Rogue Columnist

Closed minds

The media have tried very hard to make the attack on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs into a crime committed by a lone wolf..."kept to himself"..."motive was unclear"...move along, nothing to see here. It reminds me of the successful effort to make the Tucson attack on Rep. Gabby Giffords, which killed six including federal Judge John Roll, into the mindless work of a madman. Move along, nothing to see here.

In the case of the latter, author Tom Zoellner wrote the corrective A Safeway in Arizona, putting the rampage squarely into the context of Arizona crazy and specifically the violent threats against Giffords in the election campaign of 2010.

The conceit about the former was made more inconvenient when Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat and former mayor of Denver, labeled the crime "a form of terrorism." It is important to call things by their correct names.

Nor is it out of the right-wing mainstream. Planned Parenthood (whose central Arizona chapter was founded by Barry Goldwater's wife, Peggy) has long been a culture war target. Women seeking to exercise their constitutional rights on reproductive issues have faced a long and growing series of attacks. Notably, in the 1990s, Father Richard John Neuhaus, an eminent conservative intellectual, wrote an essay in his journal First Things that defended "lethal force" against abortion providers and even implied insurrection against the federal government was the moral response to Roe vs. Wade.

They won't build it...

So shopping-strip magnate Michael Pollack is worried about potential wording in Chandler's new general plan that might, might, possibly, someday allow light rail.

As the Arizona Republic reported, "It may be years from ever happening, but even the thought of extending the Valley's light-rail system from Mesa south into Chandler along Arizona Avenue is stirring strong opposition from a few key foes concerned that wording in a proposed planning document is a tacit endorsement of such a rail line."

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of people in America: those with urban values and those with suburban values. The latter can sometimes "get it," how the health of an entire metropolitan area is dependent on a vibrant downtown — Oklahoma City is a good example. More often they don't, and the two tribes can't even speak the same language.

One of the biggest points of controversy is transit. Those with suburban values, especially "conservative" ideologues, have made a fetish of opposing any mode of travel that is not based on the automobile. Armed with seemingly economically invincible talking points regarding costs and often backed by Koch brothers money, they have defeated numerous transit measures nationally. They also speak in code to suburban whites, that transit will bring Those People to apartheid suburbia.

This is what makes Phoenix's light rail such a miracle. In the face of hysterical and often thuggish opposition, the starter line was completed and has now been expanded, with more growth on the way. It is highly popular. None of the predictions of doom happened. Even left turns are easy. We built it, you bastards (WBIYB).

Chandler won't. Never fear.

Ducey and the refugees

It is low-hanging fruit to remind wealthy Republican Douglas A. Roscoe (aka "Doug Ducey"), the governor of Arizona, that one of the state's most famous families, the Bashas, came from the Laevant, specifically Lebanon.

Michel Goldwasser fled the 1848 revolutions convulsing Europe, first to London and finally to Arizona Territory. "Big Mike" changed the family name to Goldwater.

None of this would keep Gov. Roscoe from joining at least 30 other governors, almost all of them Republicans, from declaring their states would not accept Syrian refugees in the aftermath of the latest terrorist attack on Paris.

Marshall Trimble didn't teach Arizona history to high school students in Ducey's native Toledo, Ohio. So a quick primer: Anglo-Americans took what is now Arizona as spoils of the Mexican War (adding to it with the Gadsden Purchase). They took it from dozens of native tribes.

Arizona's history with refugees since then has been good, bad, and ugly.

Sunnyslope in old Phoenix

Dunlap Avenue looking east in Sunnyslope's main commercial district in the 1950s.

Of all the areas that became part of today's 516-square-mile Phoenix, Sunnyslope had the best chance of being its own separate town.

At the foot of North Mountain, Sunnyslope was very different from Phoenix proper (the name came from the Sunny Slope subdivision laid out by William Norton in 1911). It was a desert town, north of the Arizona Canal which marked the beginning of the oasis.

It was higher than the historic Phoenix townsite, something you still can see today if you drive south from Hatcher on Central Avenue, and framed by rugged terrain. My grandmother sold real estate in Sunnyslope and any time I, an oasis kid, would go with her, it seemed very exotic. And unlike Phoenix, its history was not based on agriculture.

Instead, Sunnyslope attracted "health seekers" and usually poor ones. In the Great Depression, it hosted a Hooverville. And Phoenix leaders not only looked down on it, they didn't want it to be part of the city. It received virtually none of the massive New Deal aid that saved Phoenix in the 1930s.

Let the krauts defend Europe

Sorry for the insensitive headline but my father was a combat infantry officer in Europe in World War II. While the British used the genteel "Jerry" for the Germans and the average Soviet foot soldier employed the surprisingly comradely "Fritz," the Yanks whose youth was interrupted to destroy the Nazis employed the all-American bluntness above.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon is preparing to rotate more forces to Europe to "deter" Russia. Why is this our problem? The European Union has the largest economy in the world yet most NATO members spend a diminishing amount on defense. German Chancellor Angela Merkel appears serene in the face of Russia's new assertiveness. Indeed, Germany's armed forces continue to shrink.

If there's a problem from Russia, it should belong to the prosperous, democratic Europe, and especially Germany, that was created by American blood and, in the Cold War, steadfastness.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced he will triple down on austerity, which will mean shrinking the Royal Navy lower than its already historic diminished size. In other words, Britain and the entire EU are more than ever free riders on the American taxpayers who fund the U.S. Navy to keep the global sea lanes safe and open.

Election realty check

For the past year, I have been "feeling the Bern," celebrating gay marriage and transgender acceptance, being schooled that Black Lives Matter, knowing that everything I write is from "privilege"...and worrying.

Worrying that this is the self-selecting world of my friends and "friends" on Facebook, Twitter and the progressive Web sites. Meanwhile, the majority of the electorate that is white and votes was keeping quiet. Ominously quiet.

They spoke in this week's election and the result was another disaster for progressives.

People were surprised that the Tea Party nobody Matt Bevin won the governorship in Kentucky over a highly qualified Democrat. Why? He had the one indispensable quality needed to succeed in New Confederacy politics: an R after his name.

With Bevin's election, Republicans can claim 32 governors — that's an astounding 64 percent of the governorships in the nation. Those holding hope for a Democratic victory in Louisiana against David Vitter should remember he triumphed in his Senate race despite being ensnared in a sex scandal (his lover/call girl was helpfully named Wendy, same as his wife). Will he survive a new love-child scandal or do a Grover Cleveland? Vitter has the magical R. All is forgiven.

 

The land economy

The oldest human activity in the Salt River Valley is agriculture. But the second oldest, in the era since American settlement began in the late 1860s, is land: platting, subdividing, buying, selling, flipping. It's an old-fashioned extraction industry. The remarkable thing is that it remains Phoenix's economic foundation.

With the 1851 Salt and Gila River Meridian, or "baseline," located near today's Phoenix International Raceway, the Americans set in place the point from which land would be surveyed and divided. This is a historic method of American empire, going back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. It laid down a template that organized and regularized land to make it fungible.

Initially, the land was divided into farms, the square-mile layout that remains the bones of Phoenix until one gets into the mountains. But as the towns of Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Glendale and others grew, increasing amounts were subdivided for houses and businesses. Phoenix's unique location in one of the world's richest river valleys made agriculture a natural source of wealth. But so was the land itself. The 1877 Desert Lands Act expanded the Homestead Act, not only attracting settlers but also speculators.