'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
I was heartbroken to hear of the passing of my friend, Larry Beaupre, too young, at the age of 68. He was still working, running a newspaper, serving the public trust. I would have expected no less. We have lost one of America's great journalists and newsroom leaders.
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13Main Street, Durant, Okla., down on its luck.
The tributes to the late Andy Griffith have been lavish. Did anybody compare his Sheriff Taylor to Joe Arpaio? I'm sure they did. Then there was Mayberry, the fictional setting of The Andy Griffith Show. As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote, "Mayberry was real, too — as real as the desire sometimes to escape the tyranny of What Is. It sat just outside of time, at a crossroads of nostalgia and need. There was a dirt path in the woods near town that led to a fishing hole. Sheriff Andy used to go there often with his little boy, to the whistling of a bucolic tune lifting above the North Carolina pines."
As I was preparing this column Monday, I noticed one big difference between today's reality and Mayberry: The Internet, or lack thereof. My connections were down most of the day, so no new Rogue post (much of Arizona rejoices). My jobs require me to me unusually wired, but the "tubes" of the 'Net — developed initially with federal money — are the big change in our lives. We didn't get moon colonies or manned exploration of Mars and beyond, but we got PCs, Macs and the Internet. It makes for an interesting thought experiment: Your work and personal life in even 1980 vs. today. Back then people wrote letters, typed on typewriters, filed in filing cabinets (and many more clerical workers were needed), and got their messages on those pink "While You Were Out" slips. Now I've got a Mac and an iPad for almost all of that.
One of the most ubiquitous comments about Mayberry (based on Griffith's real hometown of Mount Airy, N.C.) was the lack of African-Americans in a Southern town. That was actually possible. I lived in such a place for a few years, Durant, Oklahoma, in the "Little Dixie" southeastern region of the state. Durant had been a "Sundown Town." Blacks could work as domestics or laborers during the day, but they had to clear out to other towns at night. Old-timers told of signs at the city limits that said, "Darkie," or the N-word, "don't let the sun go down on your back."
17Hot enough for you, America? According to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 2,000 high temperature records were reached or broken over the past week. For June, 3,200 record highs were broken. Places where I once lived sound unrecognizable: Days of 105 degrees in Denver, 4,000 feet higher than Phoenix and a place I remember for its enchanting cool-off in the summer twilight; records broken in Charlotte, where a temp of 104 is accompanied by nearly tropical and suffocating humidity — even in the old days, the Southern heat was miserable, but this? — and of course the August-like oven in June for Phoenix. Violent storms sweep the east and devastating wildfires tear across the West. Welcome to the new normal?
Only a fool would not recognize that climate change is coming on faster and worse than expected, and that it won't be a phenomenon that only affects poor people in the Third World. We are, to be sure, a nation of fools that is more interested in the implosion of TomKat than the implosion of the planet because of human activity. There are the usual excuses: The weather's always changing! Even if it is true, nothing can be done locally (statewide, regionally, nationally) because it is a global problem. Taking action would cost jobs. Here's my in-depth analysis that climate change is a hoax or not a big deal, even though I am not a climate scientist. Wait…Did Anderson Cooper just come out as gay? Look over here at the bright, shiny object, Moronistan.
The people in charge understand that climate change is no hoax. Even Exxon Mobil, which spent heavily to fund denier "science," admits the planet is warming. The new excuse now is that the change will be manageable, people will adapt. The plutocrats adapt by having summer houses in places such as the San Juan Islands. Can't we all just bootstrap ourselves into this brave new world?
143Water taxis in Bricktown, Oklahoma City's reclaimed warehouse district.
Seattle readers can, and should, stop here and read other posts.
The Oklahoma City Thunder is in the NBA Finals. I think of 1976 and the Suns and Gar Heard's Shot Heard Round the World. Even though the league has been much degraded since then, pro sports will never get sweeter for a city than this moment. Enjoy, whatever the outcome. The Thunder — the former Seattle Supersonics, moved away by a new owner in a civic wound that refuses to heal — are also the capstone of downtown Oklahoma City's remarkable comeback from the grave. This in an even redder state than Arizona.
