I am continually embarrassed by the stupidity and closed-mindedness of Arizona, a state that I have enjoyed most of my life. The anger and despair that prompted my earlier post has been reemphasized by the inimitable team at The Daily Show:
I recently heard a responsible person suggest that it might be time to breakup this not-so-“perfect union” and let the states go their own way. This would solve the problems of railing against the federal government and allow states like Arizona to stand or fall on the economic value of their looney-tunes ideas.
There is a lot to contemplate in this suggestion. One thing that is clear is that many states and citizens will be quite surprised when the deep pockets of the Federal government are removed. I suspect that some states, rather than offering the state in an auction and being bought-up by Walmart, will seek to form a federation with other, presumable adjacent, states that have similar problems. Texas might try going it alone but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it as the next special buy in the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue.
So states may themselves want to split apart and realign on social or economic grounds (not just an old river that is drying up rapidly as the climate changes). I could see Northern California breaking away and possibly linking up with Oregon and Washington. Eastern Washington might better align with Idaho. Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico seem to be similar but once you get beyond the desolation of the desert, they are very different states and I’m not sure what is best in that area.
One thing that I might mention: the Mexican ethnics studies might be teaching that the white man took the land away from the Mexican but I wonder how the Navaho, Zuni, Apache, Hopi, Comanche, etc. feel about this inconvenient truth.
When I was finishing up my undergraduate degree, I took a special course in California history that was taught by the professor who wrote the book. The important thing here is that this book had been banned in schools around the state and had only been allowed in the University because the professor was using his own book. What did we learn? Well, we learned that the City of Los Angeles was a glutton for water and they would go to great lengths to steal the water from far-away areas and run it back to the city in impressive aqueducts and canals. We learned how the California wine industry saved the French wine industry when a blight decimated the vines in France and they were replaced by root vines from California (so is it French wine or is it California wine). We learned all about the destruction of California’s great forests by companies which made paper napkins out of trees that took hundreds of years to grow. We learned about the treatment of Asian-Americans during the war and the stark hopelessness of places such as Manzantar. We learned a lot, despite the education administrators try to hide the old man behind the curtain.
You can see by the radical truths I was exposed to as an undergraduate why I went on to seek an advanced degree in poetry and ended up becoming a dangerous computer programmer with a box full of new pocket-protectors hidden in the big drawer of my Steelcase.
Why is it that in this country we prefer lying and myth-making to telling the truth? Say, isn’t it Arizona that made it legal for a doctor to lie to a pregnant female patient? So why disband the Ethnic Studies classes: just continue to feed the students the myths and prevarications that have done well by the majority of American citizens. Lying is what makes America exceptionable.
I have to add a new Zonerism which just came to my attention: there is a bill in Arizona which declares pregnancy to officially start the day after the woman’s last menstruation period before the actual conception. So life begins two weeks or so before Dad’s twinkle even enters into the picture. Now if I recalculate my age based on the legislative fictions coming out of Arizona and a few other states I discover that I may no longer be qualified as a “baby-boomer.” I seem to be getting older and older without having to do anything myself. I suppose it is this sort of man-made fiction that came up with all the overage “begats” in the Bible.
Ain’t fiction grand?
A Celebration of Reading 