A near-duplicate of this e-mail can be found under
the State of Arizona, but it is particularly applicable
to the City of Mesa. A friend of mine is in China, and
notes that, despite the repressive government, he feels
freer than he ever did in Mesa, and suggested that the
United States was becoming "anti-intellectual" and generally "anti-people".
He points out that the United States, per capita, has more people imprisoned than any country in the
world, and that Maricopa County leads that parade. Yet, he noted, he never felt safe here, either, noticing that the local government never showed any interest in dealing with its vast problems, most especially crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine. And of course, the biggest and boldest crimes in the world, those committed by the city administration and their colleagues in crime, the Mesa Police Department.
This is a good community in which to do no business at all. I, for example, have been stopped by these police more times, and arrested more times than any of the fifty or so full-time drug dealers that I know of within 150 yards of where I sit now.
Indeed, between them, they have spent less time, total, in police custody than I have. This is a scumbag city administration, of which Tammany Hall would be ashamed, and duly so.
This is a city in deep financial and other trouble, primarily due to the incompetence and conspiracies of the insects who run it, who had they to earn a living on their merits, would not suffice as men's room's attendants, save perhaps at an LDS Church. They are blaming this on liberals, insufficient cops, perhaps former Governor Babbitt, or more-or-less anybody who is not a direct relative. This sound to you like your
seven-year-old when you catch him urinating in your flower pots? The motives are precisely the same!!!
Within the last 15 years, this state and city have suffered innumerable financial scams, at the hands of criminal businessmen and public "servants", even a major recession precipitated by savings and loan fraud and manipulations. Lots of people go to jail here, but none of them seem to be the ones who are the root cause.
We have had budget crises, cities—most notably, Mesa—so currupt that even casual tourists notice the scams and the naked graft.
Much of the incarceration is stupid and inappropriate.
This e-mail is merely part of long, ongoing discussion between concerned citizens, but though written about Arizona and the United States in general, it is particularly cogent in Mesa.
Submitted for you consideration...
I didn't have time to mention it in my last e-mail, but your comments on a general "anti-intellectualism" taking deep root in these United States caught my eye and my interest.
I suspect it is much more than that, and I have what may be a crackpot theory, but I explored it somewhat on the very first page of my 2000 book... Among other changes I have noticed in just the last dozen or so years, the U.S. Seems to have, very quietly, slipped into a prosecutorial justice system, in which EVERYONE is guilty until proven innocent. Likewise, public debates and forums which used to include logic, information, and ideas have slipped into what I call "Buzzword Contests". It has been many years since I heard any public controversy in which the dueling took place much above the gutter level, and yet few seem to include—and this is especially true here in Mesa—what ought to be the very most salient "gossipy" or personal facts.
Words ring out in city and county courts here, from corrupt prosecutors, less than hearsay, not even good gossip, simply tools to put scalps upon the belts of the oppressors. But relevant discussions seldom get around to what matters, in forums public or private.
For example, Matt Salmon, one of our gubernatorial candidates, from the Republican Party, of course, is a Mormon and a lobbyist for Qwest, our esteemed telephone company. But neither this nor his checkered financial and political past comes up much in public discussion. The suggestion that his Democratic opponent might be a lesbian—which interests me not at all—DOES however
leak into public discussions.
I suspect this is all due to leftover paranoia and investigative energy floating around from the Cold War. The gumshoes of the Witch Hunt era had to turn their noses to their fellow citizens, merely to occupy their minds and reinforce the silly pretense that they served some useful function. And of course, TO EARN A LIVING. We are, I suspect, effectively eating ourselves. I
am, in a twisted sort of way, fortunate to have had my unpleasant experiences in Maricopa County Jail, wherein one finds that there are many, many people locked up for very serious periods of time for downright fraudulent charges, others similarly ensconced for what simply amount to minor stupid moves without victims. American law enforcement and prosecution apparatus is apparently directed at getting "THEM"... And if there is no "THEM", it becomes imperative to create one.
To get a small taste of how this impacts people, check out the complaint, and conduct an internal search on Mesa, Arizona.
I have a couple of reports there myself, and there are many which, if they were fiction, would be incredible and hilarious.
But they are not apocryphal... They are very real. And it is not all government-related, either.
There is also a Mesa, Arizona Corruption Report site, heavily linked and with common sources.
By the way, the Briton King who got his butt kicked by the Danes/Vikings was Ethelred the Unready. That one resonates with me because I am distantly related to families on both sides, and even in grade school, we studied his unsuccessful campaigns with some mirth and considerable foreboding.
Which sort of ties two distant ideas together. Whilst we were, as a nation, trying to denigrate Clinton (who probably deserves it, but isn't there a time to STOP?), besmirch Chinese export/business practices and policies, and locking up citizens for YEARS who dared to own a marijuana seed, the real goblins of a corrupt economy and religious politics strolled up, unobserved, and took huge chomps out of our very soul. Enron, Global Crossing, Osama bin Laden, WorldCom/MCI... Take your pick, they all did more to chew away at our real security levels than the aforementioned, and did it with no announcement they were in the arena of thieves. Same with the locals, who chew up the Constitution, or find new "interpretations" which amount to lies of the lowest order.
Our politicians and pundits were too busy beating up irrelevant straw men and carrying the hogwash banners of whatever symbols were "hot" or "cool" right at that moment.
This is the "Rush Limbaugh" approach: hit a lot of targets and make a great deal of noise. Trouble is, any real boogey men are simply not involved at the front end of the rifle/shotgun. They are strolling up from behind.
I have a name for this period of American/World History, which rather flows from Chinese experience, oddly enough. I call it: "THE GREAT LEAP BACKWARD"...
And I do not for a moment pretend that it is merely anti-intellectual, it is MUCH more than that. It is anti-freedom and anti-truth. The subject truly is Nacht und Nabel... Night and fog. Real ideas and real issues are best disguised by mist and darkness, not by denial.
This is not the ancient religious conundrum "how many angels can dance upon the head of a pin?" IT MATTERS!!! It costs money, kills people, and leaves the citizenry in fear.
It is anti-freedom and anti-truth.
Conspiracy theorists inevitably discuss the Federal Government and the United Nations as the source of oppression and thievery, when in reality, here in Mesa, one needs only look out the window.
Suggestions that smaller governmental units are somehow freer and more responsive because they are "closer to the people" could not possibly be LESS true than it is in Mesa.
We live with this kind of corruption, and at the least, are daily embarrassed by it.
And because of the lethargy of the citizens, the non-elected officials get away with it.
Perhaps it is we who are the problem. This city has lots of robbers, the worst of them in the executive side of city government.
What it needs is some "cops" in the grand sense to do something about it. And we do not seem to have EVEN ONE.
THE HAMMER
Mesa, Arizona
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