Rogue Columnist

Michael Crow

When Michael Crow became president of Arizona State University in July 2002, the watch began almost immediately: How quickly would he use ASU as a springboard to a bigger and better job? It hasn't happened. Crow said he had a ten-year plan for "the new American university" and he has been as good as his word. Crow was one of the three people that progressive Arizonans vested their faith in during those hopeful years. Janet Napolitano played defense against the Kookocracy, but abandoned the governor's office to become President Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security with little left behind as a legacy. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon suffered a lost weekend of a second term, badly downgrading any assessment of the man in full. I always thought it was a sign of Arizona's unhealthy lack of private-sector stewards that all three stars were on the public payroll, but such was the case. Only Crow, to many the least likely, stuck and kept faith.

Crow was dealt a bad hand, if a very good salary: The Legislature had been cutting general-fund appropriations to the universities since the 1980s and was virulently anti-education. The state constitution mandated that ASU, especially, take virtually every qualified in-state student without giving it the means to pay for this obligation. The university had grown into a gargantuan thing. It had few friends at the capitol as opposed to, say, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Yet even Crow's critics must admit he played this hand masterfully. It wasn't long after his arrival that the UofA, which always considered itself "the university," was enviously muttering, "We wish we had a Michael Crow."

The vision of a New American University was buttressed around finding new revenue. I learned this early, when Crow asked me how ASU could be of more help in illuminating the economy. I sent him a list of some 30 indicators that were not tracked in the echo chamber of population growth and construction permits. This ended up in the economics department where the mandate was to produce it, and find a way to sell it.

Opportunity costs I

The Navy has its heart set on building 55 littoral combat ships. So far, each is costing around $700 million. That's about half the annual federal subsidy for all of Amtrak. For one ship. And although it looks "like Darth Vader on the sea," as the New York Times put it, one doesn't have to be an amateur naval historian, although I am, to see this craft could be sunk by the ghost of Billy Mitchell flying a 1920s bomber. This is another deeply troubled defense program, plagued by cost over-runs and likely not just to disappoint but actually put our security at risk. Imagine how we could be using this money, or the trillions we're spending for wars in Afghanistan or Iraq — and there, as Everett Dirksen would say, we're talking real money. Such an exercise lets us better understand the opportunity costs of the course we're pursuing into decline.

One important effort should be retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future, which is inevitable no matter how much we frack or use the dirty oil from our good friends to the north. Of course, most of American suburbia was built for the car. Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since World War II. Place-making and civic design were lost. Massive, cheap, look-alike construction, laid down on an industrial scale, has continued and metastasized, bigger and uglier, decade by decade. All this was heavily and stealthily subsidized by taxpayers and federal policy,  encouraged by a brief moment in history when gasoline was cheap and America was less populous. Jim Kunstler rightly calls it "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." Now it's a built environment whose time has come and gone. Exurbia is done. Much of the rest of suburbia will face ever-greater stresses.

Could some of it be saved and improved? Yes.

Our appetites

A reader has demanded that I write about The Hunger Games. I had never heard of the young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins or the new movie until this. I doubt I will see the film; a few years ago, Hollywood stopped making much that appeals to my "demographic." The old entertainment writer in me will simply say that Jennifer Lawrence, the lead, is a remarkable young actress. Her self-assured, perfect-pitch performance in Winter's Bone makes her one to watch.

Of course this isn't that the reader was asking. He's convinced that America is on the brink of mass starvation brought on by a lack of jobs. Here's the deal: Until Paul Ryan and the GOP Boyz defund them, 15 federal food and nutrition programs, including Food Stamps, are offered to those in dire straits. It would be obscene to compare the plight of Americans, however heartbreaking, with people in the developing world who are genuinely starving to death. That said, the Agriculture Department tracks "food insecurity," defined as "at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food." Nearly 49 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2010, 6.4 million in the most serious circumstances.

A future with lethal, televised gladiatorial games — that I can believe. It wouldn't require the "destruction of North America," only a little slippage in the ratings and a few more miles down the road of national decadence. A situation where the starving unemployed — which is where I think the reader was going — rise up in revolution against the plutocrats and their lackeys in D.C.? Nope.

The exit interview

The urbanist Yuri Artibise left Phoenix last year, returning to Vancouver. It's part of a continuing brain drain, although to be sure such assets as ASU continue to bring in new creatives. I don't know where the tally stands, but I fear Phoenix continues to lose more than it attracts. Architect Taz Loomans recently conducted an interesting "exit interview" with Artibise. It made me realize that it's been five years since I got the first inkling that the Arizona Republic would take away my column, which would eventuate in me leaving town. So I thought I'd use Loomans' questions as a test for myself.

What do you miss most about Phoenix? My good friends. (I tried to select one "most"; for more, see my additions in the comments section).

What did Phoenix have that Seattle doesn’t? It is the repository of so much of my history, so many of my hopes. My mother and grandmother, long dead, are so alive on the streets of Willo, Roosevelt and Storey. The church where I was baptised is still going, as is my grade school, still in its inspiring, grand building, and enchanting Encanto Park. Union Station, where I spent countless hours as a child watching trains and dreaming of far-away places. The streets I worked as a paramedic, learning too much too young. The different mountain vistas that always orient me. Phoenix is the home of my heart, a place so mangled, mismanaged, raped and pillaged, but still worth fighting for. No matter how long I am gone, when I return I can drive the streets and walk the neighborhoods as if I had never left. The ghosts of the Hohokam still speak to me on winter nights when the cold wind blows from the High Country and the peculiar acoustics of the valley mingle train whistles and voices of the beloved dead.

Phoenix 101: Maryvale

In the late 1950s, my uncle bought a house from John F. Long in Maryvale — and I mean he bought it from John Long himself sitting in a trailer on land that would become Phoenix's first major post-war suburb. My uncle was pretty much Long's target demographic: A veteran of World War II and Korea, young with a family and a good job. Tens of thousands more did the same thing. His house was a sparkling new ranch with an "all electric kitchen" and a pool. Every time we visited, I felt inferior, us living in a down-on-its-heels Spanish period-revival house, built in the 1920s with a gas range, just north of downtown. My mother sniffed that his commute faced the sun coming and going. But how I wanted to live in Maryvale. It was the future. Except it wasn't. Now our old house is restored and valuable in one of the state's most desirable historic districts. Maryvale is a linear slum.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. Long named the district after his wife and loved it until he died. He was unapologetic about building affordable starter homes for ex-GIs and his company tried to support Maryvale even as it began an inexorable decline. He took the model of Levittown, the "planned communities" built by William Levitt in the northeast in the last 1940s and 1950s. But Long added his own twists, such as the distinct Phoenix ranch house and abundant pools. Like its model, Maryvale was defined by curvilinear streets with cul-de-sacs and walls, providing a sense of privacy. Sometimes the newness could be jarring: I remember walking with my uncle through cabbage fields — across the street (until these were obliterated by more houses).

The American promise

Editor's note: This is an essay I wrote for the Jan. 8th edition of the Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest magazine (it's one of the last metropolitan newspapers to carry its own magazine):

I overhear many conversations about the economy, but the topper came recently in downtown Seattle. As two well-dressed men discussed the eurozone crisis and high unemployment at home, one said, "I'll tell you what I think it is: It's the beginning of the end of the world."

The severe recession and its staggering aftermath do represent the end of a world, if not the world. We live in the new hard times.

People sense it. A Rasmussen Poll last October found that only 37 percent of likely voters believed that America's best days were ahead. In a Gallup survey, 55 percent of respondents said it was very or somewhat unlikely that today's youth would enjoy a better life than their parents'.

Read more here.

Hell on wheels

High-speed rail is dead in America. In Slate, Will Oremus does a postmortem that isn't as clueless as most of what one would find in the mainstream media. It makes some points familiar to my readers: The Obama plan wouldn't have been genuine high-speed rail, except in Florida, merely higher-speed; the funds were insufficient and dolled out helter-skelter across the country rather than focusing on corridors likely to bring success, etc. I would add that the Florida HSR was foolish from the get-go, aimed at a suburbianized, car-crazy state, rather than, say, California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor, where train travel is already popular and in demand.

In any event, this is a catastrophe for the nation.

On a general level, it is another sign that America just can't do great things any longer. It's an emphatic indication of the nihilistic paralysis of our politics, with one of our major political parties captured by extremists whose mission is pure destruction. It highlights yet another blow to the commons. It's a lost economic opportunity. High-speed rail would have created tens of thousands of jobs, for operating and not just construction. It had the potential, properly done, to seed new industries here to build the trains. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that would stimulate an economy that as things stand faces years of high unemployment and stagnation. From an environmental standpoint, rail is much less destructive than cars and moves far more people with a small carbon footprint.

How the West was...

Phoenix once boasted two Cinerama movie houses: the Cine Capri and the Kachina in Scottsdale. Both were bulldozed. In Seattle, thanks to the stewardship of Paul Allen, the Cinerama theater downtown was saved and renovated. It just completed a three-week festival of movies originally filmed in 70 millimeter, which even with all the technology available to Hollywood today is something worth experiencing. Despite facing the terrible commute and traffic of going one block, I went anyway yesterday to see How the West Was Won, the 1962 epic.

At the risk of provoking readers, I must confess that I was deeply moved. Yes. The film has more than one historical inaccuracy. The cognoscenti will always condemn it as a celebration of genocidal Manifest Destiny, although for the era it shows a much more nuanced portrait of Western expansion. Still, with a grand old-time movie score, a battalion of big stars, surprisingly good dialogue and the scenery on that wide, curved screen, it was hard to resist. (An added treat: One of the card sharks was a dead ringer for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon). At the end, the packed house of Seattle lefties gave long applause.

