Disturbance in Arizona

This week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed a draconian anti-immigrant bill that could give free rein to ethnic profiling throughout the state.

What is it about Arizona?  Much as I loathe John McCain, his opponent J.D. Hayworth sounds far worse.  (Notice how Sarah Palin didn’t badmouth Hayworth when she spoke at McCain’s rally.  She might be the biggest twit on the tour bus, but she knows she might need Hayworth later.)  A talk radio host, Hayworth is one of the titans of the bourgeoning industry of misinformation that conservatives churn out big and fast for Tea Partiers and other gullible nitwits.  I hope Democratic challenger Rodney Glassman knows how to roll in the mud with dirty dogs because he’s in for the pit fight of his life.

But I have a friend who moved to Arizona six months ago and loves it.  She’s a nature lover and New Age healer, who has found a vast community out by Prescott where she can openly discuss astral projection, medicine wheels and all sorts of other occult practices that make mine and most other people’s eyes glaze over.  Lest we forget, the rise and fall of James Arthur Ray took place in Sedona.  (Did that story fall off the media’s radar screen?)

Martha Beck has lived in Phoenix for over a decade and has never publicly condemned Arizona’s ultra-conservatism (of course, she’s from Utah; Arizona must look like a nudist colony by comparison).  But in a chapter on the “essential self,” she did offer this discourse on a true-crime story from The Grand Canyon State:

Here in Wild West Phoenix, where real men still have obscene tattoos and keep rattlesnakes as pets, we recently experienced a rash of brazen burglaries.  The thieves entered empty houses to steal any jewelry, silverware, and electronic equipment they could find. In one home, their loot included an expensive camera. The thieves sold the goods at a swap meet later the same week, leaving no clues to their identity – except that they’d taken several pictures of one another burgalizing the houses, then left the film in the camera when they fenced it.  The police had lots of nice photographic evidence to help them find and convict the whole gang.

Many criminals do incredibly stupid things like this, because they’re actually conflicted about breaking the law.  It’s a rare thing to find a burglar who thinks it’s dandy if other people steal his stuff; when it comes right down to it, his deepest self believes stealing is immoral.  Your essential self will fight you by committing ‘stupid’ blunders when you violate your own values.  It’s as likely to happen when you try to be too virtuous as when you break the law.  Do you think it’s an accident that every time your mother-in-law arrives to take you to her Bible study group, she finds you naked in your backyard hot tub, singing the blues and drinking Kahlua through a straw?

I think not.