Jon Talton, Author at Rogue Columnist

Phoenix rocks

Ansel Adams' iconic "Noon and Hydrant," showcasing the natural splendor of the Salt River Valley.

Five rivers and several significant creeks converge in or near the Salt River Valley, making it the site of the most abundant water in the Southwest, an oasis going back thousands of years. But let's not kid ourselves. "We live in a desert" after all, the Midwesterners constantly lecture us. So it is right and proper that Phoenix increasingly reflects this reality.

Our young city was established in 1993, when Jack Swilling discovered one of the ancient Hohokam concrete "ground skins" dating from the eleventh century. He swept it off and for years it was called "Swilling's Sidewalk." Others learned that the prehistoric dwellers had built hundreds of miles of sidewalks, surface parking lots, wide roads and — everywhere — thrown down small gravel. From the site of what today is called Pueblo Grande Estates Gated Community, archaeologists unearthed huge caches of red roof tiles, which they believe the Indians used to barter with other tribes.

Darrell Duppa, who claimed to have been a investment-banker lord from the City of London, wanted to call this enchanting place Phoenix. It seemed right: Like the bird of mythology, the city had been reborn on the ashes of its predecessor. Settlers from the nearby village of Table (the original name "Mesa" sounded too Mexican) objected. So people settled for calling their frontier town "the Valley."

Jon Talton May 9, 201430

Phoenix

Arizona’s economy in charts

Despite all the hype, the housing depression continues, with building permits barely above levels of the 1990 recession…

…Growth in housing prices has bounced back somewhat, measured quarterly in year-over-year. But much of it is driven by speculators buying up rental properties and securitizing them. As you can see, it's way out of line with historic norms and raises affordability issues for average Arizonans, as well as a host of other potential problems…

Jon Talton May 6, 201448

Politics: National

Sterling, Silver

I've thought Donald Sterling (nee Tokowitz) was a pig since he moved the Clippers from San Diego in 1984 when I lived there. Commissioner Adam Silver banning him from the NBA for life over racist comments is entirely appropriate.

Yet the affair leaves a bad taste. It is not news that Sterling makes outspoken racist statements and discriminated as a landlord. One wonders why the NAACP was going to give him a lifetime achievement award before the latest blowup. And at age 80, that lifetime ban's sure to sting.

But this time Sterling met that strange inflection point in our culture when the insatiable appetite of 24/7 media meets a bad rich ugly white dude spewing hate and subjects him to the same beat-down as one of the victims of Billy Bob Thornton's character in FX's Fargo. Then America pats itself on the back and moves on.

Time wounds all heels. Or so we wish. I suffer from schadenfreude-interruptus.

Jon Talton May 1, 201434

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix in the thirties

Dorothea Lange photographed this homeless family nearly Brawley, Calif., in 1939. They had been picking cotton in Phoenix but moved on when the work ran out. They hope for relief in California.

The Great Depression did not bypass our little oasis city. Even if, as historian Bradford Luckingham writes, the city's newspapers paid little attention to the 1929 crash and most Phoenicians, like most Americans, didn't own stock, the hard times soon arrived.

The severe contraction from 1930 through 1933 claimed two of the city's six banks and two of its five building-and-loan associations. Another, Valley Bank, was on the edge of failure. Depositors were wiped out in these pre-FDIC days. Arizona's big Three Cs of copper, cattle and cotton were decimated as demand collapsed. Twelve theaters closed in Phoenix. The state actually lost population in the early 1930s. The average income of American households fell by 40 percent from 1929 and 1932.

In Phoenix, unemployment grew while businesses closed and relief organizations were overwhelmed. My grandmother told stories about Okies and Texans arriving in jalopies, sometimes on foot or as hobos on freight trains. Victims of the Dust Bowl came by the thousands to the Salt River Valley, not, as in Grapes of Wrath, going as far as California (something confirmed by Philip VanderMeer in his insightful Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix).

So don't believe it if you hear the shorthand that "Phoenix barely felt the Depression." Much less that its economic recovery came because of the "rugged individualism" of Phoenicians. For the second time in its young life, Phoenix was rescued by the federal government.

The Great Depression was the overarching story of Phoenix in the 1930s. And the New Deal not only saved the city and state much suffering, but arguably had greater effect because of their small populations and economic composition. Arizona voted overwhelmingly for FDR, who is shown campaigning in Phoenix in 1931. He is at the wheel of the car as always, with Sen. Carl Hayden and Gov. George W.P. Hunt beside him. It proved a good bet.

