Notes from Hell

Here in Arizona we like to say we have "taken our country back", but we never finish that sentence. More to the point, we have taken our country back about 50 years, with a new immigration law that places all people of non-White ancestry under an unnecessary - and probably unconstitutional - microscope.

By the way, beyond Charles Keating, this is the only way we've ever made the national news. It takes a governor, such as Evan Mecham, dumb enough to utter words like "pickaninny". Or a Senator, like John McCain, nasty enough to vote against Martin Luther King Day. Or some gun-toting nut at a protest.

That's macro, though, a bird's eye view of Arizona as seen by the rest of the Union. If one looks at it from the inside, one will notice that we're actually much more of a basket case than we seem on the surface. For instance, we've closed many of our state parks and rest areas, hoping to shave a few hundred thousand dollars off our $2 billion state budget deficit.

Yes, this is the home of Congressman Trent Franks, who called President Obama "an enemy of humanity". It's also the state that recently passed a bill requiring the president to present his birth certificate (cuckoo, cuckoo) in order to be on the ballot in 2o12... There go those precious 11 electoral college votes.

The same good ol' boy who brought us this immigration bill, Russell Pearce, recently wrote up a bill that did away with the need for Arizonans to have a permit to carry concealed weapons. Governer Jan Brewer signed that one into law, too; this stroke of genius came on the heels of a cost-cutting meausure that released some 17,000 mental-health patients onto the streets.

Brewer had a tough choice to make with this immigration bill. Sign it and she loses the bulk of the Latino vote come November. Veto it and she gets buried in the primary and November never matters. She made a choice based on political survival and nothing more. And she's the least of our worries.

We have a less-than-civic-minded Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who wants to supplant her as governor. We have an ethically challenged former County Attorney, Andrew Thomas, who dreams of being Attorney General. We have a mentally challenged former Representative, J.D. Hayworth, aspiring to replace McCain as our senator.

In Arizona, the idiots get promoted. How do you suppose Brewer made it this far in the first place?

There's plenty more, but just from the few things I've mentioned, most reasonable people will come to the conclusion that Arizona has the greatest level of dysfunction among all 50 states. Politically speaking, it may even be worse off than our two occupied countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.

One consistent thread runs through these horror stories: The Republican Party. All of this and so much more can be laid directly on that sorry doorstep. Is Arizona an accurate reflection of unbridled conservatism?

Yes. But it's not like the usual one you'd find in a mirror. It's more like a reflection of the desert sun itself. Look at it long enough and your eyes will burn right out of your head - not so much physics, in this case, as a defense mechanism of the soul.

pH 4.23.1o