Rogue Columnist

Book leave open thread

I must take a pass on writing new columns for the next several weeks while I finish a new book.

With the help of Front Page Editor Richard Silc and Arizona Researcher Michael Sampson, I'll continue to update the news links at left every day. Feel free to enjoy or have your blood pressure raised by the archives, including Phoenix history.

And the comments section is available for value-added commentary and discussion.

 

20/20 hindsight

A score of things that made today's Phoenix:

1. ASU: In 1920, Tempe Normal School was awarding teaching certificates and providing high-school courses. From there it became Tempe State Teachers College (1925), Arizona State Teachers College (1929), Arizona State College (1945), and finally a university (1958). Today, under the dynamic leadership of Michael Crow, ASU is one of the largest universities in the United States. Among its five campuses/centers is the transformative downtown Phoenix location. The downside: Phoenix is by far the largest metropolitan areas in America with only one real, full-sized university.

2. Agriculture: A century ago, Phoenix was the center of a major agricultural empire thanks to its location in one of the planet's great alluvial river valleys. Anything would grow — just add water, which was abundant thanks to Theodore Roosevelt Dam and its successors. It's almost all gone. At one time, we could feed ourselves and exported produce and beef to the nation. Now Phoenix is almost entirely reliant on the 10,000-mile supply chain. A more foresighted place would have established agricultural trusts to preserve the citrus groves and Japanese flower gardens.

3. Air conditioning: Refrigerated air showed up in movie theaters and new hotels a century ago. Swamp coolers and central air units made Phoenix bearable for more people year-round (no more sleeping porches and wrapping oneself in wet sheets in summer). For awhile after World War II, Phoenix was also a center of air-conditioning manufacturing.

Plague

I'm not sure what I can add to the stories we've had on the Front Page. But I'll tell you what I know.

Writing from Seattle, I'm in one of the hotspots of coronavirus in the United States. As of today, 420 people are infected in King County, with 47 deaths. More will surely follow, but that's not the whole story. No infections or deaths have come from downtown or Belltown, where I live. The epicenter is an assisted-living center in tony Kirkland on the snooty Eastside across Lake Washington. So people should be cautious about making assumptions.

Gov. Jay Inslee has banned gatherings of more than 50 people and ordered all restaurants and bars shut down. More than 253,500 Washingtonians work in food service and drinking establishments. This "one-note-on-climate-change" presidential candidate who dropped out early has shown far more leadership on the pandemic than the current occupant of the White House.

Even so, we lack so much knowledge about the situation, especially because of the lack of test kits. South Korea has fast, free drive-through testing. The United States, "Great Again," feels like the Third World. We can't tell what is prudent and what is wild overreaction, what is irrational panic. Of course, many Republicans, even friends of mine, deny coronavirus is a problem at all. It's all a conspiracy to take down Dear Leader. Never mind lockdowns in Italy, Spain, and France. Never mind the British study that predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States without vigorous action.

Remember, 80,000 voters in three Midwestern states gave an Electoral College victory to the most unqualified and dangerous man in American history. For three years, we were mostly lucky (not Puerto Rico in Hurricane Maria) with no immediate crisis demanding presidential leadership. Now our luck has run out.

Someone tweeted: "I think it's okay to be a little resentful at Trump voters for ultimately murdering us."

The field II

Carl Muecke illustration

Much has changed since late September, when 19 Democrats were running for president. Now, it's a Biden-Sanders contest. Despite the narrative that the former vice president was a dead candidate walking, he scored a massive win on Super Tuesday. This is a reminder that Twitter world is not the real world. Much can still change: Thirty-eight primaries remain and 62% of pledged delegates are still unwon.

Still, based on today's state of play and barring a massive setback for the frontrunner, Joe Biden will be the nominee.

Some friends of the blog asked me to assess the situation. I have a hard time topping Andrew Sullivan's essay, which was on Rogue's Front Page over the weekend. Among his many insights:

This was not the GOP in 2016 — unable to winnow the field and coalesce behind a single opponent to Trump, and then staggering backward into submission. This is the Democrats in 2020, finally a party capable of operating with some institutional authority. Here’s a headline you don’t often see: “Democrats Not in Disarray!”

So I'll try to bat cleanup and go in a few other directions.

Jack Welch, an assessment

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones... — Shakespeare

 

The era of Jack Welch, who died Sunday at age 84, roughly coincided with my career as a business journalist. But I only met him once, at a cocktail party in Charlotte. What most struck me was how short he was. I'm six-two; he was officially five-seven. That's neither here nor there (or maybe it really matters). But that's my only personal memory. We made small talk for maybe five minutes.  I also recall being asked to do a Page One story on Welch for the Arizona Republic, when it seemed his General Electric was about to acquire Honeywell. I learned how many business professors were funded by GE and hence untrustworthy, perpetuating the Welch mythology.

This is on display in his obituaries, the New York Times emphasizing that he "led General Electric through two decades of extraordinary corporate prosperity and became the most influential business manager of his generation." And "Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his (ghost-written) autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time." Fortune magazine named him "Manager of the Century," overlooking the likes of the legendary Alfred Sloan of General Motors.

Here, though, I must depart from de mortuis nihil nisi bonum (Of the dead, say nothing but good) taught me by my flamboyant Latin teacher at Coronado High School, Leo O'Flaherty (Magister O'). For John Francis Welch Jr. was the most destructive and toxic corporate leader of the century, probably in the history of American business. He's a big reason why we find ourselves in this era of inequality, the ashes of much of the middle class, and resultant political instability.