I was moved partly because the story, which follows four generations of a family from 1839 to 1889, could have been about my family, too. The migration routes were somewhat different and my kin fought on both sides of the Civil War, literally brother against brother, but in both cases the family ended up in Arizona. Yes, in hindsight we were part of the problem, but I can't imagine any nation just walling off settlement beyond the Alleghenies. It wasn't going to happen. But this personal connection wasn't all that provoked strong emotions.

Peak oil for smart people

You will find nothing "for dummies" on this site. But let my try to cut through the wonk: We face a high-cost energy future. I usually try to phrase it this way to avoid the stigma that the oil industry's well-paid/well-placed propagandists attach to the term "peak oil." (Rather like "climate change" vs. "global warming"). America has done nothing to prepare for this future. It's going to get rough.

In fact, peak oil is well known within the oil industry (which I covered as a journalist). It means simply that half of this one-time gift of geology is gone. It doesn't mean "we're about to run out of oil." The clever conflation of these ideas has helped to confuse and distract even the dwindling number of Americans who are paying attention. The other bad news: When applied to a nation or world, peak means the "easy" oil is gone, and the remainder will be more difficult and expensive to recover and refine. National peaks go along with economic trauma. Hence, America hit national peak in the early 1970s, helping to cause the recessions and stagnation of that decade. These peaks are hard to predict in advance, clear in the rearview mirror.

The oil industry and our leaders know that we are headed for, or have reached, global peak. As with climate change, the debate is over details: Essentially when and what next. And as with climate change, the consequences will be profound. Not for nothing has the government kept then-Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force meeting minutes secret, and not for ideology's sake alone did we commit so much treasure to creating and sustaining the Army of the Euphrates.

The periphery

When you're talking Europe, the periphery (Greece, etc.) is ailing, while the core, especially Germany and Scandinavia, is doing well. In Phoenix, the situation is reversed. To be sure, the depression has clobbered huge swaths of Phoenix suburbia, left Pinal County circling the drain and driven a stake into the dreams of Superstition Vistas and Buckeye with 400,000 poor boobs from the Midwest. Glendale is underwater on its super mortgage to hucksters and Westgate is in foreclosure. And the compromised, local-yokel professional seers have once again pushed out their prediction of "recovery," this time to 2015. Still, what little economic activity that's happening is occurring in places such as Scottsdale and Chandler.

The news for the city of Phoenix is gloomy. What few companies are coming to the metro area are setting up shop on the periphery. Banner Health, which killed a hospital on the Phoenix Biosciences Campus that would have led to a quantum leap in its synergies, has teamed up with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to establish a "world class" treatment facility in Gilbert. (The irony here is that Anderson is part of the Texas Medical Center in central Houston that should be the model for the Phoenix campus). ASU and the Mayo Clinic are setting up a medical school in north Scottsdale. Even as central Phoenix is clearcut with huge swaths of empty land, a big data center chose Chandler for a new operation, among the other new projects and expansions that the suburbs can boast. Even within the city, venerable law firm Fennemore Craig stabbed downtown (well, Midtown) in the back, relocating to 24th and Camelback.

As far as I can tell, this isn't even being discussed in the Phoenix mayoral race. Yet it's one of the biggest problems facing the city and metro area.

Did Phoenix light rail fail?

My first experience with light rail came living in San Diego in the early 1980s. One segment linked downtown with the border crossing at San Ysidro. It was popular and uncontroversial. "I didn't think one of these could run without graffiti all over it," I heard a visitor from then dysfunctional New York exclaim of the new, bright red trainsets. As a reporter, I wrote about the Trolley, especially the ambitious expansion plans. San Diego is the most Republican of California's big cities, but the light-rail system was begun under Pete Wilson, a mediocre U.S. senator, bad California governor, but stellar San Diego mayor (he was also, along with developer Ernest Hahn, the father of the spectacularly revived downtown). Today, the San Diego Trolley extends 53 miles on three routes.

Then I lived in Denver, where the city started a segment downtown. It too, was popular and widely embraced. Now it comprises 39 miles with another 12 due in two years. I was in Charlotte for the planning of the now-operating Lynx light-rail, a relatively modest 10 miles, but more is in the works. It was the first modern light-rail system in the Old South and, again, widely supported, especially by the business leadership and developers who built hundreds of millions of dollars of projects near the line. Similar success happened in other cities, especially Dallas (!), with its 72-mile system and clammoring of suburbs to get the next line.

The story didn't play out that way in Phoenix. Yes, we built it, you bastards. But it's also time to take stock.

The recovery con

When you wonder why this blog is such a downer to some readers, consider what I must read. For example, The Phoenix Business Journal last week published a story headlined, "Phoenix Cracks Forbes' Top 10 Potential Boom Cities." I am suspicious of these kind of lists, which can be shallow and misleading, although they are wildly popular. And Forbes is not exactly without an agenda. Still, I dutifully followed the link. Imagine my non-surprise when it turned out to be a post by Joel Kotkin, the four-square apologist for Sun Belt suburbia. He claimed to have crunched data to determine which "cities are best positioned to grow and prosper in the coming decade." Austin and Raleigh led the list. He goes on:

Our other two top ten, No. 9 Phoenix, Ariz., and No. 10 Orlando, Fla., have not done well in the recession, but both still have more jobs now than in 2000. Their demographics remain surprisingly robust. Despite some anti-immigrant agitation by local politicians, immigrants still seem to be flocking to both of these states. Known better as retirement havens, their ranks of children and families have surged over the past decade. Warm weather, pro-business environments and, most critically, a large supply of affordable housing should allow these regions to grow, if not in the overheated fashion of the past, at rates both steadier and more sustainable.

Thus enlightened, I set out on the due diligence and critical thinking that should be the basics of good journalism, but are seen as "negative" in booster culture.

Peak Crazy

If you missed the news, the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is being built in China as modules to be assembled in California. Fourteen million Americans are officially unemployed and the U-6 (real) rate of unemployment in the Golden State is 22 percent. The project is, according to the New York Times, "part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer." The original Bay Bridge was built during the Great Depression by Americans, employing thousands and, along with other infrastructure investments of the era, stimulating numerous American industries. We used to do these things and do them well. But no more. We buy plastic tubs from China at Wal-Mart to fill with other stuff we buy from China at Wal-Mart while working, if we're lucky, at stagnant- or low-wage jobs. We're crazy.

The last space shuttle mission is scheduled to begin Friday. After that, we cede space low-earth orbit to the Russians, who I guess won the space race after all, and more important exploration to China and India. In my lifetime, we put men on the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. NASA has been neglected since the Nixon administration, with the inadequate shuttles our only manned program. Now, nothing. We're told the private sector will take over. And it will do this...how? Why? Corporate America is sitting on its profits, not hiring Americans, not investing in America. I don't doubt some or another space boondoggle using federal corporate welfare, but Boeing is not going to take us to Mars. Where's the profit margin? We once did great things. Now we're crazy.

The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun on the debt ceiling. President Hoover is busy, as usual, negotiating against himself, begging for a few hundred billion in tax hikes while conceding trillions in budget cuts. These will only slow the economy at a time when the federal government should be aggressively investing in infrastructure (and not "roads and bridges"). Last I checked, Mr. Hoover has put Social Security on the table. Who needs John Boehner when the nominally Democratic president will give the social compact the coup de grace by himself. The nation sits cow-like as this transpires. The richest nation in history is "broke," we're told. Taxes can't be raised. It would hurt those precious "job creators," even though the Bush/Obama tax cuts have been an abysmal, demonstrable failure. Average Americans vote to protect the interests of the oligarchs. How else to explain it but...crazy.

The ambition deficit

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood... — Daniel Burnham

Hard as it is to believe for someone my age, it's been 50 years since construction began on the Space Needle, the iconic symbol of Seattle and the centerpiece of the 1962 World's Fair. Seattle leaders elbowed out much better-known cities, including New York, to gain international accreditation of the event, which was a coming out party to the world for the Emerald City. The site is now Seattle Center, a cultural mecca in the central core right down the monorail from downtown. It was actually Seattle's second world's fair and had initially been developed to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, whose grounds became the University of Washington campus. Another one of my adopted hometowns, San Diego, also held two world's fairs, in 1915 and 1935 — their legacy was magnificent Balboa Park.

My real hometown never did one world's fair, even though it passed the population mark to be a big city more than half a century ago. It may be just as well. Unlike Seattle or San Diego (or even Knoxville, Tenn.), Phoenix would have built something out in the middle of nowhere and, unlike Seattle lucking out with the timeless Space Needle, suffered the worst of modern architecture. Maybe the dusty streets for an empty subdivision would have been left behind. Indeed, I was approached by a group of well-meaning folks in the mid-2000s to promote a world's fair in the former gravel beds of the Salt River. That it was far from downtown never seemed to have occured to them.

Still, this is another sign of Phoenix's astounding lack of ambition. It plays in the majors. It just doesn't want to admit it. I recall hearing from someone who moved to Phoenix and tried, within his modest means, to push forward a project of civic betterment. He was taken aside and told, "People move to the Valley to be left alone. That's the way they like it. You either have to live with that or move." He moved.

Rules of engagement

Last night, I finished the late Alan Bullock's magnificent book, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. It's a reminder that no matter how much one has studied a topic, he or she can have vast new landscapes opened by the best historians as tour-guides. The book was completed just as the Soviet empire that Stalin built was falling apart, and the moment was marked by the greatest hope. Yet Bullock also reminded us of the bloody paths that contingency can create, particularly when broad social, economic and cultural forces and destabilization ("history from below") are harnessed by evil genius ("history from above"). The book ends with a deeply moving coda of promise. But that comes after a thousand pages examining the two greatest mass murderers in history; worse, men who could move nations to do their killing.

