Kari Lake doesn’t give up. Even as she prepares to launch a campaign for U.S. Senator, and more than two months after her opponent was sworn in as governor of Arizona, she insists she won the race for governor and that the election was stolen.
Restrictions on voting have become one of the pillars of the modern GOP — but Arizona’s desert floor absorbs such hallucinatory claims as rain, at least in part because of the state’s unique history. For most of the past century and a half, Arizona has been a region of personal reinvention, ambitious plans, and glowing hype that transcended the boundaries of nature. The name itself derives from a silver rush in 1736 in a valley near a ranch called “Arizona”, which flared up just weeks after it started. Lake’s false crusade had lasted longer.
What is in the water in Arizona that causes such an apparent conflagration?
Well, in the beginning What Water? A neat approach to hydrology characterized Arizona’s modern development. A state with an average annual rainfall of just 12 inches grows tens of thousands of acres of moist cotton and supports more than 370 golf courses and 2.6 million homes. His attribution of the Colorado River was based on extremely optimistic river predictions a century ago. In the 1960s, the state had to build a 330-mile canal to push water uphill away from arch-rival California. A prolonged drought and falling water levels in Lake Powell, the country’s second largest reservoir, are now jeopardizing future real estate projects and population growth.
Limited water immaculateness is practically written into Arizona’s DNA. In 1912, federal money built what was then the world’s largest dam in the Salt River, and agrarian aristocrats in the new legislature thought so highly of it that they placed his likeness on the official state seal.
But their enthusiasm for the new Eden in the desert – they thought the land hid vast resources beneath the surface – was overdone. “Groundwater is believed to have been virtually inexhaustible,” published a 1949 Bureau of Reclamation report after most of Arizona’s surface water had been depleted. “People stuck to the concept of huge underground rivers flowing endlessly into the sea and continued to develop more land.”
Land doesn’t even need much improvement to be a hot commodity in the state’s wishful thinking. In the 1960s, seedy realtors treated Arizona like a dry, cacti-lined Florida, with crappy junk homes sold to buyers unseen by mail through glossy magazine ads. Dupes were shocked when they arrived in person to see bare lots in the middle of nowhere with no utility lines.
Large tracts of land like the Golden Valley, Prescott Valley, and Rio Rico—expanses of desert that an earlier generation of farmers valued for pennies an acre—have given the state a dirty reputation across the country. But gullible buyers always played a key role in establishing Arizona. A famous crook, James Reavis, “the Baron of Arizona,” managed to convince hundreds of landowners between Phoenix and Silver City, NM, in the 1880s to pay him settlement on land he didn’t own. He told them he was the heir to a large 18th-century land grant from Charles III. From Spain. Never mind that the purported grant is written on paper with a Wisconsin Mill watermark. Reavis made a fortune.
Nineteenth-century promoters touted dozens of Arizona mining towns as the next Chicago or Pittsburgh. John Clum, the founder and editor of the state’s oldest continuous newspaper, Tombstone Epitaph, described this gang-infested town as “a hilltop town that promises to emulate ancient Rome in a splendor that has a different character.” has, but no less business.”
Arizonans see what they want to see. Before Charles Keating, King of Savings and Loans, went to federal prison in 1992, he built a gilded luxury resort called the Phoenician here, using money from the savings of thousands of small savers. During the 1964 presidential race, Senator Barry Goldwater suggested defoliating the trees above the Ho Chi Minh Trail with nuclear weapons – and to be safe, he would also “take a look at the Kremlin’s men’s room”. It helped cost him the general election, but the people of Arizona loved it.
Lack of traction does not help fend off strange fantasies. Nearly 60% of Arizona’s current residents were not born here. The real estate industry functions like a Ponzi scheme in this sense, requiring a steady stream of buyers from elsewhere to justify the endless expansion of stucco roofs to the desert horizon. With a population growth of 1.3% since 2021, it is still the fastest growing state in the west.
Part of the Arizona dream is to be able to move here with no family ties and no history and fit right in – even being elected to high office. People come here for a second chance and a fresh start in the land of the open air and new opportunities.
No doubt it exists, as well as the knowledge, pragmatism, natural beauty and accessible nature that give Arizona an enduring appeal. But charlatans still hide in the sun. Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics polled reporters in 2014 and called Arizona the most corrupt state in the country.
Some may see a shift in the Arizona psyche, with its left-leaning leanings, the election of a Democratic governor, the casting of their electoral votes for Joe Biden, and the shifting political gravity away from clowns like Sheriff Joe Arpaio. But the legislature remains in the hands of those who have shouted “election fraud” as their donors continue to write checks. Those who want a clean transition from red to blue are also chasing rainbows.
Tom Zoellner, a fifth-generation Arizonan, is the author of the new book Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona. This article is in collaboration with Zocalo public square.
Source: LA Times
Roger Stone is an author and opinion journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He is known for his controversial and thought-provoking views on a variety of topics, and has a talent for engaging readers with his writing.
