Jon Talton is the Arizona’s Republic’s house Socialist. He hates just about everything associated with free enterprise, but he makes up for it by waxing rhapsodic over any stray government boondoggle. He is convinced that Phoenix will continue to go down the toilet by growing and prospering until it dares to mimic all the idiotic urban policies people move here to escape. The Republic runs his column on the business page for the same reason they run articles by effete anti-athletic esthetes on the sports pages. Oh, wait–they don’t do that…
In any event, Talton suffers from a rabid moondacity, a desperate need to tell mooney, transparent lies in support of unsupportable stupidities. From the Latin moondax, moondacis, moondacity denotes an incurable condition in which the sufferer’s brain has turned into green cheese. It is epidemic in certain circles of Phoenix, particularly in the city government, where the afflicted affect to believe–and attempt to persuade others to believe–that Downtown will be revitalized by the erection of skyscrapers made exclusively from huge stacks of tax-dollars.
Here is a sampling of Moondacity, Talton style:
Maroney’s is closing at Central Avenue and Camelback Road, taking away a landmark that has stood since the 1940s. There’s a back story, of course: the dry cleaner sits atop contaminated groundwater.
“Closing”–what a failed business does–and “taking away a landmark”–what a tornado does–are not the same thing. This kind of corrupt conflation is constant among the moondacious, so learn to watch out for it. But this is the bigger lie: “the dry cleaner sits atop contaminated groundwater.” In fact, Maroney’s sits atop groundwater that it contaminated by dumping dry-cleaning chemicals into the ground-table for decades. Even so, the “contaminated groundwater” didn’t cause the business to fail. Want to know what did? You can figure it out by inverting the next bout of moondacity:
Viacom, which owns the property and its lucrative billboards, is working with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to clean up the site. So this is hardly a business closing that can be blamed on the coming of light rail.
Did you catch it? When Talton says, “this is hardly a business closing that can be blamed on the coming of light rail,” he’s telling us with all the veracity the moondacious can muster that the cause of Maroney’s failing is the coming of light rail. Talton came right out and told you the lie, so you know it’s true.
Is this so hard to foresee? Camelback and Central is fairly densely populated by Phoenix standards, but not by any standard that would apply Back East. All of Maroney’s business is drive-up. Not walk-up. Not take-the-bus-to-and-fro. You drive up. You park. You drop off or pick up your clothes. You drive away. Drive-up traffic at that intersection will be substantially more difficult after the trolley is finished. As it happens, it’s virtually impossible right now, as the trolley is being built. From Camelback to Campbell, Central Avenue is almost impassable. What killed Maroney’s? Light rail.
Talton has the gall to wonder if Phoenix might fail to benefit from transit-oriented development–which forbids the establishment of any new drive-up businesses in the swath of the trolley. In the minds of the moondacious, it’s completely plausible that people will take the trolley to the dry-cleaners, then hop on another trolley to go on to work. That may not seem reasonable to you, but you forget that, once the light-rail is completed, summer high temperatures will never hit the high seventies and all the bums will be coiffed and perfumed. Oh, wait–that’s just in the ValleyMetro brochures…
But not even ValleyMetro can top Talton for bald-faced moondacity. Contaminated groundwater has nothing to do with anything. It’s been there for decades, and nobody’s drinking that water in any case. The trolley is killing long-established businesses up and down its route, and the green-cheese-heads who inflicted it on us, along with all the other doomed Downtown ‘investments,’ don’t dare admit this and dozens of other obvious truths. They use Soviet-style propaganda to afflict us with Soviet-style ‘improvements.’
The next step in the game will be to plead with you to go out of your way to ‘support’ the businesses that are nope-no-way-uh-uh-never not being hurt by trolley construction. And that is propaganda perfection, Soviet-style, to tell two self-contradicting lies in one moondacious exhortation, challenging you–on pain of being declared a counter-revolutionary wrecker–to question anything you are told.
Phoenix can survive Jon Talton, as odious as he is. And we will overcome the stupid mistakes of the moondacious green-cheese-heads Downtown. But I’m not sure that any good thing can thrive in a place where public discourse consists of nothing but lies, and where anyone who dares to whisper the truth is shouted down and, in then end, self-censored.