I think about all this as we sit seemingly becalmed, summer opening. Americans could be forgiven a moment of desire for, as Frank Fukuyama put it, the end of history after the long standoff of the Cold War. But this is not 1989-90. Now we are a nation of simpletons in denial. Thus, President Obama could make a speech about Afghanistan where the media report it as if we're actually leaving this hopeless morass. He can say, "it's time to focus on nation-building here at home" but he lacks the conviction to build even one — just one — segment of true high-speed rail. We treat Randian ravings as serious policy options and allow the cruelest policies to be passed by those who also brandish their "Christian" values at every speech. One of our two major political parties' platforms is essentially based on returning America to the 1880s, without a frontier and with more than 300 million people in a complex society.

As I write this morning, I see headlines for stories saying the United States and its allies will "release 60 million barrels of oil to offset supply disruptions caused by unrest in Libya." And presumably also to help keep gas prices down for the trip to Wal-Mart (recent acquisition: the U.S. Supreme Court). And they note oil prices fell. I want to scream, "America uses 20 million barrels of oil every day and China is fast catching up, you fools! Prices are falling because of fears of a new recession!" But, in a calmer state, I think, maybe it's me. I don't understand the new rules of engagement:

Off the edge

Yet another pipe dream has exploded in the Phoenix Depression. This time Steve Ellman's Westgate "City Center," — the Republic story pimped the development as "the flashy dining and shopping complex that anchors Glendale's football stadium and hockey arena" — is facing foreclosure.

This is time to revisit my 2010 post on Glendale's folly. It's also relevant coming directly after the popular Phoenix 101: Malls. Yet more needs to be said; not to make thin-skinned Phoenicians feel depressed, as is the usual criticism, but to learn something from these costly debacles to move the metro area forward into some kind of broad, non-heat-island-scorched uplands.

The only ones that could be surprised by the Westgate mess are those millions who drank the developer-speak Kool-Aid ("flashy dining and shopping complex" blah blah blah). Every time I was forced to go there for an event, the place was dead. It was far from anything else besides a too-narrow freeway, unless you wanted to farm some cotton or throw up the frames of subdivisions on former farm land. Nor is it flashy, aside from the sun blinding you when it hits the bumper of some jacked-up truck in the parking lot. It is off-the-shelf suburban stuff found everywhere, with the unfortunate distinction that all the asphalt and concrete, besides being ugly, adds a special hellish ambiance even when the surface temp is not 140 degrees.

The fire this time

As I write, the Wallow fire in eastern Arizona is at 607 square miles — larger than the city of Phoenix — and zero containment. I haven't been to Eager or Springerville in more than 30 years, but Google Earth confirms that this is still a part of the state that has not been consumed by the Growth Machine. All of Apache County has less than 72,000 people and grew only 3 percent from 2000 to 2010. It is magic country.

Unlike the Rodeo-Chedeski fire, which consumed 732 square miles along the Mogollon Rim, this doesn't appear to have the added risk of hundreds of tract houses built amid pine trees on land made private by secretive federal land swaps. It also lacks Valinda Jo Elliott, the accidental arsonist, who stalked away from a fight with her boyfriend carrying the essentials for the wilderness that every Boy Scout learns to carry: Cigarettes, a lighter, flip-flops and a towel. And be sure to light a "signal fire" in dry, windy country when you get lost. She is the perfect Arizona voter, if not member of the Legislature.

This is pure tragedy. It is also a taste of the future.

Tornado country

I taught at a small college in Oklahoma years ago, then started my journalism "career" there. One of the first things I learned is that Oklahoma, along with Singapore, has the most intense thunderstorms in the world along with their attendant tornadoes. Nearly every day in the spring and early summer, they form atop New Mexico's spookily beautiful Caprock bluffs and then move east. So many days I would see a black line along the horizon in the morning. In the middle of the day, the darkness might be so complete that the streetlights would come on. Tornado watches were routine; warnings and sirens things to dread. Drenching rain, golfball-sized hail and then violent wind were commonplace during the season. People watched carefully for the formation of a funnel — if they could see the sky in the darkness and rain. Major damage was more rare in the rolling woods of the eastern part of the state; west of I-35, watch out. The movie Twister, for all of Helen Hunt's considerable charms, doesn't even begin to capture the terrifying majesty of an Oklahoma storm.

All the old-timers had Tornado Alley lore. About pieces of straw driven through telephone poles. About the freak contingency of the storms: How one side of a street might be leveled and the other look as if nothing at all were amiss. About cars picked up and put down yet the occupants lived. And the little towns that once existed before being swept off the map. Every town has a section that is prone to get hit. Soon you learned your own storm wisdom, such as the strange color of the sky after a twister-laden front had moved past. Before coming to Arizona Territory in the late 19th century, my great-grandparents lived in Indian Territory, the eastern half of what became the state of Oklahoma. A tornado was my grandmother's earliest memory: Of being carried into a shelter before the monster leveled the little settlement, killing one of her sisters.

I think about this in the aftermath of the Joplin, Mo., tornado. The region suffers through the occasional bad year, where the most intense level of tornadoes can even destroy brick buildings. The so-called "super outbreak" of 1974 is the prime example, where 148 twisters struck 13 states on April 3 and 4. There was Terrible Tuesday in 1979, when an EF-4 — reportedly five-miles wide at one point — lethally struck the suburban edge of Wichita Falls, Texas. It was part of a storm that ravaged the Red River Valley, coming way too close to the little college town where I lived. Now we're living through another super outbreak year: Nearly 1,000 tornadoes and 500 dead. Or we're entering something different.

Amtrak at 40

On May 1, 1971, the private railroads ceased passenger service and it was taken over by Amtrak, the government-owned National Railroad Passenger Corporation. Dozens of trains that ran on April 30th ceased to exist. Hundreds of cities lost their trains. What remained is largely the bare-bones operation, outside of the Northeast Corridor, that still exists today. This even though the nation has added 100 million people, become much more densely populated, and oil prices will make the car- and airline-based future seen as inevitable in 1971 increasingly difficult to sustain.

Amtrak was created because of a massive grassroots campaign. It was also an effort to help save the bankrupt Penn-Central and the freight railroads in general. But it was also born in sin as a deeply flawed political compromise, dependent on a federal subsidy that few lawmakers would or will admit is necessary, and a political plaything depending on who controls Congress and the White House. Something had to be done. Whether Amtrak was the answer is open to debate. America once enjoyed the best and fastest passenger rail system in the world. It was killed by automobiles and airlines that were heavily subsidized by the federal government (and continue to be), even as the private railroads were taxed and regulated heavily. Nor were the externalities priced in: Pollution, energy consumption and the resulting geopolitical instability, sprawl and its environmental consequences, etc. After spending heavily on new streamliners after World War II, railroads saw passenger business steadily fall off to this subsidized competition. Some fought on with top-notch service, notable the Santa Fe. Others couldn't wait to kill their trains, notoriously the Southern Pacific.

Both served Phoenix in the 1960s. The Santa Fe ran a classy little train from Union Station to Williams Junction, where it connected with the road's premier transcontinental streamliners, including the Super Chief, El Capitan, Chief, San Francisco Chief and Grand Canyon Limited. The SP operated three trains in each direction until the mid-1960s: the crack Sunset Limited, the Golden State and the remnant of the once grand Imperial. By 1970, only the Sunset survived, a raggedy thing that usually had a couple of coaches and a vending-machine car (a decade before, the Sunset routinely had 14 cars, including sleepers and full-service diner). Cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis had dozens of trains, right up to the eve of Amtrak. After Amtrak, cities usually had one train, often at inconvenient hours (Phoenix had service until the mid-1990s, when the state government refused to help upgrade the northern main line of the SP).

The city in mind

As a native Westerner, my problem with "wide open spaces" is how many we've lost in my lifetime and how difficult it is to really live in what's left in a nation of 308 million. The constant move outward in metro Phoenix obliterates anything but the illusion. Today's wide vista out the window will be a Super Wal-Mart tomorrow. People who bought in Fountain Hills years ago — a development that annihilated one of the state's most lush saguaro forests, and it takes a saguaro ten years to grow an inch-and-a-half — are now partly surrounded by schlock. Same with Verrado, where the idiot David Brooks saw "the future." Prescott, a town with history and wonderful bones, is a planning and congestion disaster outside the old town. The same is true with Flagstaff, as with most small towns in America.

If you're rich and lucky enough to buy land adjacent to a National Park, maybe your panorama will have the illusion of the pristine, although we know the pollution, fire, sleazy land swaps and other stresses facing our public lands — and just wait for the GOP to privatize it. Move to the staked plains and you can find real emptiness, but good luck finding work. And if I want wide open spaces, do I profane them further with a new house, which by its very nature can't be "green," and total dependence on the automobile? Good luck finding a real, scalable, sustainable small town on a passenger train route.

For these reasons, as well as growing up in central Phoenix and for the eye-opening years I spent living in real cities, I choose to make my stand in the city. And it's a major focus of this blog. Most Americans don't "get" cities; they don't have urban values. Most want their imitation English country estates crowded together as lookalike tract houses in suburbia. The problems with this are manifold. First, the nation's population has doubled since Levittowns were first laid down. Thus, most suburbs suffer from urban problems without urban solutions. Second, they are artifacts of a moment in history defined by cheap gasoline, now passing away. Third, sprawl destroys vast tracts of valuable agricultural land, rural areas and wilderness, with numerous environmental strains. Fourth, for all the heavy subsidies to make suburbia work (freeways, flood control, etc.), it's a highly inefficient spatial arrangement. Suburbia is not merely boring and filled with anomie (American Beauty, etc.), it is now the epicenter of the housing crash, with attendant debt, poverty and very high carrying costs.

