Barry Graham
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| Image: dustinphillips via flickr CC license |
In his latest column, Jon Talton writes:
Friends keep telling me of the coming working-class revolt (Mark Thoma writes about such here). I’ll believe it when I see it. Civil insurrection is certainly likely as America continues its downward course, but it will play out with minorities burning their own neighborhoods and the whites and other better-offs retreating even deeper into suburban apartheid. The Revolution in a nation of dolts could only be caused by taking away television, video games, smart phones and cheap gasoline. Then, to the barricades!
I agree with Talton, but things are worse, or better, than he seems to realize. Cheap gasoline is over. What are our rulers going to do when the peasants they enslave have no way of getting to work? Gary Snyder once wrote that real revolution would only come through people refusing to buy things they don’t need. That, as Talton, Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman all point out, is not going to happen - but it doesn’t have to. When the resources are not there to produce the toys, and the consumers don’t have the means to buy them, then producers and consumers have to give up these roles and return to being people.
In most media, it seems to be taken for granted that the economy is recovering. It’s not, and it’s not going to. Jon Talton is one of the few astute writers on the subject. From his latest column:
Here’s the deal: The economy is in the tank and it’s not going to improve. Too many fundamentals are fundamentally damaged. The victims are especially found among those likely to Tea Party, and the young that will sit this one out. Ohio, which went Democratic after the Bush/Ken Blackwell abuses, swung quickly right again. This is not the old Ohio of strong unions and a powerful Democratic Party. Florida is headed up the trendline to Peak Crazy with Gov. Rick Scott and GOP control of the Legislature (and redistricting). Pennsylvania? Think Ohio with two Democratic central cities thrown in. The plains, Intermountain West and, especially, Texas are deep red. Minnesota hangs in the balance. Wisconsin has been taken over by radical wingers.
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| Is Jared Loughner a “ballet mom?” |
This article, in response to the recent shootings in Tucson, depicts Arizona about as accurately as Sex in the City depicts New York. The author, a self-described “ballet mom,” laments not knowing her neighbors, and links this sense of alienation to the violence in the state. But, as far as I know, most of the violence in Arizona (which has decreased in recent years) isn’t being committed by ballet moms.
What the author describes - the lonely lives of the affluent and narcissistic - is not a problem specific to Arizona. It is a problem specific to suburbs, which by their very design are monuments to ego, created for people who want (or think they want) space and separation. A suburb is the antithesis of a neighborhood.
I have known Phoenix well for 16 years now, and my experience of the place is the opposite of that of the author of this article. It is when I read the work of Jon Talton or Charles Bowden, or the anthology Phoenix Noir, that I recognize the place where I live.
People don’t sit on their porches? I can’t think of anyone I know who doesn’t, except for the people who don’t have porches - and they hang out on the steps of their apartments. The central neighborhood I live in is not upscale, but it is a neighborhood - so the neighbors know one another. We talk, we give one another gifts from our gardens, and the young and strong haul out the trash cans of the elderly.
The day after I moved to Phoenix, I had to make a phone call, and did not yet have a phone connection in my West side apartment. I went out to look for a public phone. On the street, I asked a couple if they could tell me where to find a phone.
“Is it a local call?” I was asked. I said it was. “You can use our phone.” They took me to their apartment, let me use their phone, and, after we talked for a while, invited me to dinner that evening.
This has been typical of my experience here. Although I have friends all over the U.S., most of my close friends are in Arizona. I have never been anywhere that’s as open, where it’s as easy to get to know people as it is in Phoenix. I think this openness arose from the refugee culture described in the article; in a city populated largely by people who came from far away, people had to reach out to one another and form community, having no established one already. I seldom manage to walk or ride the light rail anywhere in central Phoenix without running into people I know.
Those with money and leisure had the option of isolating themselves and then complaining about isolation. So many people come here for school or work, drive in their air-conditoned cars between their air-conditioned homes and their air-conditioned schools or offices, associate only with classmates or colleagues, then complain about a lack of diversity. The Arizona they complain about is a very small place, one they have created for themselves. It is irrelevant to the violence in Tucson, and indeed is irrelevant to all but those who have the comfort to ruminate upon it.
Gov. Jan Brewer has a solution to the state’s Medicaid shortfall. Eliminate the program.
Read the rest.
Jon Talton has a new novel out. The Arizona Republic (where he wrote a brilliant column for seven years until the paper axed it) has an interview with him.
I’ve long argued that America’s self-image - “the land of the free,” a culture of autonomy and independence - is in sharp contrast to its reality, which is that of an extremely bovine, conformist culture. The fact that it is also an illiterate culture, in which people are told what to think rather than taught how to think, is not coincidental.
In his latest column, Jon Talton says it well:
Unlike previous generations of Americans, we are largely an easily commanded people, rather like the Germans or Russians of old. Decades ago, Americans genially agreed to be drug-tested in order to get or keep a job, even though this “guilty until proven innocent” technique is of dubious constitutionality. We submit to hundreds of new national security agencies sucking at the taxpayer trough, not least one with the queasily un-American name of “the Department of Homeland Security.” Nary a peep about this in the land of the free and home of the brave. We meekly wait in lines, not least those at the airport. It’s difficult to imagine the World War II generation submitting to pat-downs, much less those that tamed/stole the frontier. But neither have the swindles of the banksters, widespread economic distress and the rule of the fatcats produced the protests of an older America. No, give us a Kinect or an iPad, a call-center cubicle and an H.R. rulebook, and we’re as happy as a baby with a pacifier.
In response to this post, someone asked me what local journalists I respect.
Here in Phoenix, although we have a mostly-dysfunctional media, there are some excellent journalists struggling against the corporate suppression of news.
Even though the Arizona Republic is known among local journalists as The Repulsive, it still has such fine reporters as Dennis Wagner and Robert Anglen, and columnist Laurie Roberts. Sadly, it no longer has Charles Kelly, Jon Talton, Mark Shaffer or David Leibowitz, but it has retained the dull and predictable E.J. Montini (does he ever leave his office to do any reporting?) and its resident Latino Uncle Tom, Richard Ruelas (who for an embarrassing few years was the paper’s metro columnist along with Montini - a double act of impressive ineptitude).
Terry Greene Sterling, who writes for various publications, is a meticulous and relentless reporter, and so is John Dougherty, who recently ran for the U.S. Senate.
My alma mater, Phoenix New Times, no longer has Dougherty or Sterling or M.V. Moorhead on staff, but Stephen Lemons does outstanding coverage of Arpaio and the local nativists, and Robrt Pela’s cultural reporting and commentary is insightful and elegant. (Pela is not on staff there, but does a lot of freelance for the paper.)
T.V. reporter Joe Dana does strong work, even in the face of vicious personal slurs from Arpaio’s henchman David Hendershott. (I rarely watch T.V., so there may be other reporters worthy of mention that I don’t know about.)
The Arizona Guardian is one of the better news sources here, perhaps the best, though the level of talent among its reporters varies widely.
Farther afield, in Tucson, lives Charles Bowden, a truly great reporter and one of the greatest living writers in English.
Jon Talton reminds me of the character played by Kevin McCarthy in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He knows what’s going on, he’s right, it’s obvious to anyone who looks, he’s trying to get people to look - and they don’t want to know.
From his latest column:
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 America he doesn’t say.
