Author Archives: Maria Langer

Stupid Girls

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Some reading material for those who care.

A while back, I wrote a quick blog entry about a girl sitting next to me on a flight to New York. In it, I marvelled at her apparent lack of intelligence and willingness to spend most of the flight “sucking face” with her pimply companion.

I just read an article on Salon.com that put this in perspective. It’s called “Return of the Brainless Hussies” by Rebecca Traister and it discusses, among other things, that there simply aren’t any good role models for today’s girls. Celebrities like Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, and the Olsen twins are teaching young girls that it’s cool and sexy to be dumb.

The article also references a recent video called “Stupid Girls” by someone named Pink. I’d heard of Pink, but had no idea who she was — or in fact that she was a she rather than a he or a they. (I really don’t keep up with this stuff. My music tastes are permanently stuck in the 70s and 80s.) The song mourns the rise of stupid girls and the video mocks the celebrity examples out there. It’s a sad commentary, but one I’m glad is out there. Maybe someone will learn something from it.

Or maybe not. Today’s youth is too caught up in celebrity activities, fashion, and consumption. Ms. Traister’s article is a nice, objectively written piece that brings things into perspective. If you’re a parent of one or more young girls, read it and learn.

The Weather in Newark

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I get an e-mail for online check-in that includes a weather report.

I’m going to New York this weekend. It’s for a surprise birthday party for my husband, Mike. He knows about it, of course. His blabbermouth brother managed to keep it a secret for all of ten minutes.

Anyway, we’re flying out there. On Continental Airlines — their hub is in Newark. And I just got an e-mail message from Continental offering online check-in.

The e-mail included a graphic image with the weather forecast. Here it is:

Weather in Newark

Should I be upset that they’re forecasting rain the whole time I’ll be out there?

Or should I be glad to feel the rain on my face and in my hair (and down my back) again? After all, we haven’t had any significant rainfall here in a while and I rather miss it.

Will report back next week.

It’s Not Just Sand

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I have to explain to passengers that the desert is more than sand dunes.

I had some passengers on a helicopter flight a few weeks back who were just visiting the Phoenix area from somewhere back east. At sometime during the flight, they told me they were hoping to see the real desert.

My DesertI was confused. Wickenburg sits in the Sonoran desert. That’s the desert with the big saguaro cacti all over the place. It rains, on average, less than 8 inches a year. The desert can’t get any more real than that.

My passenger clarified. “Well, where’s the sand?”

The sand, unfortunately, is all over the place. In washes, in my front yard, in my shoes and cars, and in my hair and eyes during a dust storm. Sand (and dust) is a part of life here.

But not the kind of sand my passenger was thinking about. He was thinking of sand dunes. You know. Like the kind in movies that take place in the Sahara desert.

I began to understand. His mental picture of the desert included the rolling sand dunes from the movies. The same sand dunes that had hazards like quicksand and oasises with palm trees and ponds of water.

I explained that there were sand dunes in the southwest desert, but they were only part of the desert landscape — not the whole thing. I told him about the big sand dunes west of Yuma on I-8, and the small sand dunes west of Blythe off of I-10 (I’m not even sure if you can see those from the road, but I see them from the helicopter when I fly that way), and the medium sized sand dunes in Death Valley.

Then I put on my tour conductor voice and gave him a summary description of the Sonoran desert landscape, including information about its cacti, trees, animal life, and other features.

Of course, all this has me wondering how many people think the desert is just a big sand dune.

Monument ValleyOne of the things I love about the desert is its diversity. There are so many kinds of desert, each with their own little ecosystem. Drive 50 or 100 miles in any direction and you’re likely to be in a whole different kind of desert. For example, if you drive up route 93 from Wickenburg, you’ll enter another kind of desert where there are no saguaro cacti, but plenty of Joshua trees. Drive up to Monument Valley and you’ll see the layers of underlying rock exposed in magnificent formations, with scrubby trees and bushes hanging on for life in the fine red sand.

Just don’t go down to Phoenix. There isn’t much of the desert left down there, with all the asphalt, golf courses, non-native plants (like palm trees, for heaven’s sake!), and irrigation.

They Just Don’t Get It

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Some people are just too stupid to get the point.

They think I bitch about Wickenburg’s questionable politics and its poor economy and its lack of decent paying jobs and its part-time population and its mediocre dining experiences because I don’t like Wickenburg.

Hell, if I didn’t like Wickenburg, I wouldn’t live here. My work is portable — I can live anywhere I want. But I live here.

I complain because I want Wickenburg to be the best it can be.

I want politics to be clean and politicians to vote according to the majority of their constituents. But if voters don’t know what’s going on, how can they change it?

I want to see businesses in every single storefront downtown, with visitors and residents strolling the sidewalks and doing business. But if people don’t notice the empty storefronts, how can they fill them?