War (huh!) what it is good for

In trying to understand what seems to be, well, I don't know a delicate way to put it, the growing goatfuck in Libya, I turned to Professor Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog is one of the best sources of analysis on the Middle East. He lists ten ways that the Libyan intervention is not Iraq 2003. Among them, the action has UN Security Council authorization; the Libyan people "had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds"; civilians were being massacred and worse was to follow, and the Arab League calling for action.

Maybe. But I can't help this nagging feeling that Uncle Sucker has once again been lured into a Wilsonian/Bushian "make the world safe for democracy" swindle, while more complex, hypocritical, realpolitik, cynical and sinister forces are at work. It is no surprise that France pushed hard for action, not wanting to be on the receiving end of a million impossible-to-assimilate Muslim refugees, but Mr. Carla Bruni will publicize this with Liberté, égalité, fraternité. No surprise, either, that Arab League members started to squawk once the cruise missiles began landing. It's reminiscent of the days when the United States would take out some dictator in Latin America, bringing instant public condemnation of "imperialism!" by leaders in the region who were saying, sotto voce, "Thank God they got him!" And how nice to make our Chinese debt-holders squirm even a little at the prospect that the next popular uprising just might show up outside their politburo meeting. 

Still, what's the end game here? No Fly Zones are well and good and militarily...what? Actually, the only NFZ I know that was working was the one we maintained for a decade against Saddam Hussein. Otherwise, the intervention must expand or fail, for the good colonel is not committing most of his civilian killings with air power, but with ground forces. So, as Sir Sean Connery's character demands of Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, "What are you prepared to do?" One can't escape the conclusion that President Hoover and Mrs. Clinton didn't really think that one through, and Bob Gates was just too damned tired or distracted to intervene. Instead of World War III, we'll just have three wars in the world, sapping America. Forgive me for imagining the cynical Europeans and Perfidious Albion (the Royal Navy fired one cruise missile on the day the attack began) are just itching for a way to hand the mess off to us.

The Great Disruption

I am suspicious of all unified field theories, including my own. Still, we have entered a new age and must try to explain and understand it. I am with James Howard Kunstler's "Long Emergency" in many areas. But I don't think the federal government will collapse anytime soon; crises tend to centralize power — even the Roman Empire took centuries to fall apart in the West, longer still in the East. Nor do I think small-scale food production and small towns will replace cities; cities have the power and wealth to draw resources, and metropolitan areas will be the economic and organizing entities of the 21st century, barring a major nuclear war. Nor do I accept Dmitry Orlov's theory that America will collapse along the lines of the Soviet Union.

I call the new age the Great Disruption. It is on display in Japan, where one of the most advanced nations in the world is struggling with a devastating earthquake and an unfolding nuclear disaster. The planet is at 6.8 billion people, at or beyond its carrying capacity. This will amplify the natural disasters that are a normal part of the world, bringing much more widespread death and misery to the Haitis and Indonesias, but not sparing advanced nations. The United States has nearly doubled its population in my lifetime. This not only adds huge costs that we have not addressed, in infrastructure to use one example, but also vulnerabilities (and lack of spending on infrastructure to soften disasters, e.g. New Orleans). A major earthquake in Seattle or San Francisco today would be catastrophic, and both are inevitable. And lest Phoenicians feel smug, they are downwind from the largest nuclear power plant in the nation, one with a highly checkered safety record, getting older, and whose water supply in an emergency should be question No. 1 for the press. This on top of (over) populating one of the most hostile desert valleys and basins in the world, a totally manmade environment, totally vulnerable to tribulation.

Overpopulation is a backbeat for most of the other elements of the Great Disruption. But most of all it is about discontinuity The next 30 years are not going to be a replay of the past 30, only with cooler personal tech toys. Why not?

No way to run a railroad

No other issue personifies the dysfunction at the heart of America — or as they would say on Twitter, #AmericaFail — as much as the inability to move ahead with high-speed rail. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress never made a serious effort. The $13 billion initially offered is nothing compared with what's needed. By comparison, China is spending $100 billion a year. Much of the money here would go to higher-speed rail, not the 155-mile-per-hour-plus systems that qualify as genuine high-speed rail. And the choice of Florida for the nation's first HSR line was always misplaced: Florida is a car-culture, suburbanized state, especially in Orlando and Tampa, the destinations of the line, with little appreciation or habit of taking trains. HSR would better be tried in rail-friendly territory, such as California or the Pacific Northwest, or making the Northeast Corridor true high speed. Then Americans could see how well such a system would really work. Now, with Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida refusing the federal money, and the GOP-controlled House solidly anti-rail, it looks as if even this modest start will come to little.

The Republican fetish against trains and transit, so well articulated by George Will (and followed by priceless takedowns by Paul Krugman and Jim Kunstler) has always fascinated me. It was Abraham Lincoln who started the heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad. Republican presidents after him further subsidized more railroads through land grants. "Internal improvements" was a key Republican issue. No more. Republicans routinely refuse to even consider rail or rail transit as necessary options for the nation. They most of all wage war against Amtrak, keeping it too underfunded to succeed with frequent, convenient schedules (and it's still wildly popular). These "conservatives" had no interest in conserving what was once the world's most advanced passenger rail system. Is it that they represent the suburbs and exurbs, so are mindless creatures of car culture. Or is it the billions spent by the oil, auto and sprawl industries to ensure America stays mired in a 1970s transportation system? Indeed, the U.S. government gives oil and gas companies $41 billion a year, nearly 40 times Amtrak's annual budget. As usual, the fecklessness of Democrats enables the problem (oh, for a real opposition party).

In the real world, passenger trains are a major part of the transportation systems of advanced nations. The April edition of Trains magazine, a special report on HSR (not available online, alas), is quite an eye-opener.

Downtown, again II

The smart folks in the comments section of Rogue Columnist did not disappoint. So in the spirit of Abe Lincoln ("It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt"), I should probably just send you to their thoughts and end the post right here.

Still, a few observations.

Let me join Soleri and others on my own SimCity dreams. Oh, to have the Westward Ho restored to its glory, as has happened in other cities around the country (such as the Netherland Plaza in Cincinnati, the Skirvin in Oklahoma City or the Book Cadillac in Detroit)! To have the old Valley Bank building bustling again, with its magnificent lobby as I recall it. I'll see that and up you: A restored Union Station as an intercity and commuter train station, with intercity and city buses and a trolley to light rail. A real Symphony Hall worthy of a world-class city at Van Buren and Third, or any of the many vacant lots. Rebuilding some of the lost treasures, such as the red sandstone building that was located, as I recall, where the awful Wells Fargo (First National Bank of Arizona) tower now squats, on other empty land. Rebuild the Fox Theater, too. Somewhere architects must exist who would do something so subversive as to design pleasing, classical buildings.

For those wishing something to feel good about: Light rail, ASU Downtown, CityScape, the Phoenix Convention Center, Herberger Theater Center, Sheraton, Phoenix Biosciences Campus, Dodge Theater, Children's Museum, park of the Floating Diaphragm, USAirways Arena, Chase Field and the shady, grassy oasis of Arizona Center. These are all real accomplishments, major assets upon which other civic goods can grow.

Downtown, again

Susan Copeland, chair of the Downtown Voices Coalition, recently wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic, entitled, "A realistic downtown assessment." It was mostly a clear-eyed look at the reality of downtown Phoenix's challenges: Expecting too much from sports teams, failure to integrate ASU into the city fabric, too many surface parking lots and chimerical hopes from an "entertainment district." Copeland rightly adds that CityScape is "suburban mall stylistically dating to the 20th century," although I have a hard time mourning the brutalist "park" of Patriot's Square. She adds:

With all the damage done, there are still hopeful signs, if only our city officials and civic leaders follow their own community vetted and charetted ideals. The Urban Form Project; Arts, Culture, and Small Business District Overlay; and Adaptive Reuse Program are smarter moves for aspiring urban infill than another stab at a faux urban Entertainment District. When the city actually listens to its citizens rather than check-marking the input box, great things happen, like the improved ASU Nursing School exterior or the forthcoming Washington Street Centennial Project.

Well, fine (Her piece was written in response to this one). And good on her for searching for realism. But regular readers will have to forgive me if I cover some familiar ground as well as discuss the deep problems and real opportunities facing downtown Phoenix. I'm still not sure people fully get it.

Tucson rallies

The white-right has been quick to deflect any criticism after the Giffords shooting, including Sarah Palin's appalling, but somehow strategic, use of the term "blood libel." The media have been willing accomplices, as usual. Anyone who has been paying attention since the frightening crowds egged on by Gov. Palin during the closing phases of the 2008 presidential campaign, the staged August disruptions of meetings with members of Congress in 2009 and the Tea Party and all its violent rhetoric and imagery — the connection to the shooting is unavoidable. And, as Pima County Sheriff Dupnik had the guts to say, there is a peculiar accelerant of Arizona political extremism applied to this fire. In the end, however, few minds will likely be changed.

But other factors are at work, too. We can debate and weigh them, but they must be considered.

I've driven by the place where the shooting took place many times. It's one of hundreds of off-the-shelf Spanish-Tuscan-schlock shopping strips with a huge, blazing parking lot plopped down across the state by the Real Estate Industrial Complex: ugly, characterless, dehumanizing and killing of genuine community. The same is true of the endless subdivisions of lookalike tract houses, built around a garage door rather than a front porch. The built environment does influence behavior and souls. It's telling that the attack took place there and not, say, along the Fourth Avenue business district in central Tucson. Most Americans like to believe crime happens in center cities; in reality, much of it, including some of the most hideous murders, occurs in suburbia and exurbia. Also, the 8th District, like most of Arizona, is so lacking in inviting public spaces that this is where Rep. Giffords had to set up her table to meet constituents.