By the late 1980s, the state's oil industry was in a depression and downtown Oklahoma City was suffering all the familiar ills of urban America: Major corporations had decamped for the suburbs or a big office row in the northwest part of the city or been shattered by the economy, and shopping had gone out to malls. As Steve Lackmeyer of the Daily Oklahoman writes, "Oklahoma City's corporate base was dying. City Hall struggled to keep up with a record number of boarded-up homes. College professors were instructing students to seek opportunities out of state." Consolidation among railroads and changes in their business had left a vast area of warehouses just east of downtown empty. The old titan/stewards were dead or dying. Even worse, a misconceived "revival" effort involving famed and overrated architect I.M. Pei had only gotten about as far as tearing down many irreplaceable historic buildings, leaving blocks and blocks of nothing. I remember this desolate downtown from when I was teaching at a college in the southeastern part of the state and later working for a newspaper in Lawton.
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66By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue
To the extent that money spent by American consumers on Chinese imports pays the wages and salaries of foreign workers, underwrites the profits of foreign companies, and increases demand for foreign goods, it does not pay the wages and salaries of American workers, it reduces the profits of domestically operating companies, and it decreases demand for American goods.
Though subsidizing Chinese export industries creates a Chinese consumer class, which may subsequently purchase American goods, and creates a Chinese mercantile class, which may purchase American equipment as manufacturing, mining, or transport tools, as long as America is running a large trade deficit, it is in effect spending dollars to get pennies back. These are dollars (net of pennies) that, if spent on American goods and/or services, would increase domestic demand, thereby increasing hiring; and by decreasing unemployment, would increase competition among American companies for American workers, thereby bidding up wages and salaries and improving the standard of living of American households. This in turn further increases demand to American businesses, and we have the "virtuous circle."
55The 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.
54They couldn't pick a better time as that in life / It ain't too early and it ain't too late / Startin' as a farmer with a brand new wife / Soon be livin' in a brand-new state / Brand new state!
OK, I stole that from the musical Oklahoma!, about the 46th state, which entered the union in 1907. But the sentiments applied no less to the 48th, Arizona, the Baby State, the Frontier State, the Valentine State. At least for the Anglo settlers and not a few Mexican-Americans, especially in Tucson, statehood was a grand achievement, a validation of the efforts to build a new civilization in a wilderness. The government had declared the frontier closed in 1890, but it was very much alive in Arizona. The only photograph of my great-grandmother shows a grizzled, sun-baked woman standing outside an adobe hovel, my family's first home here. Air conditioning was decades away. She survived a Comanche attack as a baby — was scalped and wore a wig the rest of her life — when federal troops were withdrawn from the Texas frontier during the Civil War. In the 1890s, the family came to Arizona Territory. Plenty of heart and plenty of hope, indeed.
Many have been writing about the difficult path to statehood. I will only add that one big but largely forgotten impediment is that Arizona would come in as a Democratic state. Thus, it's no surprise that the Republicans who dominated Washington for decades after the Civil War would be loathe to give the opposition two new Senate seats and another in the House, along with Democratic electors in the Electoral College. Not only that, but allow statehood for a bunch of former Confederates and Southern sympathizers (Arizona Territory had a delegate to the Confederate Congress). And that's just what happened, with Henry Fountain Ashurst, Marcus Aurelius Smith and Carl Hayden beginning Democratic control of the state that would continue pretty much uncontested for 40 years. At his worst, Ashurst made Ben Quayle look like Pericles — he opposed a National Park for Grand Canyon, for example. Yet he also said, "When I come back to Arizona, you never ask me questions about such (international) policies; instead, you ask me, 'What about my pension?' or 'What about that job for my sons?' " Hayden, of course, went on to become one of the greats.
23It's centennial week in Arizona, and the local media are doing their part. On Sunday, the Arizona Republic had a clever front-page display of wishes for the next hundred years from readers. My favorite was that Arizona enters the 21st century before it's over. Another asked for less conservative politics (good luck with that). The paper is trying very hard and doing good work. Inside were some quick hits by state worthies on what you should know about Arizona. They were relentlessly upbeat, as is a requirement for being viable here as a worthy: "The good people of Arizona have always had grit"; "We defy a stereotype as some might see existing in Maine, Texas or California"; "We are an iconoclastic bunch"; "It's a fantastic state with an early history that is just special," and, from Gov. Jan Brewer, "There is nothing that can't be accomplished here." Draw your own conclusions.
As usual, the rest is left to homey. "Every dirty job that comes along…," as Clint Eastwood growls in the original and best Dirty Harry film. So what are some things you need to know about Arizona? It's one of this blog's missions, but I'll try to put it into short Gannett-ese (sorry, my crack graphics/design team is off):
1. Arizona is not metropolitan Phoenix. Even though Phoenix-like mass-produced sprawl housing and shopping strips have spread statewide, most of Arizona has very different history, topography, cultures and socio-economic challenges from the big concrete blob in the center of the state.
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36You 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.
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