Rogue Columnist

No justice. No peace.

Having been unsuccessful in persuading Arizona to exit from the freeway to ruin, let me turn my attention to a more promising arena: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This tweet neatly encapsulates the tenor of the debate:

"I don't agree with your view of the Israel/Gaza conflict, but I believe you made your argument in good faith."--.No One.

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) July 29, 2014

My intention is not to wade too deeply into the history of this epic tragedy. Others can do it with more authority and/or brio. For example, Juan Cole:

The United States as a great Power is facing a large number of challenges in the Muslim world, and Israel’s Gaza campaign is endangering both American diplomacy there and the very security of the U.S. Given the series of setbacks for the US in the Middle East, in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Egypt, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu could scarcely have chosen a worst time to kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the full light of world media.

And James Howard Kunstler:

Israel has all the proof it needs that world opinion will never consider its right to exist important. The Obama White House, and a lot of the U.S. News Media, portray the Hamas-Israel conflict as something like an amateur soccer match, with the uneven score (40-odd Israeli soldiers killed versus 1000-plus Palestinians, mostly civilians) showing that the contest is unfair, that Israel has “gone too far,” that they have entered the same moral zone as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, carrying out a “genocide.”

Of course, this is a real hot war, not a diversity training exercise, or a self-esteem course, or any sort of the kindergarten psychotherapy that has come to form the basis of American thought and policy. And a vicious world opinion uses America’s own moral fecklessness the way Hamas uses women and babies to shield its rocket installations.

Instead, my intention is to set the table for discussion, debate and reflection by Rogue's smart commenters with some admittedly broad-brush observations.

The 1:57 to Florence

Joseph Wood III was declared fully sedated ay 1:57 p.m. in the death chamber in Florence. But because of incompetence or a bad execution drug cocktail, he wasn't pronounced dead until 3:49 p.m.

This event has brought more of the kind of national news coverage to Arizona that can only enhance its reputation as a cruel and hapless place to the talented, compassionate and those who make decisions about where to deploy capital. A sampling is here. Even John McCain, who would know, called it "torture."

On the other hand, probably a majority of Arizonans would share the comment of someone from Phoenix on Facebook: "I saw nothing wrong with it...he did NOT suffer...just slept longer." When challenged, he added, "I hope the bastard rots in hell!!!" According to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of Americans favored the death penalty in 2013, down from a high of 78 percent in the 1980s.

Wood was convicted in 1991 for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Debra Dietz and her father, Eugene. He also pointed the gun at police, who shot him.

Stuck

This is the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first manned moon landing. It marked the greatest achievement yet of a burst of federal funding of science begun under President Dwight Eisenhower. The 50th year since college students from the north went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. Fifty years ago the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. President Lyndon Johnson fought a war in Vietnam, misbegotten though it was, while declaring war in poverty. Soon, we will mark the half century since passage of the Voting Rights Act. In 1963, the Clean Air Act was approved, followed in 1972 by the Clean Water Act. In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce these laws.

What was the nation that did these things?

A few things stand out. It was a nation with the greatest middle class in history, the greatest industrial base the world had ever known, which made things — often with union hands, and even when not benefiting from the advances for working people ensured by organized labor. That nation believed in science and progress. It was run by two mass political parties encompassing conservatives, liberals and centrists. Taxes were high on the rich and progressive. Productivity was widely shared.

That nation is gone.

What's downtown Phoenix, what's not

This is downtown — pre CityScape (photographer unknown):

Above is downtown 2020 (photographer unknown).

This isn't downtown (it's Midtown):

This isn't downtown, either. It's 24th Street and Camelback (photographer unknown):

I wouldn't dare move to Chicago and claim that Hyde Park is the Loop. Nor could I say Hawthorne is downtown Minneapolis. Cincinnatians would quickly set me straight if I said Over the Rhine is downtown — downtown begins at Central Parkway. The natives in all these cities wouldn't let me get away with it. Nor would the transplants who felt a convert's zeal to protect the geographical integrity of their cities.

Yet people in "the Valley" (Silicon? Red River — of the north or of the south? San Joaquin? San Fernando? Of the Jolly Ho Ho Ho Green Giant?), many of them from these very cities, get away with this transgression every day in Phoenix.

Downtown Phoenix runs from Seventh Avenue to Seventh Street, and from the railroad tracks to Fillmore, or perhaps Roosevelt. It includes the original townsite and some additions. City Hall's definition taking the northern boundary to McDowell is ahistorical.

The water questions

Phoenix's Grand Canal in 1915. Arizona's population: about 250,000.

I have been hesitant to pass along recent stories about water. Some examples, "Arizona Cities Could Face Cutbacks in Water From Colorado River," from the New York Times; "Phoenix May Not Survive Climate Change" on Salon; "America is Running Out of Water," from Vice; "Arizona May Be California's Future" on Slate, and this Tucson Weekly examination of the situation in the Old Pueblo.