Phoenix 101: Tucson

The Ronstadt house on Sixth Avenue in Tucson.

Early in the 20th century, Phoenix surpassed Tucson in population and never looked back. The old joke: Tucson hates Phoenix and Phoenix doesn't pay any attention to Tucson, which makes the Old Pueblo hate Phoenix even more. I don't claim to be a Tucson expert, but a reader new to the city asked to learn more. So what follows is a Phoenician's idiosyncratic take on Arizona's second city.

Tucson is much older than Phoenix, having been founded by the Spanish (led by an Irishman in the pay of the Spanish crown) in 1775, a tenuous foothold in Apache country. It was a part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 (otherwise, the border would have been as close as Goodyear — how'd that sit with the white-right Midwesterners?). Thus, Tucson always wore its Hispanic side with ease and pride. Tucson got the first main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the late 1880s and for decades was the most populous city in the territory and young state. It was also a bastion of the Democratic Party, long after the state as a whole turned Republican. This was Mo Udall, Dennis DeConcini and Raul Castro country.

Growing up as a child of the Cold War, I knew Tucson would be a first-strike target in a "counterforce" nuclear exchange, because of the Titan II missile silos that surrounded the city. My first visits were on the train. My mother and I would board the remains of the once-grand Imperial, now a mail train with one coach, at Union Station, and travel south. We would spend the day in downtown Tucson and take the still crack Sunset Limited back home that evening. Early memories: The Santa Catalinas towered over the city in a way no mountains did Phoenix. Tucson was dry, a desert city, so different from the (then) lush oasis of Phoenix. Downtown was busy and vibrant, but no more so than Phoenix. I wasn't impressed.

308,745,538

"Too many people spoil everything," my mother said. This when Phoenix passed the intolerable level of 600,000 residents and America 200 million. Now we're more than 100 million beyond that and it's difficult to argue we're that much better as a nation. The suburban apologist Joel Kotkin has written a book entitled, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His thesis, as Publisher's Weekly puts it: "a very sunny...forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by mid-century as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history. Nourished by mass immigration and American society's proven adaptability, the country will reign supreme over an industrialized world beset by old age, bitter ethnic conflicts, and erratically functioning economic institutions." Funny, that dystopia sounds much like America in 2010. The success like America in 1970 or even 1990.

Thank God I saw the West when it was still relatively empty, when Arizona was such an exotic locale that most Americans had only seen it in Westerns. That's gone forever, especially in my home state, replaced by unmitigated ugliness almost every place that has been touched by human hands.

Interestingly, the decade's 9.7 percent growth rate nationally is the lowest since the Great Depression. Arizona clocked in as the nation's second-fastest growing state, at 24.6 percent, to reach 6.4 million. It probably would have seen an even larger population if not for the white-right war against Hispanics. Yet it is hardly 24.6 percent better by any other measure, certainly those involving quality of life or economic competitiveness. It barely made a dent in paying for the infrastructure to accommodate the 35-percent rise in the 1980s and the 40-percent rate of the 1990s. Nevada, No. 1 in growth this decade (35.1 percent), is an economic, social and environmental disaster. The nation as a whole is poorer, deeply in debt, mired in imperial adventures and falling behind the advanced nations of the world.

Book 'em

A column recommending books for the holidays might seem like a lazy columnist's trick (and I know 'em all). But as we collapse into a society of limited attention spans, where even smart people rarely venture outside their bunkers of expertise, where fewer and fewer American men are reading(!), let us brace ourselves to read and give books. Here are some that touch on issues we regularly address on Rogue:

The shelves groan under the number of books written about the financial crisis, its aftermath, causes and needed fixes. My favorites are Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, by nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz; 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak; Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, and Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, by Robert Reich. It's a soup-to-nuts telling of the bought-off politics, bad policy, deregulation and greed that brought on the crash, to the steps we must take in order to save ourselves. Not that we will.

The latest cooked-up "conservative" distraction is about American "exceptionalism." If you want to see us at out best, and worse, and exceptional, read Taylor Branch's magisterial trilogy on America in the King years: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge. Every literate citizen should know these books and this history.

Republic of delusion

Thanksgiving week rolls around with the national conversation more about the Pilgrims' conversion from "socialism" than any of the real and present dangers facing America. A measure of our mass delusion can be found in Phoenix, where Greg Vogel of the Real Estate Industrial Complex was talking about "the Valley" growing from 4 million to 8 million people over the next 35 years. This was not a conversation from 2006 but from last week. Just where the 1) water; 2) the people; 3) the capital will come from in post-crash/climate change America he doesn't say. His only concession to the current unpleasantness is to move the timetable to 35 years instead of the old 20. Ain't gonna happen. The old growth machine is broken and "the Valley" still can't imagine a Plan B.

(I put "the Valley" in quotes for several reasons. For one thing, it's a moronic-anodyne concession to the suburbs when Phoenix is a beautiful name for a city, and other real cities use their names to encompass suburbia, e.g. Chicago. Also, the metro area long ago spilled out of the real Salt River Valley, e.g. Cave Creek is not in that valley, nor is Maricopa. And "the Valley of the Sun" is a dated tourist slogan that will assume ever more sinister connotations with climate change).

In any event, Phoenix is hardly alone. The International Energy Agency's new annual report concedes that conventional oil production peaked in 2006. This little bit of news that will change everything about our lives and national security in the years ahead received barely a mention in major news outlets. Bristol Palin (remember when women had attractive names like Susan, Linda and Kathy?) on Dancing with the Stars was deemed more important.

Tea Party on

If one were observing an ignorant and self-indulgent "consumer" America in the abstract, it would be fun to say, "Go right ahead, enact the deficit reductions recommended by the old right-wing coot Alan Simpson & Co. See how that works out for you." The anti-middle-class, anti-investment-in-the-future tenor of the report is perfectly in keeping with the Tea Party, and apparently the white, suburban vote that the Democrats have lost. And this is a commission appointed by Barack Obama. I'd feel this way if I wanted my country to hurt and fail. But I don't.

"Austerity" is just a con to further enrich the nationless capital markets and the super-rich. Nothing more. The very rich have no interest in the history of America from the 1940s through the 1970s, when a rising and secure middle class, and 90-percent tax rates on top earners, still supported fine lifestyles for the wealthy as well as the world's greatest economy and society. Now we have to lose so they can win yet more. But austerity and tax cuts are the watchword, the intellectual fraud that has taken the day. Somehow the boobs indoctrinated by Fox "News" and rightwing talk radio never think it applies to them. To their 4,000-square-foot exurban houses for a family of four, multiple gas guzzlers and "consuming" from the mall and Wal-Mart — all on credit. Why, that's the American dream. Talk about an unsustainable entitlement program.

The magical thinking election

A few last thoughts as we head into what might be a historic election.

In Arizona, the state's largest newspaper wrote an especially tortured endorsement for Gov. Jan Brewer. The "reasoning" of the Arizona Republic is that Brewer is best positioned to help the state's ailing economy (!). And that she can work with dominant Republicans in the Legislature (!).  Of course the latter is true because she will go along with the Kooks. The former is insanity, for Brewer doesn't understand the first thing about economic development. If sunshine, low taxes and "light regulation" were the keys to prosperity, then Arizona would be Hong Kong. So she promises more of the same, especially failure to understand the housing boom isn't coming back. This endorsement is all about appeasing the white-right advertisers and readers in the suburbs, especially the East Valley. Brewer is an idiot, and the stories are legion (e.g., being the first governor in memory to skip out after a very brief appearance at Governor's Arts Awards dinner). A more cogent endorsement came for Terry Goddard from the Arizona Daily Star.

It's said that statewide elections are decided in Pima County. Not this time, alas. If Raul Grijalva is in trouble, then the Arizona Democratic Party is kaput. As with the nation, the red states will become redder; so much for angry Tea Partiers and theocrats voting to "throw out the bums" who caused the disaster. They are the stooges, the useful idiots, of the corporate elite pulling the strings for a "permanent Republican majority."

Blue highways

Having business in Phoenix that I was in no hurry to begin, we took the back roads from Seattle. My preference is to take the train, but a funding-starved Amtrak doesn't even go to the nation's fifth most populous city (and Amtrak will probably be killed by the Republicans, should they gain control of Congress). The drive might recall the days when motoring was pleasant, synonymous with freedom in a big country. It might reveal the West as it was when I was younger, before the millions of newcomers, exurban sprawl and Interstate sameness.

Considering timing and the route I wanted, the Interstate couldn't be avoided from Seattle to the Oregon border. Even so, it was showcased the variety of Washington state, particularly the bountiful farmland east of the Cascades and running down to Yakima and Walla Walla. The contrast with Arizona, which is all about attracting new house buyers, could not have been more striking. But the true drive began where U.S. 395 hits Pendleton, Oregon, just below the storied Columbia River.

Pendleton is the kind of real small town that has been largely lost in America, leaving either wealthy yupped-up towns that are imitations of small towns, or, more frequently, places hollowed out by Wal-Mart and de-industrialization, leaving ghost Main Streets and grotesque boxes of fast food and Wally hulking out "by the highway." Downtown Pendleton is blessed with real local shops such as an office supply store (!) that actually serve local customers, as well as a mission for the needy, government buildings, offices, churches, restaurants. They occupy a century's worth of architure, but most of it pleasingly historic and densely close together. Real neighborhoods are nearby. The Union Pacific main line to Portland goes through the heart of town -- it serves the agricultural economy, and once had passenger trains before one of many Amtrak cutbacks. Taken together, the downtown is a delight of scale, walkability and beauty.

