Thursday, November 3, 7 pm: Join us at the Well Red Coyote in West Sedona to celebrate the publication of THE PINK NECTAR CAFÉ by Sedona’s own Jim Bishop. In his latest book, THE PINK NECTAR CAFE, Bishop shows us that facts can be more potent than fiction! For the past 25 years he’s been collecting stories in the Southwest—some about bygone days, others from only yesterday, but all animated by strange events and unforgettable characters. “A collage,” said one professor of the book, “woven from mystery and a pure sense of place.”

Discover the world of THE PINK NECTAR CAFE. Join Bishop as he takes the reader on a magical mystery tour of his cherished Southwest. Enjoy the whimsy and bravery of real people’s lives and places and rivers lovingly portrayed.

Bishop’s career began with Newsweek magazine in New York City in 1958 where he covered Wall Street. Later he became the magazine’s West Coast correspondent with a focus on films, aerospace and politics. In 1964, he co-authored a special project on the Apollo Project and another special issue on the SST. From 1966 to 1977, he was Newsweek’s Deputy Bureau Chief in the nation’s capital. He covered Watergate, and wrote the first national cover stories on the looming energy and environmental dilemmas.

During his career he has profiled such diverse personages as Robert Kennedy and Howard Hughes, Hedy Lamar, Robert McNamara, Walt Disney and Ralph Nader, Stewart Udall and Robert Shields.

His books include THE CONSUMER REVOLUTION — LET THE SELLER BEWARE, CREATING ABUNDANCE: A DIFFERENT ENERGY and the first biography about Cactus Ed Abbey, entitled EPITAPH FOR A DESERT ANARCHIST. He also contributed to several books on the history of the Verde Valley.

Based in Sedona since 1986, Bishop has shared the William Allen White Award from the University of Kansas for the best article in any city or regional magazine. The topic was the Glen Canyon dam. The Arizona Press Club presented a similar award to him.

He continues to believe in impossible things—including the Pink Nectar Café, deliciously ensconced on the outskirts of Sedona where only the truth is told.

Moving right along, Nixon signed a basket of environmental laws telling audiences that as far as protecting our skies, rivers, oceans, wildlife and ourselves from toxic pollutants it “was now or never.” Imagine his shock to learn that many of those laws leaders in his own party are blasting gaping holes in. At the same time, Nixon also advocated tighter regulation of insurers requiring states to create annual audits and hunt down shenanigans,

What happened? Day after day, the mainstream press, some with circulations larger than the penny dreadful you have in your hands, all aquiver from reading the truth for once, blame rightwing wing nuts and men, both large and small, that go bump in the night. Gentle reader, that’s not the half of it, not even a slice of it.

The truth is a simple as a snowdrop: The Soviets became Russians again so that they’ve become friends not enemies in many respects, though not all. American leaders have lost the threat of World War Three without the USSR to rally voters around and pump up defense budgets and reduce taxes to corporations. Simply stated, a new enemy was needed to unify the people.

True enough, Nixon had an enemy’s list when he was president. But it was pretty short and busy with the names of harmless, underpaid reporters. These days, however, longer enemy lists are being assembled by governors, legislators and D.C,-based inheritors of Nixon’s programs regarding aiding the poor, punishing lawbreaking businessmen, and cleaning-up dirty air. They include the following dangerous Americans:

• teachers
• government employees
• medical professionals
• small-business owners
• Public safety officers.
• Unemployed workers
• women

All are “parasitic bloodsuckers,” in the words of one elected official in a certain state in southwest where I.Q.s are dropping faster than winter temperatures in Montana.

No one can say for certain, but were he alive today, Nixon might asked a aide why members of his own party be driving voters to the other party with such a vengeance like lemmings racing toward a cliff.

And were he around today, how would he regard the Internet? Well on the bright side, there’d be no need to ask his secretary to erase any tapes. Also, there’d be no need for enemy lists given that few magazines have real reporters anymore. Some are driving jeeps now; others are acting in porno films for seniors. Anyway, everything is on Facebook, You tube and other new conveniences, he’d quickly discover.

