Malkin archives an amazing story from the East Valley Tribune (Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Apache Junction, Ariz.) about how students at an AP government class at Dobson High School in Mesa are being dangerously seditious — they’re actually asking questions and being critical of The Messiah, The One, and his porkulus.
I feel for them — they want to live in a country where the money is actually worth something, not a country where everyone’s a multi-billionaire but a loaf of bread costs a billion dollars. My advice to all them is not to ask too many questions, you just might have your diversity chops questioned, especially during Black History Month.
The good news is that Advanced Placement courses are still full of advanced students. The bad news is that, because there aren’t enough blacks and Hispanics in AP classes, the AP organization wants to add more feel good fluffy duff AP courses, and take away some substantive ones.
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President Obama is visiting the Valley, trumpeting his foreclosure mitigation plans. (Oops, there goes another $75 billion.) He made a major faux pas yesterday, when he said that cities like Mesa and others in the Valley are “suburbs of Phoenix.”
If you go up to a Mesa city politician and call Mesa a “suburb of Phoenix,” you’ll get a slug in the gut. I once made the same mistake, (but thankfully was nowhere near any Valley politicians), but my late granduncle, who retired to the Valley, explained it to me, that one shouldn’t think of that area as Phoenix and suburbs, like you would think of St. Louis as having suburbs. The idea is to think of Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale, and others as merely a collection of cities that were founded at about the same time, grew up separately, and kinda bumped into one another as the grew, in the same desert valley. Mesa and its East Valley neighbor Tempe were both founded before Phoenix.
Which is why Valley residents call it The Valley, not Phoenix. It just so happens that Phoenix is the largest Valley city, and has the largest central business district. But Mesa also has a definable downtown with some tall buildings, Tempe has ASU, Scottsdale has tons of resorts and golf courses, Glendale has the football and hockey stadiums, and Sun City has all the old folks homes. And, unlike older eastern cities like St. Louis, there is really not much of a discernable older urban core of old buildings and domiciles, where the construction looks “newer” as you go away from the central city. Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe and Scottsdale have little patches of older domiciles, late 19th and early 20th century, but that’s about it. Most of Phoenix looks like a suburb. All of the post-WWII middle class residential areas look the same, a 1950-built house in Phoenix looks no different than a 2000-built house in Peoria.
This is something I would have thought that The Messiah would have already understood.
