The Money in Politics

Presidents Booed, Pizzas Are Vegetables, & Occupying Money

An article on Huffington Post, that website full of news entertainment for the liberal-minded, reports that Congress overruled the USDA and declared frozen pizza a vegetable for the purposes of school children's diet.  Corporate food manufacturers make no money off of fresh fruit and vegetables. They make money off of pre-packed, adulterated foods -- and off of politicians eager for campaign donations.

Protesters occupy Wall Street and other public areas in cities throughout the country. They are angry at the rich, but not particularly well organized, like the wealthy can afford to be.

The wealthy buy propaganda, conservative talk shows and Republican talking points that make Johnny Machine-head boo Michelle Obama and Jill Biden at a NASCAR race. This is patriotism?  To boo the wives of the President and Vice-President promoting an initiative to hire veterans? Where do people get these knee-jerk, hypocritical reactions?

Corporate media. Some conservative; some liberal; but all designed to be popular entertainment that serves to influence and bias instead of inform and educate.

Shari points out that Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years by keeping the institutions of government weak and ineffective. As one commentator noted, "Libya, under the elder Gadhafi's 42-year rule, had intentionally weak state institutions and a government that barely existed. Gadhafi, who held no title, had ultimate authority and did not want the development of any other power centers that might challenge him."

Our conservative friends in this county argue that we are safer with a weak and small government. Excuse me? Where do people get such palpably stupid ideas? Propaganda.

The problem isn't that the rich are rich. It's that money drives politics. Don't bother occupying Wall Street unless you occupy the government.

The only way for ordinary citizens to control their own government is to take money out of it. Right now, we are ensuring that we have a government of the money, by the money, for the money. As a nation, a society, and a community, we are confronted by plenty of serious policy decisions. Why are we invariably and unduly influenced towards the alternatives that enrich a few?

Tucson Autumn

Tucson has its seasons. Gone are the temperatures of the three digit days. It actually gets cool at night.

But for our swimming pool solar blanket, swimming would have become quick dipping some weeks ago. Yesterday, the last day of October, the cement pond was down to 81 degrees. Still great for me, but Shari has finally surrendered. This photo was taken two days earlier.

With cooler weather, Shari set up a painting area underneath the fan outside our bedroom. The breeze keeps the mozzies at bay and it still gets hot; in the eighties. Yes folks, we have the occasional lost but irritating mosquito. She is working to complete a painting of Baboquivari and the man in the maze.

Flowers still bloom, goldfish still swim, and the citrus tree which suffered from last winter's freeze has one fruit getting bigger, and several fertilized blossoms turning into teeny-tiny round green things.

But maybe the main reason for this entry is a great sunrise photo that Shari took a few mornings ago.

A neighbor and friend joined us for dinner a couple of nights back. She is much our senior in terms of time spent living in Tucson. She admitted that she never tires of seeing the mountains and the colors. Each time it's different.

Even though I've been here only a few years, I can relate.

Red on Buff

My introduction to the Hohokam motivated us to visit the Arizona State Museum on the campus of the UofA. Shari and I had been there once before several years back. Now we wanted to look at the distinctive Hohokam red on buff pottery.

The museum boasts over 20,000 whole vessels, the world's largest collection of Southwest Indian pottery, but only a tiny sample is on public display. We'd forgotten that the public exhibit is small. There is something about being stuck in a museum which makes it tough to relate to an object.

From the one public room, through a mostly glass wall, one can see into the climate-controlled storage room with racks and racks of pots, plates and figures. That looked intriguing. Neatly organized centuries and millennia.

The public display includes a wall with examples of all kinds of pottery from the various cultures that flourished in the Southwest and northern Mexico. There is an impressive display of photographs of that wall at the museum website. You can see the entire wall, each column, each shelf, and each piece.

The other side of the public area has a display entitled "Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest," beginning with the Seri, Tarahumara and Yaqui who are in Mexico. Which raises the odd fact that the U.S.-Mexico border cuts across land traversed by many a people and culture over millennia, including today.

Being confronted with such a great diversity of cultures and languages, I thought of a native language map of the Americas that I saw in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City: scores and scores of languages quite unrelated to each other, making Europe and Asia look quite homogenous.

Somewhere in that museum were samples of artifacts from different cultures in Mexico, among them a culture around Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico, possibly related to the Mogollan cultures, that flourished about the same time as the Hohokam, a connection between Arizona and the Toltec-Aztec polities in the Mexico City area. Curious. Like the Hohokam, the Casas Grandes culture mysteriously disappeared around 1450. So was it before Columbus, or were they killed off after European diseases struck?

We Europeans live in a continent where populations, cultures and technology flourished equal to any in the Old World. Sadly, we have little awareness of the old spirits.

