Rogue Columnist

How annexation changed Phoenix

Annexation was intended to save Phoenix. It may end up badly wounding it.

The roots of growing fast by annexing land go back to the 1940s. Phoenix had grown from its original half-square-mile to 9.6 square miles in 1940, with a population of 65,414. It was surrounded by agriculture and well separated from small farm towns such as Glendale, Tempe and Mesa.

But even before the old city commission was swept away by the "reformist" Charter Government Movement, leaders looked east and worried. They knew the Salt River Valley would grow, especially once World War II ended.

They saw how cities in the Midwest and east (St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, etc.) had become surrounded by incorporated suburbs that were already sucking away people and tax dollars. They, and all their successors, were determined not to repeat that mistake.

Building nihilism

I produced a Seattle Times blog post on the "You didn't build that" manufactured controversy. The comments are as instructive as anything I wrote. We're going to see a summer and fall of silliness before the elections. But beneath many of the trivialities are profound truths — such as the refusal of wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney to release his tax returns, as his father did when he ran for presidency. And this seeming kerfuffle.

The Republicans and "independents" (who really lean Republican) are embracing a philosophy that can only be described as nihilism. As I pointed out in my post, only in a nation that became wealthy and safe thanks to the delicate balance between government and the private sector could we even have the luxury of this discussion.

It's easy to think that, once in power, the Republicans will continue their own brand of big government: Heavy subsidies for arms merchants and polluters and all members of the oligarchy that have gained control of our politics. The government will grow just as it did under Reagan and both Bushes.

Holding out for a hero

The New York Times on Sunday noted that Joe Arpaio's Arizona didn't become that way without some who fought back in public. It singled out Latino organizer Salvador Reza; Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox; community organizer Lydia Guzman; videographer Dennis Gilman; state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema; ACLU Director Dan Pochoda; Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and New Times reporter Stephen Lemons among others. If Arpaio finally goes down in the Department of Justice civil-rights lawsuit, they can hold their heads high.

Can you imagine what Attorney General Robert Kennedy would have done to Arpaio had he gone after his brother the president with a bogus quest over his birth certificate? Bobby wasn't called mean and ruthless for nothing. Or what LBJ or Nixon would have done? Arpaio would have been given the biggest IRS proctology exam in the history of the world, seen all his federal aid cut off, and been relentlessly hounded by federal prosecutors and FBI agents. President Obama, cool and contemplative, has a corporate lawyer as his Attorney General. So my hopes are muted.

The Resistence desperately needs heroes. Unfortunately, those listed by the Times either had no power or, in the case of Gordon, were severely constrained by both events and his own second-term swoon. The reality is that good intentions divorced from power get us nowhere. Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived his convictions against the Nazis, but the only reason we are able to celebrate his martyrdom today is the brute power used by the Allies to defeat them. When Lyndon Johnson suddenly became president, he was urged to back off on civil rights, so as not to use his political capital on a seeming lost cause. This master of the use of power, in Robert Caro's telling, replied, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" And a hero, with titanic, heroic flaws, emerged.

Strange awaiting

Surely I'm not the only one who feels as if we're in a spooky interlude, an intermission between bad and, perhaps not worse, but much of the same bad for a very long time. Or, something... A zone of circumstance lying somewhere between an asteroid strike and the widespread sense of peace and prosperity, however misplaced, of the 1990s.

Consider that wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney stands a very good chance of becoming president. Despite all the damage that should have been done by the ongoing revelations of his destructive work at Bain Capital, duplicity about his tenure at same, and refusal to release his tax returns — a potential chief executive with accounts in the Caymans and a Swiss bank account — despite all this, he barely trails in the popular vote and cannot be counted out in the Electoral College. How can this be? Is it simply because Obama has lost so much of the white vote? That the right has so rewritten the narrative of the past 12 years that millions don't actually know what the hell happened?

If you thought they were The Party That Wrecked America the first time around, just wait for the first Citizens United presidential election.

Mayberry RIP

Main Street, Durant, Okla., down on its luck.

The tributes to the late Andy Griffith have been lavish. Did anybody compare his Sheriff Taylor to Joe Arpaio? I'm sure they did. Then there was Mayberry, the fictional setting of The Andy Griffith Show. As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote, "Mayberry was real, too — as real as the desire sometimes to escape the tyranny of What Is. It sat just outside of time, at a crossroads of nostalgia and need. There was a dirt path in the woods near town that led to a fishing hole. Sheriff Andy used to go there often with his little boy, to the whistling of a bucolic tune lifting above the North Carolina pines."

As I was preparing this column Monday, I noticed one big difference between today's reality and Mayberry: The Internet, or lack thereof. My connections were down most of the day, so no new Rogue post (much of Arizona rejoices). My jobs require me to me unusually wired, but the "tubes" of the 'Net — developed initially with federal money — are the big change in our lives. We didn't get moon colonies or manned exploration of Mars and beyond, but we got PCs, Macs and the Internet. It makes for an interesting thought experiment: Your work and personal life in even 1980 vs. today. Back then people wrote letters, typed on typewriters, filed in filing cabinets (and many more clerical workers were needed), and got their messages on those pink "While You Were Out" slips. Now I've got a Mac and an iPad for almost all of that.

