by David Safier
Now it's The Economist adding coverage to the Baja Arizona movement in an article titled, "A tale of two counties." Note, that's "two counties," as in Maricopa and Pima.
The article is very well done, and its flavor is different from what I've read in our national media. This is an English view of Arizona as a semi-exotic, wild west region of the U.S. The intro is so evocative, it could turn Tucson into an English tourist destination.
OVER his second beer at The Shanty in Tucson, a pub popular among Democrats, Paul Eckerstrom gets to the point. “We don’t like Phoenix,” he says of the state capital in Maricopa County to the north, home to more than half of Arizona’s population. So Mr Eckerstrom, a lawyer and former chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, has launched the long legal process to secede and form a new state, tentatively called Baja Arizona.
I'm picturing English tourists, guidebooks in hand, wandering into The Shanty, ordering up a pint and looking around to see if Eckerstrom and his fellow secessionists are gathered around a corner table, plotting.
Tom Volgy, Joe Arpaio, Russell Pearce and Clarence Dupnik make the article. And Gabby Giffords is featured in a dual reference to the January 8 shooting and The Shanty.
There is another aspect to this story. It was in Tucson that Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people were shot in January. Ms Giffords, a moderate Democratic congresswoman, also frequented The Shanty, and one of her campaign posters still hangs on the wall. Nobody there blames anyone but the gunman for the shooting. But people in Tucson saw it as a warning. Sheriff Dupnik called Arizona “the mecca for prejudice and bigotry”. In response to the shooting, the University of Arizona launched a National Institute for Civil Discourse. Its director says that Arizona has been “a test-bed for uncivil politics.”
From it humble beginnings in The Shanty to the front page of the Star and now to The Economist, the Baja Arizona idea keeps spreading.
(h/t to Susan who watches the BBC, reads The Economist and sent me this article.)