La Niña, Again

Shari sent me a link to a report in Seattle. The weather folks are thinking we will have another La Niña for this winter, which means cold and wet for Puget Sound, like 2010-1 winter.

In Arizona, another season of La Niña means another dry and warm winter. We already are having a warmer-than-average autumn; highs in the nineties. We get occasional cold spells. One last winter got to 17 degrees, and a few weeks back, the night temperatures got down to the low 50's.

So we are keeping a solar blanket over the cement pond, which so far has kept the water around 86 degrees. Shari and I have a great system. In the afternoon, we peel back the cover carefully so a minimum of debris falls in the pool. We frolic in the warm water. Shari gets a lot of time swimming and aqua-dancing. Then we tuck the pool back under the blanket.

During that cold spell a few weeks back, I couldn't resist a quick night dip under the blanket. The air was cool, but the water was warm.

Casa Grande

Casa Grande, the Great House, abandoned by the
Hohokam c. 1450.  (Its modern shelter has been edited out.)

For some time, a few years actually, I'd wanted to see Casa Grande, about ninety miles northeast of Tucson. Drive another forty minutes and you are in Phoenix, which is one reason I hadn't. Plus modern Casa Grande is a bit of a blight on a flat landscape, despite Bristol Palin's purchase of a house there. What I wanted to see was the Casa Grande National Monument. So on a down day a couple of weeks ago, I went there.

I took a roundabout route, driving up to Oracle, then down into the San Pedro valley, then up to Globe, a mining town east of Phoenix, and downstream past oddly named Miami and a hamlet called Top-of-the-World, then across the basin to Casa Grande. The scenery all along this route is stunning, despite several open pit mines.

Looking southeast from Oracle area.

I ended up driving through the eastern periphery of the land where the Hohokam lived, a people and a culture that developed and flourished in the Tucson and Phoenix basins for a millennia, then abandoned it all around 1450 AD. On the Santa Cruz, Gila and Salt Rivers, they built the largest network of irrigation canals in North America. In the late 1800's when American settlers developed farmlands in the Phoenix basin, they pretty much used the ancient canals as a footprint for their own irrigation systems. Most of what we know about the Hohokam has been discovered over the last two decades. Some 160 sites, over 200 ball courts (c. 900-1100 AD), and almost as many platform mounds (c. 1200-1350) have been identified.

Casa Grande with its shelter.

Casa Grande is the largest remaining Hohokam structure. In 1694, Father Kino, the Jesuit missionary who founded most of the Spanish mission settlements in the Southwest, described the ruin in his journal as the "Great House," which name stuck. Juan Bautista de Anza stayed there in 1775 on his expedition that founded San Francisco.

When it was in use, around the Great House stood platform mounds, ball courts, and many groups of courtyard arranged dwellings. Estimates of Hohokam communities run about 5,000. Just the Phoenix area would have had a population of 100,000.

Today, Casa Grande National Monument is a small, barren site with a nice visitors center and the area around the Great House nicely cleared, fenced, and labeled. Entry into the building is forbidden. Centuries of white man graffiti is a visible reason why. From a picnic area on the other side of the parking lot, signs identify nearby, scrub-covered mounds as platforms and a ball court.

The site is surrounded by dry, flat land and the occasional shock of rectangular green cotton fields. Yes folks, thanks to the Corps of Engineers and farmers' prior water rights, we mine water to grow cotton in the desert. Which is a major reason why the water table has been sucked down and most of our rivers don't flow much any more. At least the cotton fields give an indication of the green Hohokam fields that would have been visible a thousand years ago.

Hohokam ballcourt sites, 700-1150 AD

from The Hohokam Millennium (2007)

At the visitors center at the Monument, I bought The Hohokam Millennium, a richly illustrated collection of articles by current experts in various fields. It's a fascinating read.

I began to realize that Phoenix and Tucson are built over scores and hundreds of sites where Hohokam lived for a millennium. Thanks to modern laws requiring archeological surveys before construction, many sites have been examined. But Hohokam lands have been plowed under and built over. All that's left of one of the two largest platform mounds, Mesa Grande, is surrounded by urban development.

Now when I look at the surrounding mountains, or wonder at the saguaro cactus and other plants that thrive in the Sonoran Desert, I think of the long history of peoples who lived here. This place is not only stunningly beautiful, it's also full of life. There are spirits of peoples and cultures here about whom we know only little.

I am planning on doing more exploring, starting with the Hohokam exhibits at the Arizona State Museum on the UofA campus here in town.