One of the most ubiquitous comments about Mayberry (based on Griffith's real hometown of Mount Airy, N.C.) was the lack of African-Americans in a Southern town. That was actually possible. I lived in such a place for a few years, Durant, Oklahoma, in the "Little Dixie" southeastern region of the state. Durant had been a "Sundown Town." Blacks could work as domestics or laborers during the day, but they had to clear out to other towns at night. Old-timers told of signs at the city limits that said, "Darkie," or the N-word, "don't let the sun go down on your back."

Growthgasm!

The SanTan Village shopping center in Gilbert. 

The big news back home is that Gilbert is now among the top 100 U.S. cities in population. When I worked as a columnist at the Arizona Republic, I would term these highly-played announcements as "growthgasms," an old Arizona obsession in focusing on merely adding people. A closer look at the data show that, in the metro Phoenix depression, they are faking it. Gilbert grew by 1.7 percent in the first year after the 2010 Census. That compared with 90 percent from 2000 to 2010. Any way you slice it, population growth has slowed dramatically in a place that values it above all else.

People are moving much less today because of the bad economy. But the Austin suburb of Round Rock clocked 4.8 percent in the same year and Austin itself grew by 3.8 percent. Denver increased 3.3 percent. Phoenix, which was kicked back a notch to the nation's sixth-largest city added less than 24,000 people, keeping it 67,000 behind No. 5 Philadelphia. Houston, No. 4, added nearly 46,000 residents. Yes, Phoenix was 7th in the top ten in adding raw population, but the numbers were nothing like those seen every year in the 1990s and 2000s, and by percent are below anything seen since the early 1950s and the advent of widespread air conditioning.

Gilbert is technically a "town," allowing it a runaround from many of the responsibilities of cities in the eyes of the state government. And for those who live there, I suppose it's very pleasant: New housing built around large garages in "master planned communities," more than 81 percent white, affluent, heavily Mormon, a fakey little "Old Town," well-financed schools, endless motoring, right-wing politics, chain restaurants, a sham "downtown" (all private property) at the SanTan Village shopping center and relatively low crime. The endless walls facing even modest thoroughfares are telling.

The fourth branch of government

You might be tempted to pass on a story in Sunday's Arizona Republic with the process-y headline, "Case Asks Who Must Pay Taxes for Utility." Don't.

Ably reported by Ryan Randazzo, the article lays out a controversy in Sun Lakes. The small company that provides water for the "active living retirement community" wants a rate increase of about $6 a month from residents, the first such hike since 1994. Sounds reasonable. But it wants more: "About 40 percent of the increase would pay the utility owners' income taxes." The Residential Utility Consumer Office contends that the water company's "shareholders might have other business interests that lose money, and if they combine the tax credits of those operations with the tax liability from the water utility, they might not pay taxes at all, even though the customers would be paying a 'phantom tax.' 'When this happens, this is essentially free money for the shareholders paid by the ratepayers who receive no benefit from these payments,' RUCO wrote in a brief for the case."

This is about more than Sun Lakes. My sympathy is limited for people who want to buy houses in a leapfrogged, 98-percent white development with streets named after Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana, profaning our desert. But the case is a rare window into how power and influence work in the state. Power, especially, at what insiders call "the fourth branch of government," the Arizona Corporation Commission.

Heat wave

Hot enough for you, America? According to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 2,000 high temperature records were reached or broken over the past week. For June, 3,200 record highs were broken.  Places where I once lived sound unrecognizable: Days of 105 degrees in Denver, 4,000 feet higher than Phoenix and a place I remember for its enchanting cool-off in the summer twilight; records broken in Charlotte, where a temp of 104 is accompanied by nearly tropical and suffocating humidity — even in the old days, the Southern heat was miserable, but this? — and of course the August-like oven in June for Phoenix. Violent storms sweep the east and devastating wildfires tear across the West. Welcome to the new normal?

Only a fool would not recognize that climate change is coming on faster and worse than expected, and that it won't be a phenomenon that only affects poor people in the Third World. We are, to be sure, a nation of fools that is more interested in the implosion of TomKat than the implosion of the planet because of human activity. There are the usual excuses: The weather's always changing! Even if it is true, nothing can be done locally (statewide, regionally, nationally) because it is a global problem. Taking action would cost jobs. Here's my in-depth analysis that climate change is a hoax or not a big deal, even though I am not a climate scientist. Wait...Did Anderson Cooper just come out as gay? Look over here at the bright, shiny object, Moronistan.

The people in charge understand that climate change is no hoax. Even Exxon Mobil, which spent heavily to fund denier "science," admits the planet is warming. The new excuse now is that the change will be manageable, people will adapt. The plutocrats adapt by having summer houses in places such as the San Juan Islands. Can't we all just bootstrap ourselves into this brave new world?