I want businesses to come to Wickenburg to offer good-paying jobs for career-minded young people and the goods and services we need right here in town. But if people don’t see the problems with the local economy, how can they focus on fixing it?

I want new homes to be bought by people with their lives still ahead of them, people who can enrich our town with their participation in activities rather than complain about high prices and do all their shopping at Wal-Mart in Surprise. But if people don’t realize that our part-time population spends most of its money outside of town, how can we encourage businesses to keep them shopping in town?

I want good (or at least interesting) restaurants where I can get food I can’t cook at home, prepared better than I can make it myself. But if people don’t see the opportunities to meet this need, how can qualified people come forward and fill it?

The narrow-minded, stupid people in the Town government and the Chamber of Commerce just don’t get it. They think we should all sugar coat the truth and live with what we’ve got. They want to lure people in under false pretenses, like saying that Wickenburg is “the West’s most western town” (what a line of bull that is), without even trying to make their claims remotely true. They think we should ignore the forces that are stripping away whatever’s good about Wickenburg to turn it into just another mediocre Phoenix suburb.

And I won’t sit by quietly and watch that happen. Not in my town.

Now if only I could figure out how to draw them a picture.

Want to Get Angry?

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Come to a Wickenburg Town Council meeting.

If you’d like to see an example of the failure of democracy in this country, go to a Wickenburg Town Council meeting. That’s where you’ll see a Mayor and Council, with an agenda entirely different from the majority of the people they serve, ignore the will of the people and defend their agenda-serving policies. And if you’re as unlucky as we were yesterday, you’ll get to see the Mayor belittle and insult his constituents, too.

Yesterday’s meeting was a farce of epic proportions. The public input session lasted a full hour with about a dozen people coming forward with requests to reconsider the unfair rejection of a petition to bring a high-density housing project to a vote. (You can get the details on wickenburg-az.com‘s Opinion pages.)

The mayor punctuated the session with inappropriate comments addressed at his opponents. At one point, he made a comment to Ray Johns, the man who had submitted the petition, about the fact that he hadn’t been to a council meeting in three years (this is unconfirmed) but yet he submitted a petition. The comment was rudely delivered, obviously meant to belittle the man or at least insult him. Understand that Mr. Johns lived in Wickenburg for over 40 years when his house washed away during the February 2005 floods. He is now living in a trailer someone loaned him. As an elderly man and long-time resident, he deserves our respect; as a flood victim who lost everything he owned, he deserves our sympathy. It appears that the mayor isn’t compelled to respect or sympathize with anyone.

Each speaker was only given three minutes to talk. When one of the speakers, who is nearly deaf, asked the Town’s lawyer a question, she responded so quietly that most of the room didn’t hear her. When he asked her to repeat herself, it used up nearly a minute of his time. The buzzer rang and the mayor told the speaker to get off the podium. “Time’s up.” I guess the mayor has a new way to keep citizens from talking too long — just respond in a whisper or slowly so it eats up all the speaker’s time.

Another man told the assembled group that he had in his possession a copy of a letter from the developer’s lawyers addressed to the town telling the town exactly how to handle the petition that was subsequently rejected. The man made it clear what he thought about a developer’s lawyers directing the mayor and council.

I made a 2-minute speech about the First Amendment where I pointed out that Mr. Johns’ First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances was violated by the unfair rejection of his petition. He had submitted it in good faith, I argued, using a format he knew to be successful in the past. The town should accept it. I think my big words were too big for the Mayor and council members. They obviously didn’t understand what I was saying. The audience did, though. I got a nice round of applause. But I may as well have been talking to a brick for all the impact it made on the town’s representatives.

At the end of the public session, the Mayor began his defense. During the course of his ramblings, he let it slip that he rejected the petition to avoid a lawsuit by the developer. He also tried to cloud the issue by telling us that he’d looked up the word cluster in the dictionary. Yeah? So what? Just another attempt to lead us off the main issue. It didn’t work.

The councilmen spoke, too. Most rubber-stamped what the mayor said. Dave Lane let slip in his mumbling, stumbling response that the development had been approved so the town could get more revenue from property taxes on all those new homes — a disclosure that got a murmer of disapproval from the audience. (Give Lane enough speaking time and he’ll talk his way into a noose.) Only John Cook was reasonable, siding with what is so obviously right. It’s nice to see that the mayor’s puppet strings can sometimes shake loose from council members.

Personally, I can’t believe the people of the town of Wickenburg would vote in a man like our current mayor. His attitude and complete lack of respect for anyone — including his constituents — makes him arrogant. Yet when he talks to you one-on-one, you can see that there’s nothing inside that head of his — nothing except plans to make himself look bigger and more important than he really is. He’s building an empire in Wickenburg, annexing land and approving zoning changes for high density housing without the infrastructure to support the new homes or the jobs for new residents within town limits. And the whole time, rumors are flying around town about payoffs and ulterior motives.

It’s a dark time here in Wickenburg; I can’t wait to see the light here in town again.