Rogue Columnist

The Republican devolution

Back in school, when evolution was taught, we had the familiar chart on the wall of the science classroom showing our ancestors walking behind homo sapiens, the tallest and most advanced (homo erectus was always a favorite of we seventh-grade boys).

In their debates, the most recent one Wednesday night in Republican-heavy Planet Boulder, the Republican presidential candidates are moving in exactly the opposite direction. No substance. No serious policy proposals. No attention to the most pressing issues.

Consider: This is the party of the intellectual Theodore Roosevelt, the brilliant autodidact Abraham Lincoln, and the man who organized and prosecuted the liberation of Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, a task that required not only military but political and diplomatic genius. Even Barry Goldwater talked about issues. Nixon, despite his dark side, was a policy wonk. Reagan wrote extensively on political philosophy.

Not one of them could win a GOP school-board primary today. At this rate, especially if the Republicans lose the next election, the candidates for 2020 will resemble life from the primordial soup.

Not one is qualified to be president. None (including John Kasich) has shown the chops to be any office holder of quality outside of Dogpatch mayor, although our democracy offers slots for many mediocre place-holders. And yet it doesn't seem to matter.

Here it comes...

My new book, a concise history of Phoenix, comes out Nov. 9. Some initial signings are set for early December (see the "news" page of my author site) with more to come early next year.

I didn't intend to see two books published this year. High Country Nocturne, the eighth David Mapstone Mystery, would have done fine. But I was approached by an editor at the History Press who liked my Phoenix history columns on this site.

Initially, I thought it would entail a fairly easy compilation of that work. Instead, they wanted an almost entirely new book — and fast. So I set out to write the dissertation I never did.

I received a great deal of help in assembling the 60-plus photos that grace the book. That was still some of the most time consuming work. So was drilling down into primary sources. Then I had to make it my own, my concise interpretative history that can stand apart from fine work already done by Phil VanderMeer, Brad Luckingham and William Collins.

Wickenburg on the brink

(Photo by Jacob Roddy)

All my young life, Wickenburg was the most enchanting desert town closest to Phoenix. Even into the 2000s, it retained its main street charm.

Prospector Henry Wickenburg, an Austrian native, was the namesake of the town along the Hassayampa River. He discovered gold nearby in 1863. It became the famous Vulture Mine, based on claims Wickenburg sold to Behtchuel Phelps of New York. "The Comstock of Arizona" and "largest and richest gold mine" in the territory yielded about $2.5 million before it played out. Wickenburg himself scraped a living farming before committing suicide in 1905.

The young town was also contested by the Yavapai, who didn't appreciate the Anglo and Mexican settlers taking their land. In the Civil War, federal troops were withdrawn and the Yavapai attacked. Confederate cavalry responded but soon withdrew. Hundreds were killed on both sides before an uneasy peace settled.

Wickenburg the town played a major role in the rise of Phoenix. Jack Swilling, who also made some inportant gold finds there, saw an even richer possibility in the prehistoric Hohokam canals of the Salt River Valley. In the late 1860s, Swilling dragooned a crew of workers from Wickenburg to help excavate one, which became today's Grand Canal, and build Swilling's Ditch.

Later, Wickenburg became a stop on the Santa Fe Railway between the northern Arizona mainline and Phoenix; another line was built west to connect more directly with California. Until 1968, Wickenburg had daily passenger train service (and the depot still stands). The town was also an important stop on U.S. Highway 60 between Phoenix — on Grand Avenue — and Los Angeles.

Even as Phoenix grew into a soulless blob and once-magical places such as Prescott were subsumed by sprawl, Wickenburg retained its uniqueness with local businesses, an intact and walkable central business district and even a working movie theater. Celerity rehab centers had replaced the dude ranches of the 1930s but Wickenburg circa 2005 seemed remarkably authentic. So close to plastic suburbia of "the Valley" and yet wonderfully apart. Now it is in the fight for its life, at least as the town we knew and loved.

Where Arizona fits

In 1981, Joel Garreau wrote a popular book called The Nine Nations of North America. His conceit was that state lines and even national borders were meaningless in understanding the "true regionalization" of the continent.

Arizona was split between "Meximerica" and "The Empty Quarter," with Phoenix and Tucson lying in the former. Of Meximerica, he wrote, it was "a 'booming place'...characterized by a sense of no limits."

They say that the only limit to growth is the human ability to dream. By the way, does that sound familiar? Where did our President grow up? In Los Angeles and the Southwest. Reagan’s vision of the world was formed by the way this part of the world works.

As for the Empty Quarter, "It is very dry; water is a constant preoccupation; it is very fragile...Very few people live here, and as a result it is politically powerless."