The reruns of August

As others have noted, the 'ground zero mosque' hysteria, whipped up by the white-right and the corporate media, is this year's version of 'death panels' and other nonsense that sandbagged Democrats last August. What's remarkable is that the party keeps falling for it. A party so cowardly doesn't deserve to remain in "power," if you can call their recent run being in power — a minority of lockstep Republicans have managed to block most meaningful legislation. A party so stupid doesn't deserve to survive, when it could run on the rhetoric of Harry Truman or FDR or its few contemporary real Democrats (Rep. Alan Grayson, Sen. Bernie Sanders et al). But it won't. That it could fall for the same play over and over, again and again. The president has given a few good speeches, including this one in Seattle earlier this week. Unfortunately, the Obama magic has fallen into a credibility gap with an administration run by Wall Street and Clintonites.

I know all this is true. I just hate to consign our nation to more of the same right-wing governance. On and on until...what? Perhaps the Democrats must go the way of the Whigs. Yet an America that has lost its lead in college degrees — lost the ability to value education and thinking in the age of Sarah Palin and suburban arrogant-ignorance — won't embrace a progressive agenda. Will it? We may never know because the major media outlets are themselves either compromised or terrified. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox "News" and the Wall Street Journal, is openly giving money to the Republicans as well as tilting coverage. This is just the opening salvo in corporate money that will gain even more control over our government thanks to the "conservative" Supreme Court. (Do the Democrats think it was wise, say, to have two presidential nominees in 16 years from Massachusetts?)

Yet this is neither 1994 nor even 1988, when Michael Dukakis was punked by the late Lee Atwater, the political daddy of Karl Rove. The list of differences would be long and almost all are alarming and risky. The most immediate and volatile is unemployment. America has never seen a jobs crisis like this since the Great Depression — and then we were still the world's largest creditor nation and enjoyed the most powerful industrial base. Now we have at least 16 percent real unemployment and no prospect of recouping those lost jobs. Indeed, highly profitable companies are cutting jobs, freezing wages and, in one high-profile case, demanding pay cuts. In any other time, this would be the making of social and political strife. Don't assume that flat-screen TVs and Wal-Marts will keep the peace forever.

The big breakup

So how will it go down, this mess we're in? Dysfunctional empires can last a long time (Byzantium) or not (the Soviet Union). We've been more violently divided, in 1861, and yet the nation survived, albeit with more than 600,000 killed. America suffered worse governance and severe big-business malfeasance in the decades after the Civil War, but the damage was limited by the decentralization of cohesive small towns, farms and close families, the opportunity of the frontier, rising living standards and finally was reversed by the rise of the Progressive movement. The nation saw worse unemployment and economic collapse once before in modern times, but finally the federal government led by Franklin Roosevelt responded with vigor and effectiveness. And yes, a big war helped. We were mired in Vietnam and finally gave up and still America sailed on, passing two centuries.

Times now are tough and alarmist sentiments are easy. We can always muddle through, can't we? One observer has written glibly about how we'll add another 100 million people in suburban bliss. Most Americans can't imagine a future that's not pretty much like the recent past, maybe with a few wind turbines and solar panels added. Still, I can't think of a moment in history quite like what we now face.

The stock market is swooning again. One reason is sobering enough: Fear of slower growth in China, which has taken the spot held by America for a century, as the nation expected to lead the world out of recession. But the market has been in a secular bear for a decade. The real American economy is a wreck in its fundamentals — something very different from the crises listed above. Before, we were always an economic powerhouse, a petro superpower, and each generation was guaranteed a better standard of living than its parents. No more. Another banking crisis is very possible, as is a new bubble in Treasury bonds. We make so little here now that we can't undo the huge imbalances of debt. The Ponzi scheme has collapsed. Long-term unemployment is a human tragedy and political nitroglycerin. What of the commons has survived the Reagan Revolution is now falling apart. We're mired in two wars that are only the most obvious pieces of untenable military overstretch.

And we know some things. We know the Democrats are unwilling to put together an effective progressive agenda and sell it to America. How could they when so much of the government is now controlled by corporate interests? We know Wall Street and the big banks have gotten away with it, and they will be cooking up new trouble for the economy and expecting the taxpayers to once again pay for their swindles gone wrong. Addressing climate change, building 21st century transit and rail systems, retrofitting suburbia for a peak-oil future, rebuilding our educational, research and manufacturing dominance — nope. Confronted with historic discontinuity and unsustainablity, our course will remain unchanged. The solutions are there — we refuse to undertake them. The confluence of business, political and even cultural interests and forces will make it so. The elites, even in the media, are well paid, live in fine cities and are educated in the conventional wisdom. They are paid to not get it. We know all this.

So, how's it going to go down?

Doomsday Machine II

While a breathless nation watched natural redhead Lindsay Lohan try to adjust to jail and the most prestigious organ of the American press prominently lamented the failure to regulate Froot Loops, your world and the world for your children and grandchildren changed last week. Reported grudgingly if at all in most of "the media": The death of legislation that would even begin to address climate change. Others have commented on the shameful retreat by the Democratic Congress and White House, and even Tom Friedman had a good column. It included the pungent observation:

We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign — even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.

I'd like to explore the future we're making by our own choice.

Water and Arizona's future

 “There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.” — Edward Abbey

Asked to write about Arizona and water, I fear I will disappoint. My take is now too idiosyncratic, too impossible for the state's residents to even contemplate or for the economic and political elites to allow. Still, a reader asks; I'll deliver and at least start a conversation/argument.

In its particulars, Arizona's water issues are complicated, making them inaccessible to a population with lower levels of education and civic involvement, as well as little connection to the state's history. They did not, as I did, grow up with water — my mother working as part of the effort to win the Central Arizona Project. In general, Arizona's water issues are stark and simple: The state can't sustain double-digit percentage population increases every decade, particularly in subdivisions apart from historic urban footprints. This statement is anathema to the Real Estate Industrial Complex and what passes for an "economy" that Arizonans keep looking to resuscitate. But wait... In reality, Arizona probably doesn't have the water to support its current population for long. Beyond these basics, it's all over but the shouting.

Here's what I don't trust: The state Department of Water Resources or its active water management areas. The risks of compromise to water rules by the development elite is too great, exacerbated by continued under-funding of state government. And the 100-year supply "rule" for new development? Even if it's enforced what does it mean? One thing it does, because water is divorced from land-use regulations, is to cause a land rush to lock up aquifers that have taken eons to create — all to provide the illusion of security so another "master planned community" can expand out beyond the White Tanks. Meanwhile, much of the state lacks even this suspect oversight. Mojave County, notorious for its lack of water, was a hotspot for wildcat exurban sprawl before the housing collapse.

This time is different

Anyone who thinks our economy and the rest of America is in a familiar cycle, with perhaps different music and new electronic gadgets, hasn't been paying attention. Unfortunately this includes much of the media and the economic experts they choose to quote. It's like 1981-82. Well, no, even though in severity that event was the worst up to that point since the 1930s. Jobs were shed in this recession at a faster and deeper rate than since statistics began to be kept in the late 1940s, and by this time after the start of the 1981 downturn we had regained virtually all the lost jobs. Now we have nearly 26 million unemployed or underemployed (temps who want full-time work) Americans. Thanks to Republicans in Congress, 2 million have lost their unemployment insurance. In any event, that was a Fed-caused recession to defeat inflation, and the underlying American economy was strong and diverse, with the middle class at its zenith and Wall Street a dowdy joint tasked with raising capital for real productive, job-creating enterprises. None of that is true in this disaster.

It's like the Great Depression. That was an economic collapse fueled by financial speculation and fraud, high leverage, laissez-faire, and extreme income inequality, too. Unfortunately, there the parallels end. America was the world's largest creditor nation, manufacturing exporter and oil producer/exporter, with state-of-the-art factories and a skilled workforce just waiting for an upturn. Government was much smaller at the start of the Depression, allowing FDR plenty of room to experiment; he was not weighed down in the 1930s by two endless colonial conflicts and defense spending greater than all other nations combined. The bad was worse: Unemployment was estimated at 25 percent; poverty was much more widespread; the country was still heavily rural and small-town. And, importantly, the "old order" that brought on the crash was discredited and, for the next several decades, shut out of political power.

It's just a normal business cycle being made worse by government. When people say this, they don't mean that the government has made inadequate and poorly targeted stimulus or helped prop up the Wall Street casino prepping us for another panic. They mean Obama is a "socialist/fascist/communist" and America needs to let the "free market" rule, while slashing "wasteful" government spending. This would be dark comedy if it were not fervently believed by so many voters. It is most definitely not any kind of business cycle we've seen. But this dangerous minority may well get their way come November — they're already getting much of it, with painful consequences.

And that's the way it is

I wondered if Barack Obama became a one-term president with his astonishingly vapid Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster. But maybe Mr. Obama has the pulse of the nation better than any of us who wanted real change and the fierce urgency of now. It was grotesquely ironic that a few days after offering the usual presidential platitudes about the need to wean ourselves off oil, he was in Columbus, Ohio, touting his stimulus by dedicating work on a road expansion. It was, he said, the 10,000th road project that the stim has funded.

Around the nation the transit systems that had been dramatically expanding ridership as gasoline prices rose are now starving from state and local fiscal crises. Amtrak, despite the vice-president's supposed love of it, remains a shadow of the passenger rail system it succeeded and a political pawn awaiting further cutbacks and the demand that it "pay for itself." This even though no major transportation network pays for itself, certainly not roads. And this despite evidence that road projects don't even have much of a positive effect on unemployment. High-speed rail? It's being studied, even though other advanced and ambitious nations already have systems and are expanding them. Cincinnati, a lovely central city that has been devastated by freeways and sprawl, can't even muster the civic sanity to fund a streetcar line. America will continue its dependency on roads and cars — something far beyond our competitors in Europe or China. Why? Because that's the way it it.

