should know about Arizona. They were relentlessly upbeat, as is a requirement for being viable here as a worthy: "The good people of Arizona have always had grit"; "We defy a stereotype as some might see existing in Maine, Texas or California"; "We are an iconoclastic bunch"; "It's a fantastic state with an early history that is just special," and, from Gov. Jan Brewer, "There is nothing that can't be accomplished here." Draw your own conclusions.

As usual, the rest is left to homey. "Every dirty job that comes along...," as Clint Eastwood growls in the original and best Dirty Harry film. So what are some things you need to know about Arizona? It's one of this blog's missions, but I'll try to put it into short Gannett-ese (sorry, my crack graphics/design team is off):

1. Arizona is not metropolitan Phoenix. Even though Phoenix-like mass-produced sprawl housing and shopping strips have spread statewide, most of Arizona has very different history, topography, cultures and socio-economic challenges from the big concrete blob in the center of the state.

The capitol

The Capitol and legislative chambers in the 1960s, before the erection of the brutalist Executive Office Tower.

Channel 12's Brahm Resnik asked me to nominate the three most significant Arizona political events since statehood. It's a bit like wanting a cinephile to name only three favorite movies. I settled for 1) statehood, which was not a given when it happened; 2) The congressional delegation's ultimately successful decades-long pursuit of Colorado River water, and 3) SB 1070, which is a bright red marker for the hotbed of intolerance, ignorance, extremism and backwardness into which the state has descended. Other events could contend, such as Barry Goldwater's 1952 narrow victory over Sen. Ernest McFarland, marking the birth of the Republican Party's ascendancy.

One of the most telling political stories, however, doesn't concern politicians or elections, at least not directly. It's about the old capitol building. The copper-domed structure was actually built as the territorial capitol and completed in 1901. The architect was James Riely Gordon, who designed many court houses in Texas, as well as a grand one for Bergen County, N.J. Gordon set aside his usual Romanesque Revival style to create a territorial capitol made from native materials. It was originally intended to be much grander, but the territory cut back funding. Additions made in 1918 and 1938 preserved the Gordon design.

President Kennedy (perhaps apocryphally) quipped that it was the ugliest state capitol in America. This was certainly not true: The Alaska capitol resembles an insurance company office; the Ohio statehouse with its forever-incomplete dome defines homeliness and lack of proportion, and North Carolina's looks like the court house for a small, poor county. The only saving grace for New Mexico's building is that it is in Santa Fe. To me, the old Arizona capitol always held a certain modest grace, particularly when I was growing up and it dominated the vista at the foot of Washington Street. But it's also true, odd and perhaps telling that Montana, which still doesn't have 1 million people, has a much bigger, grander capitol. And otherwise poor, conservative states such as West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi boast majestically beautiful statehouses.

 

Halftime in Arizona

Note to national and international Rogue readers: As Arizona marks 100 years of statehood this month, you'll have to put up with more than the usual number of AZ- and Phoenix-centric posts.

In 1962, Arizona marked its 50th year as a state. It's a vivid memory for me, although I was but a child. I loved the commemorative seal with the cactus wren, so much more appealing than today's gaudy centennial emblem. Fifty years of statehood was a remarkable event for those still living who had witnessed statehood and lived in Arizona Territory, my grandmother among them. The state in 1962 had barely more than 1 million people, with Phoenix not yet at the half-million mark. Phoenix was becoming a big city with comforts unimagined 50 years before, especially air conditioning. Still, the frontier was close enough to touch, living history was all around and much of the state was still wilderness. Vast empty distances separated the settled areas and those were compact and clear in their purpose.

Prescott, for example, the onetime territorial capital, was an enchanting little town with appealing rough edges. None of today's sprawl existed. It had only recently lost its status as a division point on the Santa Fe Railway between Phoenix and Williams Jct. Mining and ranching were the economy. The highway up Yarnell Hill was notoriously treacherous. Flagstaff was a major railroad town, also depending on sawmills for the logging industry and Arizona State College. The Mogollon Rim was virtually uninhabited, just one of many parts of the state as wild as ever. The state highways were two lanes, taking you to rich history that wasn't across the street from a Wal-Mart. Even in Phoenix, you could see old cowboys, the real thing, living out their last years in the elegantly-designed-but-neglected old apartments that graced the neighborhood between Seventh Avenue and the capitol.

The 50.1 percent

Some readers have accused me of not paying proper homage to the Occupy "movement." I risk being seen as "a grumpy old man." What — and not getting The Google and The Twitter while telling stories about the old days of taking the ferry over to Shelbyville and wearing an onion on my belt...which was the style at the time? Okay, I suppose Occupy raised consciousness of the 1 percent of the super-rich and the 99 percent of "the rest of us." Good intentions abound. We know more about pepper spray.

Meanwhile, in the real world where real policy is made, the right marches on. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure pulled its funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screening. The reason given is that Planned Parenthood is "under investigation." Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is auditing Planned Parenthood to see if any public funds were used to pay for abortions. The Komen money, about $680,000, was used exclusively by Planned Parenthood to provide breast screening for the poor and under-insured (and most of the organization's activities are not about abortion). On top of this, Komen recently hired an anti-abortion Georgia Republican politician as a vice president. This is not just about the abortion debate: Many "conservatives" now are opposed to birth control.

The result: A nice bank shot that hurts an organization reviled by the right, makes a loud statement against women's freedom of choice and accessibility to health care, and hurts the poor! Nicely played.