The Arid-Zone: dry, dusty, deserted

Arizona should be thinking about refurbishing Tombstone and the Boothill Graveyard now that the deep revulsion caused by its nasty anti-immigrant law has made the state so unpopular that the tumbleweed threatens to outnumber the tourists. Arizona’s distinguished political leaders, now scrambling to recover from the gaping, self-inflicted wound to their lily-white tootsies after they imprudently listened to the siren calls of the tea-baggers and Lou Dobbs-ites, are now realizing that in America it’s all right to be a racist, but you can’t sound like one.

New York cops can shoot down young black guys and generally get away with it, but they can’t call them the terrible ‘N’ word that we are forbidden to commit to print. Arizona’s goofball solons didn’t realize that they could have Sheriff Arpaio round up Mexicans by the caravan-loads, but they made a big mistake by passing a law saying they were going to do it.

Now the floundering governor, Jan Brewer, has announced it’s time to ‘rebrand’ the state to stop people from canceling their conventions and further wrecking Arizona’s road-kill economy. A bit late there, Jan! She and her Republican buds might have thought of the impact on convention business before launching their anti-brown-guy crusade, but I guess it’s more fun to be ideologically rigorous.

Brewer was hilariously clueless about why the new stop-and-frisk law was making people want to avoid her slab of desert. Attempting to deflect what she called ‘mistruths’ about the new law, Brewer insisted that people won’t ‘be asked for ID unless you first commit a crime’.

Hello, Madame Governor? The law you just signed says that people can and in fact must be picked up on ‘reasonable suspicion’ of being in the U.S. without a visa, otherwise known as illegal lawn-cutting or an excessive tan. Having to carry your ID around or get hauled off by cops feels like apartheid South Africa or a banana republic police state, i.e., exactly what pissed everybody off in the first place.

Meanwhile, conferences continue to be canceled, and the city of Los Angeles now refuses to do business with the state. Other groups that had been planning for future events in Arizona aren’t even answering tourist operators’ phone calls, reported the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic.

‘This is impacting Arizona’s face to the nation’, moaned Brewer, rumored not to hold a doctorate in English composition.

Inevitably, some people complain about injecting ‘politics’ into things like sporting events and high school seniors’ graduation debaucheries. That never seems to come up when Yankees owner George Steinbrenner tries to make everyone stand up and sing ‘God Bless America’ in honor of ‘the troops fighting for freedom in Iraq’ during the 7th-inning stretch—but I digress.

The Arizona debacle is an encouraging sign that wackos in power stand a good chance of promptly turning themselves into a laughingstock. Meanwhile, they’ve got their work ahead of them as they try to make the late-night jokesters stop the punishment.