Chances are he’d order up an ice cold gin martini and order computers removed from the White House—pronto. Leading the report on his desk would be news that in the past five years, Americans have doubled their hours online, exceeding TV. By the age of 21, the average young American will have spent three times as many hours playing video games as reading. Wait, there’s more according my guru, Elias Abouja0ude: Americans spend 200 million hours a week playing the World of Warcraft. Our worst instincts are being unleashed says my guru. “It connects you with whatever you want, gambling, sex with strangers, overspending, impulse buying. In short, everything we know about, what we thought was good is bad,” Nixon would be told by senior staff aides.

“Call in the plumbers,” he might yell.

“Too big a job even for them,” he’d told.

“OK, then a double martini on the double. Sorry some of our past didn’t make it into the future. Hold the twist.”

A pessimist burns his bridges before he gets to them.
–Mayor Jim (RIP)

Fresh from gnashing hangovers brought about by learning of the greatest robbery since the James boys robbed the Kansas City Fair in 1872 many citizens no longer regard Wall Street big shots, or their Federal counterparts, as the financial equivalent of the Red Cross.

Sipping on their cheaper and cheaper drugstore wine one day after another they wonder where the sheriffs were, even the law in some form, even the FBI or Marshall Dillon. Why didn’t someone with a brain, if not a heart, call a halt to the plundering of our hard-earned dough? Did investment bankers really spend our money on golden waste paper baskets and shady ladies of the night?

Somewhat more soothingly, let me submit some examples of what didn’t happen in our bioregion as we shift gears to think and act locally if our skin is to be saved, if our goose is not to be cooked.

The Salt River Project has moved into court to stop the City of Prescott from tapping into the Verde Rivers life-giving aquifers in Chino Valley. Quipped Yavapai Supervisor Chip Davis, One thing we seem to be good at in Arizona is killing rivers. But not this time, a special Excentric underground task force closed allied with the Monkey Wrench Gang, now holed up in Bumble Bee is at work round-the-clock.

Two dozen oil and gas leases adjacent to Arches National Park hard by legendary Canyonlands National Park will not happen and Ed Abbeys ghost can rest in peace.

Despite assaults on existing law by politicians waving law and order flags the air around Grand Canyon will not become more radioactive since all efforts to strip mine uranium have been halted.

Unable to deal with good news, some academics are comparing the U.S. to the fourth century A.D. when it was widely believed that their imperial adventure was over. These are the Peak-oilers, The Doomers, and they are growing in number.

Day after day they clamor in elitist journals made of un-recycled paper that the future isn’t what it used be, that America is the buffalo being brought to her knees by hard-hearted men shuffling worthless paper with no thought to tomorrow as they hand one another bulging bonuses made possible by liberal handouts from conservative bureaucrats.

But there is another world beginning, one that can be experienced in small groups gathering all around Sedona, Cottonwood and beyond. People in these groups believe that current economic troubles will not solved by a return to the economic models of yesteryear, such as Big Business riding to the rescue with large manufacturing plants making products people possess in large numbers already.

Time was during WW 11 that American grew 40 % of their food in Victory Gardens. Time was the restaurants served food grown locally. When he smells flowers the pessimist looks around for the funeral. Not so those who believe that optimism is a mans passport to a better tomorrow and Victory gardens might return.

Gardens for Humanity topsider Diane Dearmore believes that baby steps are leading us to an agricultural renaissance. After all, the land fed people here ever since 600 A.D. until agriculture fell out of favor some 50 years ago. They sustained themselves, and so can we.

In small groups people are asking the question: How long can Sedona continue to import its food from 1500 miles away and sometimes beyond? And the answer is that such a situation is unsustainable just as is petroleum where with three percent of the population the U.S. accounts for 32% of daily consumption.

Could it be true that our current economic troubles could turn out to be a gift from the higher powers? Perhaps thousands studying to become hedge fund managers may avoid prison time and become supervisors of cornfields in the Verde Valley? Not a bad idea says author Wendell Berry. If we could think locally, we would take better care of things than we do now.

Indeed and then maybe we won’t have to go to war for food, energy and water after all and the Wrenwood will reopen with Keeber in charge of the adult beverages. 