We care about the poor birds and fish being killed by the oil spill. But not enough to give up our cars. We live magical thinking: That technology will simply replace the inexpensive light sweet crude that powered the automotive age. Rather like the technology that was supposed to allow BP to drill miles down into the earth to extract the remaining crude in the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars will be expensive and require minerals from places other than America — many of them unstable — as well as demanding electricity from power plants that will be run on...what? Fossil fuels most likely. Beyond that, the dreams become loopy. Space aliens are not going to drop by and give us magical hydrogen cars. Tar sands are not going to yield inexpensive gasoline. Few seem to understand that the fossil fuel "imputs" into most alternative fuels are greater than the new energy produced; many also have nasty environmental or other unintended consequences. Nowhere is this more true than with any alternative to the big oil hog: automobiles.

Peak oil and its deniers

UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has a running feature on his blog called, "Why, oh why, can't we have a better press corps?" Amen, brother. But even the best newspapers have blind spots, and that has especially unfortunate consequences when those dark zones concern some of the biggest issues of the day. The New York Times is already terrified of climate-change stories and won't plumb seriously into the soft empire we've created and its crushing costs. One of its biggest deficiencies is coverage of energy, especially the oil industry. Hence, we were served a story on Sunday about peak oil that failed to define the term and consigned the people in the story to the survivalist fringe. This from a newspaper that also publishes a deferential story about the retrograde nihilist Rand Paul and shrinks from nailing the tea party for its racist supporters, incoherent positions and — especially — shadow control by big corporate money.

Peak oil doesn't mean "we're about to run out of oil." Even defining it as "demand outstripping supply" is incomplete. Peak oil means the world has reached a point where half of the planet's oil has been burned up (see, "climate change"). The remainder will be increasingly hard to reach and more expensive to refine. America hit its national peak in the early 1970s. The North Sea has passed peak. Several of the world's giant "elephant fields" are near or past peak. This is a simple fact of geology about which there's no disagreement among most experts (the outlier: the oft-quoted and highly-paid-by-industry Daniel Yergin). Peak oil was being used in ads by major oil companies and speeches by their CEOs in the mid-2000s. As with climate change, the debate is over details; in this case, when will peak hit and what will be its effects?

Not for nothing did America fare well in World War II because it was a petro superpower and the world's leading oil exporter. Neither Hitler nor the Japanese Empire had much in the way of oil resources. Hitler failed to make the Caucasus oilfields an immediate priority in his attack on the Soviet Union, a geopolitical example of when cops say, "Thank god for stupid criminals." Now, more than three decades after hitting peak, America still produces oil, especially in Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana. We're even still one of the world's larger oil producers, but that is way outstripped by our appetite.

Top kill

Our front page editor translates into honest English the typical hate letter that comes to Rogue Columnist:

Dear Mr. Talton: If it wasn’t for you I’d have an additional 200 percent equity in my house in my gated community in North Scottsdale. If you would stop pointing out the minor problems we face in PHX, we could win the NBA and my greens fees would be lower.

He adds in his own voice: "We are a nation of spoiled shits living off of debt and about 40 years past the high water mark of America. The real shame is that it could all be fixable, but will never be. We live in Scamistan. The U.S. government scamming taxpayers and lenders. CEOs scamming shareholders. Military scamming the President. Corporations offloading the real cost of their fat/salt laden food. BP/Massey Coal on the real cost of energy. Iowa corn farmers on ethanol and water/pesticides killing the Gulf before BP….  People delusional in thinking short term and not long term in fixing our problems.  Pols worried about the next election, not the next 20-plus years."

And you think I'm gloomy. To paraphrase Emerson, God offers every mind its choice between truth and American brightsided "optimism." Take which you please — you can never have both. So, tell me, ye brightsiders, what are we to make of the unparalleled, at least in this country, environmental disaster happening off the coast of Louisiana?

Second time around?

If Arizona was a 'clean slate', how would you do it the second time around?

This challenge, from commenter Rate Crimes, is too tempting to avoid. But it risks being the kind of temptation found in the bars of history at closing time: A pointless counterfactual fling that will end in regret or even worse. No place can be separated from its moment in history, the larger forces at work upon it, the larger-than-life people who mold it, and the masses of people who live there. Arizona and Phoenix were always going to be exactly what they are. Maybe.

Yet here's one imagination exercise: An Arizona with 2 million people, about the population of real-life New Mexico (rather than 6.6 million). Most live in relatively compact versions of Phoenix and Tucson. Every city and town in the state has maintained its distinct identity, look, feel. The larger cities have kept and enhanced key industries while drawing high-value, leading edge sectors proportionate to (or disproportionately favorable to) their population. Housing is a much smaller part of the economy. Smaller places especially have scalable local economies. Multiple universities, federal laboratories and a robust technology cluster are a draw for international talent. Incomes are higher than the national average, as in real-life Washington state or Colorado. Most people are literate and educated, engaged in the community, committed to preserving the environment, part of a vibrant two-party political system that veers to moderation whomever is in power. This outward-looking state is a major trade hub for Mexico and Latin America, comfortable with its Hispanic part, but largely insulated from a huge illegal alien influx by its high-end economy and the cohesion of its cities.

I could get even more specific about Phoenix.

Arizona depression III

I'll wrap up my trip back home with the question that started it: What now?

In numerous conversations with the well-connected and just average 'Zonies, nobody has an answer. "Every time things seem to be improving, we take a step back," said one prominent player. "We have an unerring ability to shoot ourselves in the head." I would add: "And reload." While the state is very different from metro Phoenix in many ways, economically it has become an even less diverse mirror of it, depending on population growth, housing and tourism. The "plan," such as there is one, seems to be hoping the Growth Machine can sputter to life for one more good run. The white-right rhetoric about cutting taxes and regulation to gain business is nonsense: If that were the key, Mississippi and Somalia would be economic giants. The reality: There's no plan B.

In my old haunts, every little triumph is offset by a heartbreak or moronic misstep. Some new restaurants have set up along the light-rail line — wish some productive businesses or headquarters with high-wage jobs would do so. The historic districts continue to hold on, despite scads of "for-sale" signs. ASU downtown seems there to stay, no small accomplishment. Yet the number of empty storefronts is astounding, a sign of the lack of capital coming to the city. The city can't afford to keep up iconic Encanto Park while what was the shady oasis adjacent to the Viad tower has been turned into a horrid faux desert radioactive zone. Every time someone throws down rocks and removes shade trees and grass from the old city, it only increases the heat island and decreases the livability. "We're in a desert!!" No, Mr. or Ms. Transplant, old Phoenix was always an oasis.

Arizona depression I

Traveling around Arizona, it's difficult to imagine how the state can turn itself around, even if a majority understood the term. For most, a turnaround would mean a return to 40-percent population growth every decade, more sprawl, more "active adult resort living -- with championship golf!," more spec retail development and office "parks" to house the real-estate outfits, mortgage boiler rooms and call centers. The dirty secret is that as an economy, Arizona outside of Phoenix and Tucson is "the Third World," as a prominent booster economist once told me, not for attribution. An overstatement of course, although the Third World also has its gated enclaves of the super-rich and depends heavily on tourism. But among the states, Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson performed dismally on almost any measure of economic well-being except for housing starts and population growth, the latter a mixed indicator that carries huge costs, too. And this was before the Great Recession.

Now tourism is in freefall, even before the Jim Crow anti-immigration law (and a Tea Party 'buycott' is of questionable help considering the bulwark of the "movement," New York Times spin notwithstanding, is economically distressed whites). The exurban and rural sprawl building of the mid-2000s is dead and decomposing. Even tony Sedona is suffering. Another striking fact is how dependent rural Arizona has become on everything from food to gasoline to Wal-Mart Chinese goodies trucked up from Phoenix, even as it has added huge gobs of new people. This region was once the epitome of localization, along with distribution via railroads. Now Flagstaff's rail yard has been ripped out and the two tracks of the BNSF "Transcon" run through alone, heavily ballasted for speedy passage as if this were the middle of nowhere. It's not merely that Arizona produces little now, but that such a layout is highly vulnerable, not least to the future of peak oil and its much higher gasoline prices. The forest looks sick despite the wet winter. Climate change is bad enough, but one wonders whether this miracle of creation can withstand more than 6 million people and their cars in a place far beyond its carrying capacity. Then there's the once-magical Verde Valley, profaned by sprawl around Cottonwood that makes Phoenix look like a model of planning, all sucking water that will be needed by the Salt River Project.

In Phoenix, one of the most arresting aspects of the depression -- for the city has never been through anything like this -- continues to be the relatively light traffic. I drove from Sky Harbor into midtown, hitting the Papago/Red Mountain/51 merge headed to Seventh Street at 5:45 p.m. on Thursday. Easy motoring. Three years before, it would have been an impossible mess. The air was relatively clear, even though the ozone and other vaporous car-vomited poisons congregate in north Scottsdale and Fountain Hills (awww). Not much looks different. This is the trick Phoenix plays on its residents, although the world is changing fast. Again, I don't see how this place recovers.

Screwed 3.0

Now we enter the next phase of the Great Disruption, where political dysfunction meets unsustainability. The Greek debt crisis is helping prepare the way for American panic about the federal deficit and national debt. These two maladies are a cause célèbre for the Tea Party. The supposedly left-wing media are on board. USA Today headline: "Nation's soaring debt calls for painful choices." Tom Friedman of the New York Times: "After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics." Isn't he cute? I can't wait for the idiot David Brooks to weigh in. (He's already written about how "as government grew, the anti-government right mobilized. This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class...As government became more threatening..." Funny, he means the Obama administration, not the Bush wars, shredding of civil liberties and crony capitalism leading to trillions in federal bailouts, i.e., government growing.) You see, we're just like Greece — a profligate nation that needs to tighten its belt, cut government.

