Rogue Columnist

Book it: 2012 hottest on record

From the respected site Climate Central:

Global warming is directly linked to only a few weather events and climate trends. One of them, however, is warming itself, which could make 2012 a watershed climate change year in the U.S. More than superstorms, wildfires, and devastating drought, this year’s record-smashing spring and summer heat waves, with their melted airport runways and warped steel rail lines, are more evidence that climate change is real.

Download the full report here, and read the Rogue Columnist Climate Page here.

Happy New Year.

The continuing crisis

I have been hesitant to write about the so-called fiscal cliff for many reasons. It's an over-covered topic, leaving readers in a zombie trance, even if most of the stories shed little real light. I subscribe to the Abba Eban doctrine: "When all else fails, men turn to reason." And the less elegant: Surely, they couldn't be this stupid. But it looks as if one of two things will happen: Either we're going off the cliff/curb/ramp, or President Obama will sell out the middle class safety net to get a deal.

The Bush tax cuts on the rich need to expire. In that word, "expire," we have the answer. They were sold with an expiration date, once already extended. The cuts did not perform as advertised. The Bush years, even at their best, produced the worst job creation and growth in modern American history. Inequality grew as the rich, following the rentier model, used their money to gamble in the $600 trillion derivatives market and other casinos, rather than investing in productive, job creating enterprises. Frankly, taxes elsewhere need to go up. Americans are the least-taxed among advanced nations. And we need carbon taxes and taxes on transactions, i.e. gambling by the Wall Street Boyz.

The sequester part of the cliff/curb/ramp is an artificial creation that grew out of the 2011 budget standoff, to put a gun to negotiators to reach a debt/deficit reduction deal. It could be repealed by Congress in a day. But it won't, so serious, "automatic" reductions will start on January 1. The Congressional Budget Office has warned this will cause a recession

The Sprawl Needle

Once again, it's left to homey to sun on the parade. People will once again conclude that I "hate Arizona."

Novawest, a "boutique real estate developer," has rolled out, let's call it an aspiration, to build a 420-foot-tall observation tower in downtown Phoenix. It is being likened to the Space Needle in Seattle, which marked its 50th anniversary in 2012. More about that in a moment. The developer has no financing. It has completed no project in Arizona. "But Novawest leaders are optimistic." The renderings — and I understand this is to be an open-air affair? — looked really hot, and I don't mean sexy. If every rendering proposed for downtown and the Central Corridor had been built, central Phoenix would resemble a five-mile slice of Manhattan. But let's give Novawest the benefit of a dreamer's doubt and get down to cases. [Jim Kunstler does, after his fashion, naming it the January Eyesore of the Month].

First, the Phoenix skyline is abysmally dull aside from the Viad Tower. But the combined power of the People's Republic of Sky Harbor and lack of capital, headquarters and civic leaders with means has thwarted anything better. Want some visionary skyscrapers? Go see my friend Will Bruder, architect of the central library. He's got some designs that would vault Phoenix's skyline to world prominence. But, again: Capital, headquarters, civic leaders with means. Without that combination, great civic acts are difficult. For example, Viad was built by the old Dial Corp. as a signature world headquarters and a gift to its city. Dial is gone as an independent headquarters, just another office in Scottsdale.

Republicans in retreat?

Since the election, the meme has been that a defeated Republican Party must change or face becoming a permanent minority, a regional party in a changed America. But that's not how it looks in real life. The most substantive legislative victory since November has been the passage of legislation making Michigan a "right to work" state, a staggering Republican victory in a state where the modern labor movement was born.

Meanwhile, the "fiscal cliff" negotiations go on without end, with President Obama almost pleading that he has gone "at least halfway" to give House Republicans "a fair deal." That doesn't sound like the victorious leader of a party of the future. If the election was about anything substantive, it repudiated efforts to roll back Social Security and Medicare, endorsed "nation building at home" and affirmed that taxes on the rich must go up. Why should Mr. Obama go anywhere near halfway, for in doing so he once again betrays the values of those who elected him.

The Republican position on maintaining the Military-Industrial Complex at all costs perseveres unless we are fortunate enough to go off the fiscal cliff. Meanwhile, the president left Susan Rice twisting in the wind amid the despicable character assassination by wealthy Republican Sen. John Sidney McCain III, R-Fox News. McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election badly, will apparently determine who serves in Mr. Obama's cabinet.

Empire of violence

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence

I was raised in Western gun culture. From an early age, I was taught gun safety, including an NRA safe hunter course in the eighth grade at Kenilworth School. My friends and I would go target shooting in such places as the then-empty desert around Pinnacle Peak. My scoutmaster showed me how to fire my first semi-automatic rifle. As important as the shooting was always checking to make sure a gun was unloaded, knowing that if you dropped the magazine (not a "clip," unless it was an M-1 Garand rifle), a round might still be in the chamber. Where was the barrel pointing? How to cross a fence safely. How to carry a shotgun (breach open).

"Don't point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them," my mother said. In addition to being a concert pianist, she was an expert shot and would not have hesitated had we been at risk. She did not like handguns. To her mind, a handgun could be too accessible while one was still angry. Through all this ran a thread of deep seriousness: A firearm was deadly, must be treated with respect and care, and its watchful possession was a sign of adult maturity. Needless to say, this culture existed in a West with many fewer people than live there today. Still, I own guns. I like them. If I had the money, I would buy more. I'm not a hunter like my uncle and grandfather. But I do like target shooting.

