The Geography Of Failed Revolt
On the strange case of #OccupyPhoenix and the search for civic life in the exurbs
By Alex Aums and James Broulard
In America (1986), Jean Baudrillard identifies two facets of the country that is his book’s subject: “the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways” and “the deep America of mores and mentalities.” If the latter befits the ideopolises of New York and Boston or the hipster Elysiums of Portland and Seattle, then the former definitely belongs to Phoenix, a city in which the automobile reigns supreme, neighborhoods exist only as squares on a gerrymandering chess board, and sprawl is not so much an effect of meager zoning laws as a law unto itself. Phoenix is anomie expressed in four directions; it’s the nihilism of unwalkable distances.
The weakness of the Occupy Phoenix protest can perhaps be understood, then, in purely geographic terms. If the purpose of the Occupy movement is to protest economic conditions, then it makes sense to direct disapproval at Wall Street, which represents the vast network of social relationships otherwise so invisibly engrained in ordinary life as to exist only on an abstract level. By protesting, the aggrieved can appear to attack the entire economic system of the world.
Yet this logic of metonymy breaks down when transferred to a municipal building in Phoenix which has no obvious link to what used to be called late capitalism. “Phoenix is a branch-office town, not a headquarters town,” notes Ken Silverstein in a 2010 Harper’s article, “and much of the population works low-paying jobs at call centers and assembly plants.” When the concern of most working stiffs involves up-selling customers on tiered internet service, the issue of whether synthetic CDOs should be traded on a supervised exchange remains so much wonkish babble on CNBC.
A multivalent isolation characterizes life in the Valley of the Sun, and this isolation could only produce the sort of anemic results seen on October 15, when malcontents everywhere were summoned to occupy their cities. The Phoenix manifestation of this hashtagged revolt is generally considered to have met with failure: “The ‘Occupy Phoenix’ protest against corporate greed, the Fed, the government, the banks, politicians, lobbyists, ‘the corporations’ (etc., etc., etc.), has come to an end,” notes an October 17, 2011 article in the Phoenix New Times. “(Ahem) Shockingly, nothing’s really changed—the Fed still exists, lobbyists still are lobbying, and ‘the corporations’ are still in the business of making money.” The fruits of the occupation amounted to little more than sunstroke (the mercury topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit), ominous threats of kettling, and some 46 tickets for trespassing on César Chávez Square after park hours.
This ignominious denouement highlights the impediments to political action out where the buffalo roam. In purely geographical terms, the idea of “occupying Phoenix” in any meaningful way is preposterous. The metropolitan area is roughly 9,000 square miles. (Manhattan is about 23 square miles, and the five boroughs of New York, together, roughly 300 square miles.) Sprawl militates against massing for protest; many of those who bothered to show up are those who already had an ax to grind about, say, medical marijuana or the brutal tactics of the county’s police.
The irony is that the Phoenix metro area’s geography has been scarred by the sort of real-estate-driven catastrophe that few in Zuccotti Park have first-hand knowledge of. Entire suburbs of Phoenix—the towns of Goodyear, Anthem, Maricopa—have been transformed in less than two decades from alfalfa and cotton farms to vast cookie-cutter developments and then to REO ghost towns. Each of these stages was dictated, of course, by the cycle of real estate speculation abetted by Wall Street.
A leaflet distributed at Occupy Phoenix on October 15
Before the call sounded from Adbusters to occupy Wall Street, the U.S. appeared doomed to an uneasy economic senescence marked by Ayn Rand–inspired sniping and low-intensity Hobbesian warfare of each against each. Rage over health-care legislation was rampant. Teabaggers ambushed their representatives in town halls, demanding deep cuts to social programs while upholding the sanctity of Medicare. The country’s politics acquired an air of lifeboat ethics. Tenebrous associations with the plutocratic Koch brothers buoyed such off-kilter pols as Sharron Angle, John Boehner, and Rand Paul to national prominence on a program that, when considered closely, amounted to little more than keeping a president of color from having his way.
That summer, Arizona not only courted controversy but fanned its flames. For instance, if all you had was the testimony of Governor Jan Brewer, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, you might have thought that the Grand Canyon State had ceased to exist and in its place stood some suzerainty belonging to narcotraficantes who, outfitted with ample dope and arms, marauded its highways with impunity. To get the tone of the typical rhetoric, you need only refer to the good governor’s catalogue, breathlessly rehearsed in a June 2010 Fox News interview, of the ills attending “illegal immigration and everything that comes with it—” crime, drugs, extortion, kidnappings, and beheadings. The demagogic highlight reel featured an Arizona that in a century had metaphorically wheeled through three major cinematic genres, life in the state having gone from gritty Western to sunny suburban romance to grind-house torture porn.
