Arizona's First Political Blog

E-mail Anonymous Mike at zonitics4-at-yahoo.com

By Anonymous Mike, pseudonymously.

 
The Unbearable Lightness of Jon Talton

Back when he was a columnist for the Arizona Republic, Jon Talton provided local readers with a relentless critique of the Valley of the Sun which stated that...

1) The community and region we live is going down hill because...

2) We all wanted to live in houses with yards (sprawl)

3) Our local officials were bunch of narrow-minded right-wing kleptocrats in bed with the "real estate industrial complex" that provides the sprawl that allows us to have affordable houses with yards.

4) That life would be better if the vast majority gave up the idea of having houses with lawns (sprawl), spend large sums of public monies to provide inducements for the creative class and leading technical industries and educational establishments to move to downtown Phoenix, and if we just recreated a leadership elite under the aegis of something like the old Phoenix 40.

5) That we were too stupid to listen to him because for strange reason we liked having low taxes and houses with yards.

Btw.... he was the business columnist for the paper. For some strange reason (again), after years of recycling the same themes over and over, the paper let him go. He sold the house he owned for 6 years, with a lawn located by downtown Phoenix, for $895,000 which is more than twice what he paid.

I thought he would take his anti-Sun Belt schtick to some new hick burg like Tampa-St.Pete or Albuquerque or maybe become a roadie in the Richard Florida traveling Church of the Creative Class. I thought this was his niche in life, to live as a new urbanism missionary of old out in the wilderness of Sun Belt sprawl.

I was wrong, instead he took all that housing equity and moved to Seattle. He now has his own blog where he writes:

Now I'm not a 22-year-old HTML kid and have little interest in writing about Britney's panties. So no newspapers are calling.

Strange Robert Robb doesn't write about Ms. Spears and her delicates and yet he is still employed by your old newspaper. However I digress; the point is that no one wants to put an economically-illiterate business columnist on their payroll.

So he's stuck... he fancies himself as a blogger who writes "commentary and analysis too dangerous for the corporate media" but in reality blogs the same old stuff he used to write for pay at the Republic. Even his occasional piece for the local Seattle paper smacks of recycling.

Part of me misses him. He not only provided constant fodder for this blog, but he personified the folly of much what passes for political leadership and economical development in this state.

Many thanks to El Gringo for the link to his blog. I'll sleep better at night knowing that Jon Talton is back on the air.
posted by Anonymous Mike at 7:23 PM