Too Much Publicity, Poor Planning and Creepy People threaten Fossil Springs—–How publicity, sleeping politicians and poor planning is destroying a Wilderness

The Law of Unintended Consequences invoked
As Arizona Congressional delegation sleeps
By James Bishop Jr.

If we have no hope there is no hope.
–anon

Pausing by the blue-green waters of Fossil Creek in the Fossil Springs Wilderness to examine a trashed campground Heather Provencio, Sedona District Ranger exclaimed, It hurts my heart to see this wilderness gem being so hammered. It makes me so very sad to see what people do, but there is hope.

Despite this newspapers powerful editorial and reportage coverage of A Jewel Befouled (10/11/07), its become abundantly clear to this observer that more than hope will be required if total anarchy is to be prevented, and that will only transpire when a hard-hitting management and enforcement regime is established; and that will only materialize in the form of a Wild and Scenic designation, the river protection law due to celebrate its 40th birthday in 2008; that will provide funding and enforcement power, resources that are lacking in the US Forest Service budgets.

But don’t bet on that happening soon.

Camp Verde Mayor Tony Gioia recently took some soundings in both the House, Senate and US Department of Agriculture about a series of concerns regarding various river and stream issues including the threatened Verde River and the equally endangered Fossil Springs Wilderness. Everywhere he went he was advised not to bet the ranch on action. First he was told that Rep. Renzi, sponsor of a bill to create special resignation for Fossil Springs was radioactive and his bill is as dead as desire in the dead.

Next he ran smack into a catch-22 situation: High officials in the US Department of Agriculture informed him that a designation for Wild and Scenic for the upper Verde River was not achievable until the Fossil Creek designation was completed the outlook for which is dim.

Before he returned home, he crossed party lines and visited Senator McCain’s staff and also the staff of the Subcommittee of Energy and Natural Resource staff for Senator Bingaman. He found them helpful but also overloaded with other issues, a hearing is likely but chances for the Senate to move first are uncertain at best.

So much for Arizona’s congressional delegation – either asleep at the wheel or running for higher office, either ignorant of or oblivious to the fact that wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture.

An antidote for despair, Cactus Ed Abbey wrote years ago, is wilderness: We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all; but we cannot have freedom without wilderness. Ah wilderness. America is blessed with 702 wilderness areas totaling more than 100 million acres that are defined by the language in the 1964 Act as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man From wilderness insisted Henry Thoreau come the barks and tonics which brace mankind.

Few wilderness areas are more stunning, magical or legendary than the Fossil Springs Wilderness in the Coconino and Tonto National Forests located southeast of Sedona. Sacred to the Apache, the blue-green 14-mile-long stream seems to appear out of nowhere, gushing 20,000 gallons a minute out of a series springs out of the bottom of a 1,600 foot deep canyon in probably the most varied riparian area in all of Arizona. Over thirty species of trees and shrubs and at least one hundred species of birds have been observed in this mysterious, wondrous vicinity where people lived for many years before the European incursion in the 16th century.

What began as a dream in the late 1990s, that APS would cease hydroelectric power operations so that historic natural flows would be restored and scientists would be given the research opportunity of a lifetime, has miscarried. Sometimes you think you are doing something good, observes John Parson, longtime Verde Valley conservationist. But then the chickens come home to roost and you realize that youve invoked the law of intended consequences. APS kept the place in order, they were the de facto sheriff in town. Today its rampant lawlessness and the most crass behavior is the norm. Its going to get worse- one hell of lot worse, and may never get better or even return to a remote resemblance of what it once was. All we’re getting is lip service now.

Rangers tell me that piles of human waste and trash are awful but Meth and Marijuana are more dangerous, dangerous enough, one ranger told me, but they are not usually accompanied by bad guys who want to kill you.

It is said that people never see the handwriting on the wall until their backs are up against it. For years warnings filled the air that unless a management and enforcement plan were created before Fossil Creek was allowed to run free, roads should be closed to prevent human invasion. Friends of the Forest volunteer Justine Kusner remembers the reply by telephone to one of her letters of concern and warning, Right On. And that was the last she heard.

