Rogue Columnist

The Friday Saloon

• The most interesting thing I learned on this Phoenix trip is how Gannett has removed Eugene C. Pulliam's name from the masthead of the Arizona Republic. (I typically read the paper online). This is a remarkable act of historical vandalism. One more reason that the boobs come here from the Midwest and say, "Phoenix has no history." Gannett wants every "product" to be the same, coast-to-coast. You get two pickles, not three. Heaven forbid that unique cities such as Phoenix or Cincinnati get distinctive newspapers.

• I was talking to a man at an event downtown last night. He said, "I don't get it. Every time I ride light rail, the cars are full." Yes, it is a shocking thing — if you believed the years of anti-light-rail propaganda. We built it, you bastards. And it's a huge success. Stations need markings to downtown Phoenix. God knows, we need transit-oriented development — but that would require a real economy with large numbers of good jobs in the central core. Commuter rail is needed, too. Meanwhile, has anybody else noticed how the guy who records the Spanish language announcements at stations sounds like a porn star, especially when he says, "muchas gracias."

• Oh, for more private capital and good jobs in the central core. Not more development — that would be a consequence of having a real economy. It would also empower cultural and restoration efforts. Here are 13 historic homes on the endangered list in Phoenix. Losing them would be a crime. Meanwhile, I was downtown on Tuesday and looked down Fourth Avenue to see a closed street and pile of dirt. My first thought: The sons of bitches have torn down Union Station. It is still there. But is anyone working to protect it and make it a train station again? Chirp chirp...all the money is in north Snottsdale.

• On the ground, the vacuousness of the debate among Phoenix City Council candidates is as embarrassing as it sounds at a distance. Do any of these candidates have vision, an understanding of urban issues or the severe challenges facing Phoenix? I have yet to hear it. What a change from the councils that enacted the policies that helped build light rail and turn around dowtown. Now it's all small ball and The Sal Show.

• Is it true that the Phoenix Symphony sandbagged Mayor Greg Stanton with an ultimatum that it would move to Mesa if it didn't get an even better deal at Symphony Hall?

¡Salud!

 

Economic report card

I arrived back in Phoenix to find the local newspaper editorializing, "Now is the time to invent a new Arizona." I thought the "new Arizona" was what came together to put St. Janet in power and had since been cleansed from the capitol by the Kookocracy. Anyway, on a Page One snippet (the highly formatted "product" is full of "snippets") we read, "Arizona stands on the threshold of a shimmering future...This place is redolent of change — Arizona is primed for progress." While it talks of "lift(ing) off the dead weight of the Great Recession and ... start(ing) now to ambitiously reinvent our state," the overall tone of the package is very cheerleader-y. No edge. Kid gloves. The reliable developer-economist Elliott Pollack is quoted. Gov. Jan Brewer is given a column. The status quo smiles. Everything's fine.

No disrespect. The people that remain there are nice folks doing the best they can within the constraints of the huge corporate owner, right-wing extremists and Real Estate Industrial Complex. But the Arizona Republic under Sue Clark-Johnson had a few years of sterner stuff, when I and others wrote seriously about the state's opportunities — and the challenges it would take to achieve them. We had a few successes: ASU downtown, the Phoenix Convention Center, T-Gen, Science Foundation Arizona, all-day kindergarten and light rail (WBIYB). But the moment was fleeting, the opposition ferocious and the real progress was stymied or rolled back. It has been a decade since Mary Jo Waits of a more muscular Morrison Institute wrote the Five Shoes Waiting to Drop report. While it helped spur some action back then, the rise of the Kookocracy stopped it. All shoes dropped. As Waits repeatedly warned, "Arizona will become the Appalachia of the 21st century."

Back in the 1980s, when the Republic was independent, publisher Pat Murphy led similar efforts to get the city and state's attention. Powerful civic leaders — and Phoenix once had them — used the 1990-91 crash to form a new economic strategy and go after high-wage clusters. In every case, the growth machine overwhelmed reform. Why should the Great Recession, which hit Phoenix worse than most places, be any different. But my intention today is a deeper examination of where the state and metro actually stand.

The Friday saloon

• I keep eclectic company. Arizona's piano-playing, car-clipping-to-hide-canoodling, legal-troubled but ambitious Attorney General Tom Horne has put me on his list. So I get the "Cracking down on polygamist abuses in Colorado City is a Top Priority" email. How this helps him is a mystery to me. Gov. Howard Pyle, who didn't have Mr. Horn-e's, um, issues, ordered the Short Creek Raid in 1953, and it helped cost him the election. I keep thinking about all the children in poorly funded school districts who are stuck for life because of the malpractice of this gentleman and his successors as Superintendent of Public Instruction. But in the post-St. Janet Arizona, they just get promoted.