Jon Talton April 29, 201436

Politics: National

Missing plane and missing journalism

A helicopter crew aboard the destroyer USS Kidd in the Indian Ocean, involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

There will be much Monday-morning quarterbacking on the Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Not here. Over two days, beginning March 17, I predicted where the missing plane would be found and by whom, providing reasoning to back it up. Thereafter I gave frequent updates of analysis and criticism as new developments occurred. Sift through the full record of date-stamped comments, here.

The errors of investigators and of the media reporting on them can be summed up as three logical fallacies: confirmation bias, argument from authority, and argument from ignorance.

Searchers began their efforts in a part of the ocean known to accumulate vast collections of garbage (it's even called a "garbage gyre"), yet the media treated every stray object floating in the water as if it had a good chance to be plane debris instead of almost certainly being garbage, despite repeated disappointments.

Soon the satellite photographs showed many hundreds of objects, an embarrassment of riches. Suddenly, the search shifted hundreds of miles to the north, to an area which, coincidentally, offered searchers far more congenial weather. The mass of objects in the old search area was summarily dismissed, even though most of these remained unexamined. When new objects were spotted in the new search area, the media response remained the same. This time for sure!

Jon Talton April 23, 201439

Uncategorized

The outage

Rogue has been down much of the time in recent days. The cause was a hacker attack on the hosting service, Typepad. I apologize to readers who were inconvenienced. This…

Jon Talton April 22, 20141

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Ballinger’s masterpiece

When the pink-and-white Civic Center opened at Central and McDowell in 1950, it included a "little theater" but the art museum didn't come along for another nine years. Both were considered small confections to the main course: the public library. Things were not much different in 1974, when a young University of Kansas graduate named Jim Ballinger joined the museum's staff as curator of collections.

That the Phoenix Art Museum today enjoys national stature and draws prestigious international exhibitions — and has grown to take up most of the former Civic Center block — is mostly because of Ballinger, who announced Thursday that he will retire after 40 years with PAM. He became director in 1982. No other single figure has done more for the city's cultural landscape — to create, grow and sustain one — than Ballinger.

The reader should know that Ballinger and I are friends. We also were neighbors on Holly Street in Willo. But he first sought me out when I started as a columnist at the Arizona Republic, writing on such issues as the city and state's economic narrowness, lack of civic engagement, poor educational outcomes and difficulty in retaining talent. In our first conversation, he showed his incisive grasp of how such challenges would affect the future viability of cultural institutions.

Jon Talton April 18, 201432

Politics: National

Cadillac cowboys

When Republicans were conservationists: Theodore Roosevelt with Sierra Club founder and activist John Muir.

Obamacare is doing better than expected. Benghazi lacks traction. The vast enterprise of "conservative" politics needs something, anything, to keep the red-state proles in the state of constant agitation that is so profitable for the oligarchs that bankroll it. Could Cliven Bundy be the ticket?

This is the man who has been flouting the law for years, grazing his cattle on public lands northeast of Las Vegas. When the feds finally moved in to seize the livestock, an armed protest caused them to withdraw.

To the right he is a hero standing up against federal "tyranny." A National Review writer likened his "little sedition" to the non-violent movement of Ghandi.

I broke away from a larger Rogue project to offer a few thoughts, given the interest by our readers here. You should especially read Soleri's excellent comments on l'affaire Bundy on the thread below the previous post.

Actually being someone from the West, among my first thoughts was how could Bundy be grazing 900 head in such desolate country? At least when I was growing up, a 640-acre "section" of Arizona rangeland could support only about 20 head — and that was barring drought.

Jon Talton April 16, 201444

Politics: National

Just shut up

Comes the New York Times with an op-ed headlined, "Global warming scare tactics." One point is indisputable: that journalists and those concerned about climate change shouldn't leap to blame the phenomenon for every major natural disaster.

But the deeper point embedded is that those of us in the reality-based community can't reach our fellow citizens on the right unless we tamp down our sense of "obligation to convey the alarming facts":

While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.

A host of little nagging problems trails this article like feral dogs chasing an SUV through the remains of suburbia. The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, are primus inter pares among the robooted "pragmatic" environmental movement. In almost every case, they argue environmentalism has lost, apparently because of its bellicosity, and must "move on." Alternatives must become cheaper than fossil fuels. How this can happen when policy prevents fossil fuels from being accurately priced, they never say. And new nukes aren't being built because of resistance from greens, but from Wall Street.

But this is the small stuff. The big one is how America has pretty much come to the end of dialogue. This has happened only one other time, during the 1850s, with the compromisers dead and the nation headed to the Civil War. Oh, my stars and garters! I am being alarmist! Uh…hmmm…can I not alienate conservative readers?

Jon Talton April 10, 201477

Phoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Strong mayor

Phoenix is the most populous city in America with the council-manager form of government. Council sets policy which is carried out by a professional city manager.