Bishop was Newsweeks Environmental Correspondent from 1968-77, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy under Secretary James Schlesinger

Was this the best way to show man’s love and respect for sacred waters, to please an Arizona woman, she who guards your oasis civilization? No answers came but even n more havoc lay ahead for me — Arizona woman.

Like mindless drunks, growth maniacs those who cannibalize nature, they were not done — they sawed my limbs, the yellow ponderosas, three shifts day and night, crippling me with chain-logging, clear cuts and dynamite all for TV cabinets? What a way to treat a woman. Hawks and condors say I should sue for rape and pillage, and circling above me they wonder what I shall do — I wonder too. Who is able to weep for anything, should weep for me — Arizona woman.

Then came a new brand of love power plants that filled the skies with yellow poison, clogging my lungs, defacing ancient places, I am a woman in hell. So too is my sister the Green now roiling with nuclear wastes near Moab.

Why why why — when, when when will I be set free, too many feelings, so many questions.

I am the cut body of a coyote, the cougar strung up on its hind legs off a trail, too close to gated communities they must have come, the condor shot from the sky by a dumber than whale shit rancher I am the native plants bulldozed for swimming pools and timeshares, I am a desert bighorn sheep infected by disease that made me go blind. I am the antelope run down in Prescott by an 18-wheeler. Is this any to love me, your Arizona woman?

Must I go dry before the warnings of the ancient ones who emerged from my waters come true the frog does not poison the world and drain the pond in which it lives.

If you won’t Love me, then at least leave me alone.

Thank you.

Cottonwood: During the annual Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival here near the Verde River here a few years ago, a woman from Seattle became so excited about the unusual bird sightings at Dead Horse Ranch State Park that she asked a park ranger to whom she should write a check? To the Cottonwood Chamber of Commerce, she was advised.

Impossible, the woman with the checkbook fussed. Whats a Chamber of Commerce sponsoring anything to do with birding?

You should have seen the look on her face, State Park Ranger Hart recalls. I told her that birding brings business to the area, and that creates jobs and protects habitat. Visitors from everywhere have taken to call this place Birdy Valley. Still looking dubious, the lady nonetheless wrote a generous check.

Another Earth Day is looming and in many places and in many articles and celebrations writers and speakers will invoke the words of one of the fathers of the conservation movement, forester Aldo Leopold. Before he died fighting a fire in 1948, he wrote The Sand County Almanac in which he evokes the American dream of perpetual harmony among self, society and non-human surroundings. A rousing, overarching vision, but as renowned author Damon Runyon once quipped, I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is 6-5 against.

Its undeniably true that 37 years after the first Earth Day, in many places the forces dedicated to protecting nature remain at loggerheads with developers and corporations. But not here in Cottonwood, Arizona a town that literally has gone to the birds. In just a few years its become a world-renown destination for birds and birders to flock together in amazing numbers, marvel at the hawks, fly catchers, falconsand spend money. Pursuing their passion for birding, people spend some $800 million a year in Arizona, reports Sam Campana, Executive Director of Audubon Arizona, and thats a larger economic impact than golf. And that could be just the beginning.

For the festival this year from April 26 to April 29, a variety of businesses, State agencies and non-profit organizations have stepped up with support ranging from funds to manpower and vehicles. The business community gets it that wildlife, the Verde River and birding are essential to our economy, observes Ranger Hart, one of the festivals founders seven years ago along with the Chamber of Commerce. It not like OK, Earth Day is coming and wed better protect the environment then everyone goes back to business as usual. It is widely understood here that if we were to lose the very things people come to see, like some of the best birding habitat in the U.S., they wont come back anymore.

Former Cottonwood Chamber President Pete Sesow concurs. Im no environmentalist but I sit on both sides, and I see both sides, and as a conservative I fought for the Verde River as an economic resource for years, battling the sand and gravel miners, and more. You can say that without the support of the Chamber, well the Verde might still be the mess it once was not many years ago.