The reality, of course, is very different. Whatever his failings, Bill Clinton showed that seemingly intractable red ink could be turned into surpluses. The present deficit and debt is almost entirely a creation of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars and the Bush bailout of Wall Street (for which Sen. Obama voted). The fiscal situation was made more severe by the worst recession since the Great Depression. It's as if FDR fought World War II twice as long, cut rather than raised taxes, and did all this in the worst part of the Depression while using federal money for the banksters rather than the people. It's a wonder the deficit is so low as a percentage of GDP. It is not a cause for hysteria.

But, ah, dear reader, it will be used. "You never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste," said White House tough guy Rahm Emanuel, who is letting the real crises of the Great Disruption do just that. The extreme white-right — the idiot David Brooks' "yeoman enterprising class" — and the plutocracy will use the "crisis" of federal spending to their own ends. And if the effectiveness of their party as the minority in Congress is any indication, wait until they take the House this year from a feckless Democratic Party. And then the Senate and White House. Prepare for Screwed 3.0

A volcano at the party

A tiny pinprick in the earth, as author Simon Winchester puts it, offered an object lesson in just how vulnerable our high-flying, high-tech civilization has become. The American media are obsessed with the grounded airline passengers, and, because our society now must always put a price tag on everything, how many hundreds of millions of dollars it is costing the airlines.

They are oblivious to other things: How much of Europe is doing fine because of its excellent rail system. How the global interconnections that have arisen over the past 30 years bring dangers more profound that the intertwined investment banks that nearly blew up the world economy. These connections are complex yet highly limiting and unsustainable. Consider Wal-Mart's 10,000-mile "supply chain" facing a future of higher energy costs and shortages. Yet just as America once had a great intercity rail system, it could once feed and clothe itself. In many cases, that's no longer true. Phoenix once produced a huge variety of foods, from strawberries to steaks. Now if the global links shut down, Phoenix would starve. You can't eat foreclosed houses.

I think about that when I am at Pike Place Market in Seattle, five blocks from my home, watching the tourists ooh and ahh over the bounty of food and flowers, most of it grown and harvested locally. Then they go back home and shop at Wal-Mart. Do they even wonder if their towns once had such markets? Most did, if not the size and abundance of choices available here. Now, except for a few hippy-dippy eat-local places, they're gone. It might not prove to be the best choice in the decades to come.

The CityScape Gamble

CityScape. For most cities of its size, this downtown development would be considered modest, especially with its first phase, which will apparently comprise a 27-story office tower and a retail arcade. For Phoenix, it's a big deal, especially for downtown and the central city. It could provide some answers as to "what next?" in the nation's fifth (for now) most populous city. Unfortunately the odds are long.

When the project was first hyped in the mid-2000s, it was supposed to be a game-changer, with iconic, soaring towers that included offices, hotel and 1,000 condo units. It took over the dismal Patriot's Square, which had been created by tearing down a block of historic, irreplaceable buildings, as well as adjoining vacant lots, which also once held viable commercial structures. Yet when the real renderings came out, the buildings looked very conventional and short (yeah, yeah, FAA...ask San Diego, Boston, etc.). The retail was inward-facing, risking another Arizona Center mistake. When the economy collapsed, even these modest plans were heavily cut back. An anchor tenant, Wachovia, died in the merger with Wells Fargo. The lack of inspiring architecture, a lively streetscape and pleasing spaces is no small thing.

This is a bad time to be bringing new office and retail space on the market, whether you're in thriving downtown Seattle or in a Phoenix which has faced special, self-inflicted wounds to its old core. The commercial real-estate bubble remains a danger. Still, RED Development has stuck with the more modest first phase and continues to roll out announcements of new restaurants, a comedy club and, importantly, a pharmacy. On the other hand, Eddie Basha, in bankruptcy reorganization, couldn't fulfill his desire to locate a grocery there,

Passages

If my editor and publisher allow it, the new David Mapstone Mystery, South Phoenix Rules, will come out in December. I've never written a novel in, essentially, three months, but I know Mapstone fans have been without a fix for some time. Thanks to blog readers for their patience.

In Arizona, two passings. Stu Udall, who served as one of the small state's two or three congressmen, and later became the distinguished Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, died at 90. The gift of years had its pain: Seeing his beloved West become overrun with people, independent old Arizona become a hotspot of white-right extremism and the conservation ethic he embodied undone in so many ways. Roy Elson also passed away. As the powerful top aide to Sen. Carl Hayden, Elson was one of the most important players in winning the Central Arizona Project. So lacking is the Information Center in institutional knowledge or curiosity -- or a desire to be relevant -- that it failed to note Elson's death for a week after it was being discussed in Phoenix. When what should be the state's newspaper of record thinks "there's no history here," why should we expect a different attitude from the Midwesterners and inland Californians who have swarmed the place like a biblical plague? Elson was a friend of my mothers, and after I returned to the state, I vowed to trek to southern Arizona and spend time hearing of the old water-war days. I regret that I never did it.

The Kookocracy has begun to attain its goals as Arizona becomes the first state to eliminate health care to children of the working poor. This underscores the cruelty, "devil take the hindmost" and sociopathic nature of the white-right (see "The Party of Cruelty" on The Front Page). Much more is being churned out of the Legislature, including the destruction of the state park system, draconian cuts to education and Medicaid, and hundreds of other measures. They will make Arizona's dire economic situation worse. But will voters reject the Kooks? Or will the state's large number of Anglos in low-wage jobs, who have seen their living standards drop and opportunities whither because of Republican policies, be led by talk radio to vote for more of the same? It's a national question, too. And, of course, the ruling elites want you to be stupid.

The Full Kook

Gov. Jan Brewer is pulling Arizona out of the coalition of Western states and Canadian provinces trying to make some regional progress in limiting greenhouse gases. J.D. Hayworth is taking on John McCain in the Republican Senate primary (make your own gasbag jokes). For awhile, I worried Arizona might be denied what I call "The Full Kook," where the Kookocracy implements its most cherished and dangerous proposals, rather than being the crazy aunt in the attic down at the Capitol whose ravings are muted by the adult in the governor's chair. Now I'm more hopeful. Why? Because the Full Kook is the only way I can see that Arizona might save itself. For decades, the creeping growth of the Kookocracy has slowly been damaging every part of the state's social and economic health. But still, the Kooks kept control of the Legislature because most eligible voters stay home. Only the Full Kook might shake most Arizonans out of their torpor -- and we'll see if there's what Saint Janet called the "sensible center" majority -- or if the Big Sort has turned Arizona into the nation's largest insane asylum.

Brewer is falling into line with the successful reactionary effort to halt any measures to address climate change -- or even to accept its scientific legitimacy. Even the New York Times has strangely bought into this. The deniers of established science are "skeptics." What next in the flagship of the liberal media: "Evolution skeptics"?  Thus the big snowstorm in the East is a sign that "global warming is a hoax," when in fact it is confirmation of the destabilizing weather patterns we were told to expect from climate change. In Seattle, we just had our warmest January on record. (Stephen Colbert has a great retort for the deniers, in media most Americans can understand). No matter. The strategy is to keep arguing and prevent action. In D.C., any meaningful action to limit emissions is dead, another casualty of the Hoover/Carter/Obama malaise. What is barely reported is how much money Exxon/Mobil and other corporate giants are pouring into not only lobbying against action, but to prop up the elaborate propaganda machine of the "skeptics." Nor is there ongoing, serious discussion of the costs of inaction, whether because of what's coming from climate change or because we're abrogating opportunities to create new industries to help slow or reverse its effects.

So Arizona needn't worry. America will remain paralyzed. Reality will not, and the costs, destabilization and even national security perils from climate change will continue to creep forward. Brewer doesn't even hear the contradiction in her statement, when she withdraws from the Western Climate Initiative -- hardly perfect but a start among serious leaders -- and wants to avoid California emission standards, but also wants green-tech jobs. Sorry, the two work together. This is why Germany is solar-power central. And notice that China is working furiously to corner the technology and manufacture of renewable energy. In the U.S., the best shot at ameliorating the effects of climate change are happening in the smart states, not the cheap states. Even if ASU makes some research breakthroughs, Arizona lacks the economic capacity to exploit most of them.

The Godot housing recovery

"Everybody" in the Arizona's limited cloud of good intentions believes the state needs to diversify its economy, particularly in suffering Phoenix. Unfortunately this doesn't include the two entities that could actually address this issue: the state government, which is controlled by the Kookocracy and can only cut services and taxes, and the Real Estate Industrial Complex. The latter is just waiting for the old reliable growth machine to wheeze to life once again. For both, rapid population growth alone has cloaked an array of dysfunctions and it's gone on for so many decades that few can imagine a future of discontinuity. In other words, nobody with real power has a Plan B.

As the Kookocracy has gone national, so, too, did much of Phoenix's delusional thinking during the years leading up to the crash. With so much of the economy hollowed out, more and more prosperity depended on house building and improvement, house selling and flipping, and mortgages — from generating and refinancing them to packaging them in elaborate swindles on Wall Street. No wonder that many days the national news sounds like the local land boosters giving a forecast at the Arizona Biltmore. Housing has hit bottom! A recovery is under way! Sales are up — ooops, today they're down, but tomorrow's another day.

None of these individual snapshots answer the fundamental question: Can the old housing market be restarted?