Such hysteria opened opportunity aplenty for the ambitious. Former sportscaster J.D. Hayworth challenged incumbent John McCain for Senate from the right and nearly dethroned him. Brewer finagled a second term with commercials depicting a portion of Phoenix-area exurbs as a de facto possession of Mexico. Stirring the most political controversy, however, was not a person, but a bill (Senate Bill 1070, to be exact) that threatened to visit the worst governance practices of despised regimes on the American Heimat, requiring police to force anyone they deem suspicious to show their papers.
On one level, the political brouhaha of summer 2010 can be seen as a particular expression of a politics of resentment inflamed by the brute fact of a black sitting president, a man who, as suggested by the so-called “Birther bill” passed in the state House and Senate, many Arizonans believe pledges allegiance neither to the country nor the deity of their forefathers. Right-wing rhetoric would have Arizona voters believe that Obama is someone to be opposed in his own right, a closet Muslim/Commie who wishes to unleash the full fury of either Sharia law or the platform of the third Comintern on a hapless Christian nation.
Yet such invective is less a cause than an effect of an evolution inching steadily ahead that Obama does not direct but merely personifies. In “Securing Arizona,” an article from the March–April 2011 Boston Review, Tom Barry discusses the “politically toxic” fumes generated by the friction between Arizona’s two most significant populations: Latinos and white, mostly retired Midwestern transplants. The explosive growth of the former “has put Arizona on a fast track toward becoming a minority-majority state,” Barry writes. Though demographic experts have predicted this eventual future for the U.S., as a whole the 48th state is on the leading edge of the transformation; its date with demographic destiny is 2020 or perhaps earlier.
Arizona is not merely becoming more ethnically diverse; it is becoming more educated. “Alongside Latinos,” Barry notes, “the college-educated white population has been growing faster than the senior white population and the population without college degrees.” Republicans have not been able to make significant inroads with these burgeoning populations, which leaves the state’s political tendencies squarely in the ambit of the Democratic party—a trend that conservative elderly and the undereducated can do little to reverse.
The vitriolic reaction in recent Arizona politics may represent right-wingers’ desire to scuttle the ship of state rather than allow it to fall into the hands of Mexicans and liberal know-it-alls. Libertarian philosophy and political economy supply ideological cover for this project of depriving the succeeding generation the means by which it can manifest Arizona’s progressive destiny. Only thoroughgoing privatization prevents the fruits of civilization from falling to the unworthy.
This makes Arizona, as Silverstein observes, “fertile ground for an especially showy brand of symbolic politics.” This typically translates into stump speeches steeped in the three Gs—guns, gays, and God—that trumpet change Arizona’s anti-government nativists can truly believe in. Silverstein quotes a state worker who fairly sums up the prevailing attitude. “People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks,” she informs him. “If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K–12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all.” Behind this sentiment lies a particular conception of government as a mechanism for redistributing tax revenues brownward, and not at all as the means by which the basic necessities of civic life are maintained.
It may be that Arizonans aren’t interested in viable civic life at all. Perhaps they pant after a liberty far more radical. Deep in their hearts they seek liberty from their liberty, which, thanks to the general laissez-faire spirit of the state, they enjoy in spades. Pushed to its asymptotic limit, liberty becomes disaffection, and in reaching this limit Arizonans are further ahead than other areas of the nation, if for no other reason than they dwell in the desert. Baudrillard writes that “the desert is simply … an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” If the political battles waged in the state appear so ferocious, it owes to the fact that those waging them are defending a vanishing way of life, and the reason for its disappearance is that other areas of the country simply never really participated in it in the first place. How could they, when this way of life exists not so much as a regionally specific body of traditions and customs as a negation of those found elsewhere, namely, the Eastern metropolises where formidable movements gestate and find firm purchase in both newspaper headlines and the popular imagination?
The tactics of protest that are applicable to a densely populated East Coast city simply do not translate to a city with the mass of Phoenix. If the Occupy movement wants to make a lasting impression in Phoenix it cannot use the model appropriate to Manhattan, San Francisco, or D.C. An army must adapt to the terrain, after all. An indelible impression would thus be better ensured by occupying freeways, or, even more appropriately, the many vacant REO exurban properties.
Yet the Phoenix detachment of the Occupy movement should perhaps do nothing at all and simply allow prevailing demographic trends to do their work for it. Indeed, this may stand as the only viable option. If the Tea Party protests of summer 2010 were a dialectical dress rehearsal for those of autumn 2011, then the characterless expanses of tract homes festooning Maricopa County, Arizona, should be considered as pertinent as the tarp-tents populating Zuccotti Park.
Alex Aums is a writer, editor, and curriculum developer who currently resides in Tempe, Arizona. He holds a doctorate in English literature from the University of Arizona.
James Broulard is an attorney in private practice in Phoenix.