• Then there's Sal DiCiccio, who represents the largely Anglo and affluent District 6 in Phoenix City Council. He's a Facebook friend. Why this developer, right-wing "friend of the taxpayer" wants to get Homey's screeds is a bit of a mystery. I wish it were like old Arizona, where people of different ideas could be real friends and even compromise for the common good. I'm not sure this is possible with today's GOP, although I do respect Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, with whom I am on cordial terms. Back to Sal. I read a story about how "the 11th-floor at Phoenix City Hall has become a metaphorical revolving door as of late, with numerous City Council aides and staffers announcing their departures." Missing was the why of the "Ws" that old journalists once prized. One must read these stories like a Kremlinologist back in the Cold War. Among the changes, DiCiccio "hired Lisa Gray, an activist and wife of Rep. Rick Gray, R-Sun City, somewhat recently to be his council aide/scheduler." Am I the only one who would like to know what kind of activist this person was, and are Phoenix tax dollars going to pay for an employee who lives in Sun City? I'm sure it's all innocent. Better call Sal, to paraphrase Breaking Bad.

• Speaking of calling, City Hall is replacing human telephone switchboard operators with an automated system on Oct. 1. It will save — wow! — $250,000 by putting the switchboard operators out of work. There's the usual blah-blah-blah about "the way people communicate with the city has changed." But this is just one more way we perpetuate both unemployment and the endless time suck of being stuck in these "please listen to the entire recording because our options have changed" circles of hell. Jim Kunstler had a great rant about this last year.

The saloon is yours. What's going on that isn't being reported?

Exceptionalism

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel — Samuel Johnson, 1775

Poor Nikita Khrushchev, banging his shoe at the UN, threatening to "bury" us — America just got stronger. Ike's Secret Service wouldn't even let the Soviet leader visit Disneyland on his trip here. Instead, he should have hired a public relations outfit to place an engagingly written op-ed in the New York Times. When the new czar, Vladimir Putin, pulled this off last week, American pols and opinion leaders went crazy. The detonation didn't come from Putin appearing statesmanlike (even when off-base), but when he challenged President Obama's assertion about American exceptionalism. "It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation."

Peggy Noonan was nearly hysterical. "Putin is telling the world he knows how to correct America, tell it off, criticize it for its conceit," she blogged, and of course had to blame President Obama: The Russian president is "attempting to show the world he’s its reliable voice, its real leader, not those other guys. Would he have done this in the past? No. A truly historic level of foreign policy incompetence on the part of the White House got us to this point." The right-wing talking-points email must have gone out because Charles Krauthammer made much the same argument, adding: "I mean, the chutzpah of writing that, by a KGB thug..." Wealthy Republican Sen. John Sidney McCain III, R-Fox News, vowed to give Putin some of his own back by writing an op-ed in Pravda.

Even the Washington Post's Dana Milbank felt compelled to explain to the Russian president the gravity of his transgression:

Americans aren’t better than others, but our American experience is unique — exceptional — and it has created the world’s most powerful economy and military, which, more often than not, has been used for good in the world. When you question American exceptionalism, you will find little support from any of us, liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, doves or hawks.

The Friday saloon

Conversation starters for the open thread:

• If we're so eager to bomb Syria to enforce "international norms" (such as things, you know, like torture), let's learn a few things about the place. Oh, and here's how we're checking to see who is a "moderate" rebel.

• Truly remarkable that Voyager I has left the solar system. It was launched in 1977 by a very different America.

• Breaking ground on the new LDS Institute building at ASU Polytechnic campus.

• How to argue with research you don't like.

• Check out the progress many cities are making while Phoenix becomes the hole in the donut.

• What's going on in Phoenix and Arizona that's not being reported in the media?

¡Salud!

 

The permanent crisis

Five years ago this week, the giant investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This set in train the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The world barely avoided a second depression. Now, the United States is technically in a recovery. It doesn't feel that way to most people. Unemployment, at 7.3 percent, is at a level that would have been considered a crisis in the post-World War II era. Now it's the new normal. The one-tenth of a percentage point drop in August came for the wrong reason, 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force — and these are not mostly baby boomers headed for secure retirement. Most of the jobs being created are in low-wage industries and many are part-time. Even if we continued to see 169,000 jobs per month added — unlikely — it would take until mid-2023 before we regained the employment level of 2008. A recession comes along about every seven years, so even that horrid timeline is unrealistic.