Jasmine & Nazar on Vacation

Nazar & Jasmine in their traveling nest

I don't really take vacations. For the last six years I am never away from my virtual law office for more than a couple of days, just long enough to drive between Tucson and Whidbey Island. It's a forced march. I do the driving because I want to. Shari is up for the adventure. Our two furry children, Jasmine and Nazar, come along because they have no choice.

They are long suffering. Eleven to twelve hours at a stretch, they settle into their nest on the back seat next to the cooler which is stocked with snacks and numerous small tins of Starbuck's espresso. We let the dogs out for the occasional gasoline station and rest stop. Thank god for them that Shari and I drink coffee, otherwise rest stops would be ever fewer.

Sunrise rest stop on the Great Basin Highway, Nevada.

Jasmine, our ten-year old, knows the drill all too well. She eagerly jumps into the back seat. Nazar is two and athletic. He still needs a little coaxing. But even he has become resigned and resists less being picked up and placed on the back seat.

After six or eight hours, Jasmine no longer responds to conversation or her name. Her face remains buried on her front paws. Nazar starts talking and singing, as if to pass the time. Sometimes one or the other comes up front and sits on Shari's lap, but mostly they just hunker down in back.

Rest stops (which in Nevada can be the open road), gas stations, diner parking lots, and motel rooms are what Jasmine and Nazar know about the two and one-half day, 1600-1800 mile stretch (depending on the route).

All of which is to set up a scene in the reader's mind. Imagine two days on the road, over eleven hours each. Imagine arriving at our sister's house outside Walla Walla at the end of the second day. Imagine a fenced in backyard with a lush green lawn. Imagine how Jasmine and Nazar went nuts chasing each other and the frisbee, up and down the grassy strip, ecstatic.

Double Bluff, Whidbey Island

Shari and I had mixed feelings about returning to Lower Alaska. For Jasmine & Nazar, it was pure vacation. Two weeks of cool weather. Green lawns everywhere. Running about gardens and the ill-kept and recently bankrupt Holmes Harbor golf course by our house and Shari's mom's house. Chasing frisbees and the familiar smell of rabbits. (Jasmine knows that word really well.) We got more walks and runs in them each day than we typically get in several days in Tucson.

We even took them to the beach at Double Bluff where dogs and their owners can run off leash. I think Jasmine & Nazar prefer grass to sand, and I know that Aussie shepherds do not like being in water. But I had a good walk and Shari stayed on the wet, firm sand.

Visiting Lower Alaska

Ever since a cruise ship took me up the Alaskan coast, I have thought of Puget Sound in a different way. Puget Sound looks and feels a lot like Alaska, or British Columbia, or as Shari tells me, the south of Norway. Trees, bushes, weeds and grass cover the ground.

Puget Sound is Lower Alaska.

Talking with Whidbey Island friends during our recent two-week visit to the North, the subject of weather necessarily came up. I tried joking several times about visiting South Alaska or Norway, but nobody got the joke. When you are inside, you don't get the view from outside.

Our first morning I desperately wanted to go home. It didn't help that we were sleeping on Costco futons on the floor of the empty, mortgaged house that we have been trying to sell for two years. But it was also all the green outside and all the water that fed and cooled it and everything that went along with it.

I know I was rude with friends and family who live in Lower Alaska. We arrived at the beginning of Puget Sound's summer, September 1, and left towards its summer's end a couple of weeks later. Locals were excited. They wore shorts and smiles as they sat outside in coffee shops. I complained. I missed the dry heat, open sky and palette of colors that extended beyond green, blue and grey.

The weather is reversed in Lower Alaska. Mornings are clear, cold and damp. A heavy dew settles on everything. About ten or eleven in the morning, it heats up enough to dry out and go out. The day becomes pleasant, then muggy from all the dampness, until the sun begins to set. By five in the afternoon, it's getting chilly. By the time it gets dark, it's time for several layers of clothes. Tucson is the opposite. Mornings and evenings are the precious times to be outside. It's during the day that you stay inside.

Of course, I failed to pack enough clothes. When daily temperatures exceed a hundred degrees, it's hard to think about socks, hats, layers and wool. I brought a hiking pullover sweater made of petroleum and a cotton cardigan and ended up wearing them every day, sometimes both together.

Something has changed in Shari and me. We both talked about it during our two week vacation in Lower Alaska. Nothing in Puget Sound's best stretch of weather for the year made us regret leaving. We were happy to have made the move to Tucson.

We took a long drive down I-5 through Oregon and California. (One could argue that Lower Alaska extends to the Willamette Valley.) We passed through the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, then over Tehachapi to Barstow and through the Mojave Desert. Crossing the Colorado River into Arizona at Parker, we began to see saguaro, cholla and ocatillo, open sky, pink and brown rocks, and dry dirt. It's so stunningly beautiful. We felt at home in the Sonoran Desert.