The only places that come close are San Antonio (where the city manager is the former deputy city manager in Phoenix, Sheryl Sculley) and Dallas. San Diego abandoned council-manager in 2006.

The alternative is the strong mayor form, where the mayor acts as a largely independent chief executive and the city council is a legislative body. Think: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Detroit and Seattle.

Twelve of the 20 most populous American cities have strong mayors. The remainder are council-manager. Now there is at least a boomlet to bring a strong mayor form to Phoenix.

Jon Talton April 8, 201430

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Charlie Keating’s Phoenix

Everybody who was anybody in Phoenix has a favorite story about Charles H Keating Jr., who died this week at 90. Here's mine. By the time I came back in 2000, Keating, the disgraced imprisoned former S&L kingpin, was once again a fixture around town. I would run into him at Durant's, where he was cordial but declined my invitation to sit down sometime and tell his story.

One day the restaurant was packed and Keating couldn't get seated. He confronted the day manager, the fabulous Mari Connor, and said, "Do you know who I am?" Without a second's hesitation at a restaurant that had hosted governors and mobsters, Connor said, "No, but I'm sure they can seat you up the street at Alexi's. Otherwise, the wait is thirty minutes."

Time wounds all heels.

I was gone from Phoenix during Keating's glory days of the 1980s. He developed Dobson Ranch in Mesa and Estrella Mountain Ranch in Goodyear among many other projects. The most impressive physical monument he left behind was the Phoenician resort. The name says much about the time: Phoenix was still the center of "the Valley's" economic universe. It would never happen today; the resort claims it is in Scottsdale, even though it in the city. And for all the criticism heaped upon it, the Phoenician to me remains a beautiful place — built within the existing urban footprint — with an apt, evocative, allusionary name.

Jon Talton April 3, 201489

Phoenix Politics: National

Rough justice

Mark today. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released what my grandmother would have called the "Katy bar the door" report on climate change. It is the product of the sober work by hundreds of actual climate scientists. Read it for yourself. Please.

And mark the day you knew, without doubt. Climate change is real, human-made, happening now with growing costs — and the worst is yet to come. Especially if we do nothing.

Someday historians will note the curious contrasts of our time. So much of the public square is dominated by scolds with their calculators, talking about what we can't afford, how the cost side of the ledger must be the deciding factor in any debate.

Yet these are the same people who block any attempt to show the astronomic costs of doing nothing to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

Those historians will shake their heads at our myths about "makers and takers," "bootsrappers" vs. "welfare queens" and the widespread belief that government was an impediment to the efficient, justified workings of "the free market."

Jon Talton March 31, 201468

Phoenix

Train dreams

True high-speed rail: A train running from Paris to Brussels at 186 miles per hour.

The news stories said that ADOT was seeking our input on its study of passenger rail between Phoenix and Tucson. It isn't seeking my input for reasons that will become apparent, but here goes anyway.

It was always a joke renaming this entity the Arizona Department of Transportation. It was and remains in spirit the Arizona Highway Department, committed to building highways. The glory days were under state engineer William Price (1963-1977), when Arizona could boast some of the finest highways in America, before population growth and underfunding overwhelmed the agency.

Also under Price, the Highway Department began its swerve from serving the public interest to private interests and it's never looked back. You can see an early indication in the odd, seemingly illogical, westward shift the Black Canyon Freeway makes between Northern and Dunlap in Phoenix. This mission became gospel with the metro Phoenix freeway system, most of which was built to benefit private land owners whose worthless desert was suddenly highly profitable because a freeway was coming. The damage done to the city by the ensuing sprawl was catastrophic and is probably irreversible.

Jon Talton March 26, 201464

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix

Downtown podcast

Edward Jensen was kind enough to interview me on the history of downtown Phoenix and the issues facing it. Listen to the Downtown Phoenix Podcast here. If you want a…

Jon Talton March 24, 201439

Phoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Keep out the vote

It is fitting that a federal judge chose this week to uphold the power of Arizona and Kansas to require proof of citizenship in order to vote.

This was the week in 1965 when 25,000 marchers led by Martin Luther King Jr. reached Montgomery from Selma, Ala., a landmark in the long, bloody struggle for equal voting rights.

Who says the clock can't be turned back?

My favorite quote came from Arizona Attorney General Tom Horney: “This decision is an important victory against the Obama administration because it ensures that only U.S. citizens, and not illegals, vote in Arizona elections.”

Ah! Now I understand! The reason a bunch of ignorant, nihilistic Krackpots have taken over state government in Arizona is because illegal immigrants have been voting them in. Now, thanks to this George W. Bush-appointed judge in Wichita, perhaps sanity can return to the capitol in Phoenix.

Jon Talton March 21, 201466