Rogue Columnist

More vines, please

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. — Frank Lloyd Wright

The most depressing part of Star Trek Into Darkness is not the many liberties that the filmmaker takes with some of the foundational conceits and tropes of the franchise. Only trekkers will notice (for example, a starship is not built to enter a planet's atmosphere, much less hide in the ocean, etc. etc.). No, what really bummed me out was the architecture. I mean, this is the 23rd century and we're stuck with taller versions of the insipid buildings of today? At least Blade Runner has some variety and gigantic Japanese-style electronic billboards in its vision of the future. We've got interstellar travel, transporters, phasers — and civilization is stuck with the progeny of John Portman, David Childs and Cesar Pelli. And that's if we're lucky. No art deco revival? No reinterpretations of the Chicago school? Gah! If this is the future, no wonder they want to leave the planet.

That's just movie fantasy. In the real world, there's no shortage of lists of the world's ugliest buildings (see here and here), along with Jim Kunstler's cringeworthy-but-must-see Eyesore of the Month. And to be sure, I'm treading into matters of taste, where many valid viewpoints must be considered. Still, architecture matters a great deal. It is the most important physical testimony about a civilization and its trajectory. It constitutes the built environment that at its best informs, inspires or defines so much of our lives. At its worst, it is, as Kunstler says, a landscape not worth caring about. And unfortunately a stupendous amount of our total buildings have been put up in recent decades, with most exercises in copycat banality or starchitect sculptures with little to offer humans or the surrounding streetscape.

The lives of others

[UPDATED] Rogue's Front Page Editor and Director of Competitive Intelligence has filled my in-box with some of the best stories about the extent of our national security state. We learn about the private companies that profit from analyzing your personal data. Our outsourced spy force is enormous. Not only that, but the National Security Agency, building a huge secret data farm in Utah, is recruiting a new generation of Stasi geeks. The administration's constitutional amnesia. How members of Congress are not outraged about the invasion of your privacy, but instead are turning on leaker Edward Snowden. How what was intended as a "transformational presidency" has turned into a soiled presidency instead: George W. Obama. Pro Publica offers the five things we still don't know about NSA snooping. One of the most on-point comments came from Tom Ricks, the former military correspondent for the Washington Post:

As for the assurances of intelligence officials that we should not worry because they will be careful: I don't buy them. The intelligence community has not come clean about the torture of captives, so why should it have credibility on this? At any rate, the health of our Bill of Rights should not be dependent upon the constitutional interpretations and tender mercies of secret policemen and their staff lawyers.

And yet, I have heard people say variations of words spoken in 1930s Germany and the Soviet Union: "I don't mind this if it keeps us safer. I haven't done anything wrong, so I don't have anything to fear." According to a poll from the highly respected Pew Research Center, 56 percent of those surveyed say the government spying is acceptable. So-called conservatives unfurl their protest banners over slight attempts to limit assault weapons or raise adequate revenue for the commons. Most are silent in this very real reach into tyranny. Liberals are so marginalized as to be out of the public square, not least with President Obama.

Phoenix 101: Barry Goldwater

Barry Goldwater in 1941.

Phoenix would benefit from some heroic statues to enrich the streetscape. It's not as if we're lacking in heroes and audacious history. Instead, we get a dreary bronze of Barry Goldwater in Paradise Valley, unreachable by pedestrians but with an adjacent holy parking lot. Then there's the bleak terminal four at Sky Harbor named after Goldwater. And a street in Scottsdale. A newcomer might think the only history worth remembering, if badly painted, concerns the long-serving senator and 1964 presidential candidate.

Readers of this blog know better. But understanding Goldwater's place in Arizona is a daunting challenge. The magisterial biography remains to be written. And for most of his public career, Goldwater was a national figure. We must also contend with a good deal of nostalgia and hagiography concerning the hero. An example of the latter was a recent article in National Review about how Barry was a leader in Phoenix's school desegregation before the Brown decision. The former goes something like this: Barry was no Kook, he fought the religious right and one shouldn't conflate today's conservatism with that of Goldwater. Even I have been guilty. But the reality is more complex and interesting.

Just a teacher

Ralph Bradshaw died Wednesday night. He was just a teacher.

I had him for junior English at Coronado High School, where he pushed a young man with miniskirted coeds on his mind to read serious novels. I told him they were boring and reading them was hard. He made no attempt to make them relevant to me or dumb them down. Instead, he told me that I must read them because they were hard and if I was willing to find the tunnel into them they would be anything but boring. He was right, of course, and years later I realized he was teaching from "the great books." In his early thirties at the time, Mister Bradshaw sported fashionably longish hair and a moustache, looking almost a hippie compared with some of his older peers. But beneath this was an incisive mind, a setter of high standards, passionate supporter of quality and something of a square (in a good way). A sponsor of many extracurricular activities and sometime director in the theater, he was also great fun. He was just a teacher.