Something has gone drastically wrong in America. We no longer have a manned space flight program, even as China prepares a moonshot. We're not reaching for the stars, literally or metaphorically. The sequester ensures research funding is being slashed. The Large Hadron Collider, the greatest triumph of modern physics, is in Europe, not America. A "Manhattan Project" for renewable energy? Building high-speed rail and other advanced job-creating, productivity enhancing projects? Such all-American efforts are beyond today's America. Our infrastructure is in deadly bad shape. But we're incapable of doing more than patching a road-heavy transportation system — and we have too many roads already — geared to a much less populous nation with 1960s gasoline prices. A real college education is now the province of the well-off. So are good jobs. The ladders up that were so abundant here are mostly gone. No wonder about one third of the people stuck in minimum-wage jobs are age 40 or above. Adjusted for inflation, 40 percent of American workers earn less than the minimum wage in 1968. The shift of national income from labor to capital is startling, with the result being historic and rising inequality.

This state of the nation is inextricably tied to the situation in Washington, D.C. It is typically described as "gridlock" and the media are at pains to find the "extremes" of both parties holding up intelligent responses to our cascading troubles. This is not true.

The Friday saloon

Pouring for the weekend open thread:

• To beat the parched horse about Phoenix's unique and valuable oasis: the replacement for the Bethel Methodist Church at Osborn and Seventh Street is shown in this Republic article. The restaurant will be better than nothing and preserves much of the building. Lost amid the new concrete, rocks and cactus are the lovely — and cooling — grounds that once were there:

• A reporter tweeted that Scottsdale was holding a forum to ask for suggestions on "transportation options." I remember giving a speech in Scottsdale where my suggestion that light rail be considered was greeted with a death threat. So, "transportation options" for Scottsdale? Lamborghini, Bugatti Veyron Super Sport or the Maybach Landaulet.

• The John Kerry irony: First we condemn the old men who send the nation into a quagmire war, then we become them.

• From Slate: Life expectancy has doubled in the past 150 years. Here's why.

The saloon is yours...

Phoenix: The oasis city

The 1929 Maricopa County Courthouse and Phoenix City Hall when it was surrounded by shade trees and manicured lawns (Photographer unknown).

Alone among the cities of the American Southwest, Phoenix is the oasis. It has always been so, but whether it remains an oasis city is starting to come into doubt. A common narrative is that Phoenix attracted Midwesterners who wanted to recreate the landscape from which they came.

This is untrue. In fact, the early Anglo residents were from many regions, especially the South. And the oasis predates American settlement. The archeology of the region is in flux, but it appears that "plant husbandry" was being performed by prehistoric tribes as early as 3,000 or 1,500 B.C. (or BCE if you are trapped in the politically correct precincts of academia). By the first millennium A.D., the most advanced irrigation in the New World was being perfected by the Hohokam.

The Salt River Valley was an ideal location, with rich alluvial soil that would grow anything — just add water. The altitude and weather in the modern climate era allow for two or more growing seasons depending on the crop. Maize was imported from Mesoamerica. Cottonwoods, willows and other native shade trees grew along the riverbank and its subsidiary creeks. I have no doubt that Hohokam dwellings were well-shaded. The new settlers merely took it to a higher level.

The photo above captures the oasis city at its zenith, in the 1960s. Note the inviting public space provided by shade and grass surrounding an inspiring art deco building. This was the Phoenix I grew up in. At 10,000 feet, you would have seen a green city surrounded by bands of citrus groves, farm fields and horse pastures. And then: The majestic, largely untrammeled Sonoran Desert. What a place to live. The older neighborhoods were graced by mature trees and parking lawns, a grassy area between the curb and sidewalk. Encanto Park was an oasis within an oasis. Central, as you see below, was lined with palm trees. North of Camelback were shady acreages, often along streets with an abundant shade canopy, set back behind irrigation "laterals." My great aunt lived in one: It was a wonder of shade and tranquility behind oleander hedges on Seventh Avenue. Well into her eighties, this daughter of the frontier would walk out every Sunday evening to turn the valve and "take her water," the flood irrigation from the Salt River Project.

In our neighborhood, what is now Willo, few families had pools but most put in winter lawns to give the sweet season its magical green. Even driveways had grass between two narrow concrete strips. This was not the Midwest. It wasn't LA, although the parking lawns were imported from there. Instead, Phoenix created its own unique urban aesthetic. It wasn't planned. This Eden just happened. If you missed it, you have my deepest sympathy. Many areas of oasis beauty remain. If you want a sense of the practical benefit, drive south from Osborn on Fifteenth Avenue some summer evening with the windows down. When you cross Thomas into Encanto Park, the temperature will drop by ten degrees or more.