In the 1960s, liberal sociologists explained rising crime as the outgrowth of "the sick society." Then it included racism and lack of economic opportunity for minorities and many lower-class Americans. But that society was healthy compared with today's. These endless cavalcades of mass shootings — taking place while overall violent crime is falling — are telling us something important. I don't claim to know all the answers, but I have some suspicions.

Phoenix rail: Next steps

Newer readers to this blog might wonder why the parenthetical "WBIYB" is always inserted after the first reference to Phoenix light rail. It stands for: We Built It, You Bastards. A reminder of the hysterical, ignorant and too often thuggish opposition to a transportation technology that had proved successful around the country. I received death threats and demands that I be fired for columnizing in favor of light rail at the Arizona Republic. Well, you bastards, we built it and it is a big success, aside from the distortions that suppress transit-oriented development. Such a big success that Mesa (!) is building the line deeper into the city — and you can thank former Mayor Keno Hawker for having the foresight to persuade his colleagues to help fund one mile into the city; otherwise, Mesa would have been cut off from a system it now embraces.

It's a tough slog. The Legislature and governor are hostile to anything but freeways. The great crash slowed funding from Prop. 400 to a trickle, and even then most of it was going to build transportation infrastructure appropriate to the 1960s rather than today, including the misbegotten Loop 303 and South Mountain Freeway. While these will enrich a few connected developers, they are engines of sprawl, congestion, pollution and expansion of the heat island. Most Phoenicians can't imagine a lifestyle that doesn't revolve around long single-occupancy car trips.

Even so, the 20-mile starter line is expanding not only into downtown Mesa but also toward Metrocenter mall. An ambitious new line is being prepared to run west from downtown to a park-and-ride at 79th Avenue and Interstate 10. The West Line/Capitol Line is widely misunderstood in the media, but it would be an important step to creating a much more robust light-rail system.

Holiday books

I spend all day in front of a computer screen. The last thing I want to do for pleasure is read on a Kindle or Nook. Joe Queenan nicely encapsulates the love of books in a Wall Street Journal article: "No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like 'Have a good one!' and 'Sounds like a plan!' A world where men do not wear belted shorts..." But however you enjoy reading, here's a relatively short list of books to buy for friends or ask Santa for.

One fad in historiography is that the Red Army primarily won World War II. Rick Atkinson is having none of it in his majestic Liberation Trilogy about the U.S. Army in Europe. An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle are the two completed works and they are the finest military history I've read in recent years. This is the way history should be written, the way that has been beaten our of three generations of professional historians. To give the Red Army its due, check out Thunder in the East by Evan Mawdsley and Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale. A terrific read about World War II in the Pacific is Evan Thomas' Sea of Thunder, about the greatest naval battle in history.

We're coming up on the centennial of the conflict that changed everything, World War I. The must-read here is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, a World War II American combat infantryman, focuses on the British troops in the trenches of the Western Front and the things they carried, especially the literary influences that reached into the lowest ranks. This is one book every educated person should read: Deeply learned, highly moving, surprising and written with the attitude, as Fussell said, of "a pissed-off infantryman." Two others are both seminal and thrilling: Dreadnought and Castles of Steel by Robert Massie, about the battleship arms race and war.

Phoenix in the sixties

Downtown in the mid-1960s, with the new Municipal Building, forefront, and the iconic rotating Valley National Bank sign in the upper right.

Decades are arbitrary things. One could make the case that "the sixties" in Phoenix ran from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. In any case, it was a most consequential time, arguably the decade when Phoenix set the pattern for what it would become, for better and for worse. In the 1960 Census, Phoenix's population was 439,170, making it the 29th largest city in America and 187 square miles within the city limits.

This was a startling jump from ten years before, ranked 99th with 106,818 people within 17.1 square miles. Phoenix had quickly become a big city, but unlike most others: single-story, spread out, car-dependent and populated by few natives. It had decisively surpassed El Paso as the dominant city of the Southwest. Yet, as it remains today, its power was like that of a small town.

Nineteen-sixty saw the unveiling of the Wilbur Smith & Associates freeway plan. Although its closest big-city neighbor was Los Angeles, Phoenix had only one baby freeway, Black Canyon. Over the decade, this would curve into the Maricopa Freeway but otherwise the Smith plan was mired in controversy. Phoenicians didn't want to become another LA. The Valley Beautiful Citizens Council worried that freeways would destroy an already ailing downtown. A hundred-foot high Papago Freeway with "helicoils" provoked more opposition. In the end, almost all of the 1960 plan was adopted. But surface streets carried most traffic during this era.

Downtown retail was slowly dying, as was the dense corridor on McDowell between 12th Street and 18th Street called "the Miracle Mile." This included the lush, stately Good Samaritan Hospital campus, replaced 20 years later by the brutal spaceship building that remains today. Malls were flourishing, including Park Central, Tower Plaza, Thomas Mall and Chris-Town, named after farmer Chris Harri on whose land it was built. Many of the downtown merchant princes were dead or ailing. Others, notably Goldwater's (sold to Associated Dry Goods in 1963), moved to the malls.

Permanent war

When Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks, he hoped to provoke an American overreaction that would bleed us to death with unending, futile military adventures and alienate the Muslim world from the thrashing giant. He dreamed of bringing out our worst.

Mission accomplished.

One of the fascinating aspects of the so-called fiscal cliff "negotiations" — as well as the presidential campaign — is the hysteria surrounding reduced or even stable military spending. We have become such a garrison state, and an economy so dependent on war, that we can't even imagine another reality. Or at least our elites and a large number in the media can't.