He contacted me when I returned to Phoenix in 2000 as a columnist for the Arizona Republic with a first novel coming out. By then retired, he had lost none of his intellect, dry wit and interest in his students. I have some mixed feelings about that decision to come back home. At the time, I was riding higher in my newspaper career than I ever would again and had offers and feelers from around the country, including one that might have resulted in attaining my lifelong dream of going to New York City. And things didn't exactly turn out well after speaking truth to power. But if I hadn't returned, I never would have gotten to know Mister Bradshaw with the gift of years to illuminate all that I owed him.

Field notes

Catching up from my recent visit "back home..."

• Many people asked me why Gov. Jan Brewer was backing a Medicaid expansion in apparent defiance of GOP orthodoxy. Has she finally shown a conscience? No. The major calculus is that what remains of the business leadership in Arizona leaned on her to accept the Obamacare/Romneycare deal, where the feds will pay for most of the expansion anyway. The biggest employers in Arizona provide no or minimal health-care coverage, so they offload (socialize) those costs to the public through AHCCCS. Among the big employers are health companies that profit from the system, and would make even more under an expansion.

Most of the New Confederacy is not participating, a calculated move to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. So why is Brewer different? My suspicion is the composition of the economy. The other populous, urbanized states have plenty of corporate headquarters and well-paid jobs (and in the case of Texas, oil and big government spending). So it's easy to say, "devil take the hindmost." In Arizona, the hindmost is the economy — Wal-Mart is the largest employer. That and health care. Of course, Brewer might simply be playing a game, knowing the Legislature will prevent Arizona's participation. But I think she's sincere. If she goes "Full Kook," the business interests might do an Ev Mecham on her.

Questions for Phoenix candidates

I received a query from a group called Democracy for America-Maricopa County asking me to suggest questions for Phoenix City Council candidates. I always try to be obliging, and this issue is of special importance.

It seems as if Council has lost its consensus and focus, virtues that were essential to the progress made with T-Gen, ASU's downtown campus, the Phoenix Convention Center and light rail (WBIYB). Nothing could be worse for the city than a right-wing takeover or blocking minority on Council. And members who think civic greatness is filling potholes and collecting trash ("listening to the neighborhoods) are not much better. Phoenix is at a critical tipping point. Here are the questions I suggested:

1. Please detail your connections to the real-estate industry: Properties you own; do you work in the industry and if so, doing what?; have you served on boards that make recommendations on land use?; have you profited from land-use decisions made by public bodies, including the approval and siting of freeways?

It's a scandal

It's a scandal. It's an outrage.
On our manhood it's a blot!
Where is the leader who will save us
And be the first man to be shot?
— Rodgers and Hammerstein

The "scandals" of the past week — Benghazi and the IRS — have two purposes: To destroy Hillary Clinton, the presumptive/feared Democratic nominee in 2016 and "to break him," as the secesh former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint said of President Obama on another issue. Whether the tempests can rise out of their right-wing teapot remains to be seen. Ruining Hillary and seeking to impeach Mr. Obama will be the Republican enterprise for the next three-and-a-half years. It's a tired playbook, but it keeps working for the right.

Little of what the right claims about Benghazi is correct. And, as Rogue's Front Page Editor tells me (and he's a man who knows about such things), the truth will never be known because the CIA will never come clean about its part in the mess. It is interesting that we've been spending more on the military than during the Cold War and yet we couldn't get help to the consulate/CIA safe house during the attack. I know there's a Marine FAST unit (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team) based right across the Med in Rota, Spain. FAST is specifically designed for these crises. Why has the press never raised the question about why it was not mobilized? The narrative has it that the nearest help was in the Balkans. But I don't blame Hillary for this tragedy. John Boehner's House ensured that funds for State Department security was cut back. 

Reinventing Hance Park

I'm in Phoenix this week for my new novel, The Night Detectives (you can find a schedule of signings on my author Web site). One remarkable thing is how the conversations I have with friends never really change much when it comes to the topic of Phoenix and Arizona. Searching for something new...an effort is under way to produce a "new master plan" for Margaret Hance Park.

The site irritates me at the outset by claiming Hance Park is located "in the heart of down downtown Phoenix," whatever that means. It is in Midtown, a deck sitting atop the Papago Freeway from Third Street to Third Avenue. All together now: Downtown runs from the railroad tracks to Fillmore and from Seventh Avenue to Seventh Street. One could be very liberal and extend it to Roosevelt — no farther. You outlanders would be offended if I said the Loop in Chicago extended to Winnetka; you don't get to rewrite the geography of my hometown.

In any event, the deck park was the compromise when Interstate 10 was rammed through the heart of Phoenix, resulting in the demolition of 3,000 houses, many of them irreplaceable historic homes, as well as the shady Moreland Parkway. Originally, the Wilbur Smith plan called for the freeway to soar 100 feet over Central Avenue and traffic to exit by "helicoils" winding down to Third Avenue and Third Street. So things could have been much worse