Oh, and from Smithsonian (!): "Arizona Could Be Out of Water in Six Years."

Water in Arizona is a highly complex issue. It risks being spun as "everything's fine!" by the boosters, lied about by real-estate hustlers and their stooges, or oversimplified as "Phoenix is about to run out of water!" by outside observers. So let me tiptoe in with a reminder of this Phoenix 101 primer, and then...

Some things we know:

1. As with so much else, Arizona is not Phoenix. Even the farthest-flung reaches of the metropolitan area are not the old city. In other words, each part of the state has distinct water issues.

2. Phoenix is not Death Valley with subdivisions. In fact, the Salt River Valley, sitting in and near the confluence of multiple rivers, is the most abundantly watered place in the Southwest. The Sonoran Desert is the planet's wettest desert. This is why the Phoenix area has attracted irrigation civilizations going back perhaps 3,000 years. Phoenix is a natural oasis.

3. Thanks to this and the billions of federal dollars spent on reclamation projects in the first half of the 20th century, the core of Phoenix is blessed with nearby renewable water supplies. The dams and lakes of the Salt River Project delivered 767,445 acre feet to the project's footprint in 2012 and held nearly 1.5 million acre feet in the reservoirs in fiscal 2013. This water comes from snowmelt in the east-central Arizona mountains.

The omen

The mainstream media are all over it: the "crisis of kids at the border" — children, not baby goats. Some outlets are joining in with the right-wing echo chamber to make this, finally something, into "Obama's Katrina."

In fact, the phenomenon of unaccompanied minors being sent norte has its origins in an obscure and well-intended law signed by President George W. Bush. You know, the one with the real Katrina. The situation has been made worse by corrupt Central American governments, our appetite for drugs and cheap labor, and federal austerity.

I will leave it to others to report more clearly on the children at the border — other than to note that the $3.7 billion requested by President Obama to respond to the situation represents 0.1 percent of the federal budget. But more than twice the annual federal support for beleaguered Amtrak.

My mission is different. It is to pose the question of what happens when climate change and all the disruptions it brings really kicks in? It is already at least partly to blame for conflicts and dislocation, such as the Syrian civil war. But we ain't seen nothing yet.

Human-caused climate change, especially if left unaddressed, has the potential to cause such damage on an overpopulated planet that any sober discussion risks sounding alarmist. So what happens when millions upon millions of the displaced huddled masses show up on the southern border?

A Great War reader

The Douaumont Ossuary at the Verdun battlefield. Inside are the remains of at least 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers, a fraction of those killed in the battle.

Our world was made by the Great War. In big ways, with the creation of the Soviet Union, the bitter peace at Versailles that laid the foundation of World War II and the partition of the Ottoman Empire that recklessly established the multi-sectarian Iraq. In small ways: "No man's land," the trench coat, "shell shock," the tank. In France and Flanders (where "the poppies blow"),  farmers still regularly call out demolition crews to dispose of unexploded ordinance. The Great War destroyed four empires and killed the Western idea of progress that had endured since at least the Enlightenment.

When my grandmother spoke of "the war," she meant the one that began in August 1914, when she was 25. She never forgave "Kaiser Bill" for, by her lights, starting it. Or, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson. At least 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed. The 1918 flu pandemic, which followed the war like a judgment from the almighty, claimed as many as 100 million.

And yet, a century ago right now, hardly anyone expected the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to lead to apocalypse. Royals were murdered with some regularity. At worst, Austria-Hungary would punish Serbia. It had been a century since the last general European war and nations were tightly connected in the first great era of globalization. Monarchies were bound by blood. In 1910, Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, arguing that economic integration was so total that war was impossible (n.b. Washington and Beijing today). Most people agreed with him. And yet, as the month progressed, a war beyond anything the world had ever seen was inevitable.

The long summer of 1914 was said to have been especially beautiful. That's the way my grandmother remembered it. "The old world in its sunset was fair to see," wrote Winston Churchill.

The Southern poverty bloc

I'm not sure if the cottage industry of explaining away Arizona's reality is on vacation in cooler climes or will scramble to attack this telling map that went with a story headlined: "The South is Essentially a Solid, Grim Bloc of Poverty."

Arizona Territory sent a delegate to the Confederate Congress throughout the War Between the States, so the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree.

Seriously, the data come from a new report by the Census Bureau of people living in "concentrated poverty areas." It digs down to the Census tract level, finding that more than 2 million Arizonans, or 33 percent, lived in tracts with highly concentrated poverty. That compares with 1.2 million, or 24 percent, in 2000. The comparable national averages were 25.7 percent and 18.1 percent respectively.

These areas have "higher crime rates, poor housing conditions, and fewer job opportunities." They breed a feedback loop of poverty.

It's easy to blame much or all of this on the Great Recession. Arizona's dependence on the housing sector left it in a virtual depression after the collapse. There's some truth to this, but the problems go much deeper.