This is the last "colony" of the nine nations. The idea is that we are going to chew this up and spit it out to get us into the next century. But there is one hitch. This is also the place that has the last great stretches of wilderness and quality-one air; so, if we chew this up and spit it out, we can kiss the Rockies goodbye. And of course there is a political context to that too, because there are a lot of people who don’t want to see that wilderness despoiled.

So far, so OK. Except Arizona has little in common with Texas; Phoenix little commonality with Houston or Los Angeles. And the name Meximerica wouldn't get very far with the Kookocracy.

Now a new author wants to reorder things. Colin Woodard, according to the Washington Post, "says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government."

Assessing the Democracy

The term above was synonymous with the Democratic Party well into the 1930s. Republicans didn't object because they, like many of the Framers, saw "democracy" as the mob, as opposed to our representative form of government.

Tonight's first debate will allow us to take soundings of the Democratic presidential candidates. It will surely be more substantive than the GOP Klown Kar shows. But I don't expect much from the questioners or the mainstream media. For example, the usually excellent McClatchy D.C. bureau produced a set-up story asking such hardball questions as, "Will Clinton be able to articulate a softer side...?"

The last time we elected a candidate people wanted to have a beer with, we got George W. Bush. Warren G. Harding was also a charming fellow.

Meanwhile, the victim/'ism" politics and symbolism that all right-thinking people (in the liberal echo chamber) agree upon will not win a general election.

So, a bit of a reality check.

The president is the chief of one branch of one segment of our federated form of government. Any candidate needs to make the point that she or he can only get so far as long as this broken and radical Republican Party controls the Congress (and most statehouses). None will state this important  truth because it would imply weakness.

Little pieces

The interior courtyard of the Tovrea Mansion in happier days. (Steve Weiss photo).

A reader from Michigan wrote, "My wife and I were married at the Tovrea Mansion in 2000 (on today in fact — 6 Oct.). Not the Castle, but the mansion on 46th Street and Van Buren. We went back to see the building last week and found it abandoned, looted, and partially destroyed."

Almost everyone in Phoenix who pays attention knows about the Tovrea Castle and its storied past. The unique building was saved thanks to the city and a preservation effort led by former Mayor John Driggs. Amazingly, a number of loud voices opposed this and wanted the building demolished, the saguaros bladed.

The Tovrea Mansion was not so fortunate. A large ranch house surrounded by tall oleanders and palm trees, it was unknown by most Phoenicians. The pioneer Tovrea family lived there for decades.  By the 2000s, it had been turned into an events center.

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Killers among us

Back in the 1960s, the phrase "the sick society" was coined among liberals to assess a collective responsibility for that era's crime, riots, racism, and political assassinations.

It seems quaint now. When a former Marine ascended the 30-story tower at the University of Texas in 1966 and used his sniper skills to shoot 14 people to death, it was a shocking act. There were no SWAT teams then, no militarized police. Such events were almost unheard of. Two Austin police officers and a civilian, armed with revolvers and a rifle, made it out on the roof of the tower and killed the sniper.

Today mass shootings, "rampage killers," are so common they can be mapped. So many have occurred in recent years, they are on spreadsheets. A calendar can be marked up: 274 days, 294 mass shootings.

That's a sick society.

After the latest, at a community college in a small town in Oregon, I struggled to write something beyond my earlier column "Empire of Violence." Vast terrain of the Internet was taken with predictable outrage and horror, but ultimately pretty empty stuff. The most intelligent prescriptive writing came from the New York Times' Nick Kristof, urging us to treat gun violence as a public health issue.

The Russians are coming

I've been reading books about the last days of the Soviet Union, especially David Remnick's magisterial Lenin's Tomb, but also Serhii Plokhiy's The Last Empire, which is particularly insightful about Ukraine's critical role in the breakup.

The more I learn, the more Boris Yeltsin emerges as a giant in the burial of the totalitarian regime and birth of a democracy for the first time in Russia's thousand-year history. The vast importance of the "saint" Andrei Sakharov and the courageous priest Alexander Men. And the smaller Mikhail Gorbachev becomes: naive, overtaken by the reforms he began, ultimately captured by the reactionaries. Yesterday's man.

Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer, is no doubt a bad guy. But a new Stalin? Hardly. Stalin murdered at least 30 million people. Indeed, Sakharov believed that the KGB contained the seeds of potential reformers because its agents were more educated and had seen more of the world than the communist nomenklatura.

While brings us to Russia bombing in Syria and the proto-hysterical reaction of the American media. For example, the Washington Post's David Ignatius implies that President Obama has lost Syria to the Russians. As if Syria was ours to lose.