No doubt about it, the Verde Valleys reputation as one of the greatest prime birding areas anywhere is rock-solidand spreading. Up to 175 different species were recorded last year–not including a Pacific Loon and a Pelican blown in by the powerful spring winds. Compared to the dig and drain we must attitude of the old days, theres been a shift in consciousness. More people are shooting cameras rather than guns around here, and industry isnt interested any longer in grabbing everything from the earth and nature states Margie Beach, current Cottonwood Chamber president who is also local business executive. Our job is to give visitors a positive experience. They spend money wildlife watching and get excited that rare species of fish exist in the river that are not to be found anywhere else. As for ecotourism, conservation of our beautiful streams and paths of wildlife helps business. Times are changing in relations between business and conservation interests. We have to get along.

Walking by the river one day recently with a friend, Yavapai County Supervisor Chip Davis mused, If more people can just understand that preserving whats important and valuable about nature can be an economic engine. What it will take is the dissolution of the groups who insist that resource conservation is the enemy of business and economic growth and visa versa.

Cottonwood, at least, has gotten message that having discovered that humans can actually change the way nature operates, they also have the power to restore what was once nearly ruinedthe habitat along the river that attracts birds and birders from all over the world, where nature presents herself says teacher and naturalist Dena Greenwood always on her terms, not on ours.

By James Bishop Jr, an author based in Sedona

Inside the rickety, clanking airport van rivulets of sweat trickled down the drivers face, sometimes pausing to rest on his bulbous red nose which was a dead ringer for a certain Mr. W.C. Fields snozzola. Every once in a while he’d mumble a few words, bright stuff like Arizona is where hell spends the summer. The only other passenger was a paunchy lady not past 40 by much who was wrapped in a heavy woolen purple sweater. She was whiling away the seemingly endless trip to the Verde Valley from Sky Harbor by toying with a fuzzy, red hat and playing the tarty flirt with the driver. I tried to glance away and bury myself in a copy of John Barrymore’s essay, Fifteen Steps to a More Thunderous Orgasm, when she blurted out in a high-pitched preppy voice, Excuse me sir, but can you tell me where to find the Pink Nectar Café?

Sometimes it makes no sense to get out of bed in the morning. Here I was in Zane Grey country, in the land the Spanish called the Northern Mystery. It was a rainless August day and sun was beating down on our timeless vehicle which had no AC so it felt like the Devil’s kitchen on wheels and the air outside and inside was 99 degrees and climbing the driver kept informing us.

The Pink Nectar Café? No such place was listed in the AAA guide. Innocent as a cloistered nun, nonetheless I knew what I might be in for in the land the Spanish also called Terra Incognita. In my wanderings Id read some Stegner, D.H. Lawrence, Mary Austin and Cactus Ed Abbey. Clearly, no other region in America abounds with as many myths and superstitions except perhaps the Yukon where strange things are done in the midnight sun, indeed.

But the Pink Nectar Café? If it was real, what did it have to do with mountain men, Indian medicine men, the Old West, the New West, and gold-hungry developers in four piece black suits, not forgetting cattle, cotton or copper?

My mental meanderings were interrupted by the lady in the sweater.

Could I help her?

What did I know about that café?

Instead, I turned the conversational tables on her and asked who she was. To this day, I recall her very words: I am miserably married to an oil tycoon in Texas and I have been wandering here and there in search of who I am. It was in North Hollywood that I found the key.

The key to what I interrupted. My latest psychic spoke of a place in the rocks and rills around Sedona where there is a combination saloon, Bed and Breakfast, UFO landing site and New Age meditation compound. From behind the bar made of turquoise, a lady by the name of Aurora serves up a special, sweet-tasting drink, nectar of some sort.

Hmmmmmmm! Interesting details, could there be such a place? I pressed on for more details. She then proclaimed that when one quaffs even a drop of the nectar which is pink in color, ones sexual drive is restored, ones wrinkles disappear, ones savings account swells, ones brain sweeps away all negative thoughts and feelings.

She went on to talk about the different levels of consciousness that one may discover if one spends a few days around the café’s underground, warm flowing salty lagoon at least eight she was told in North Hollywood.

Now I was paying attention. Pressing on for more detail, I asked her what people did there for fun besides rediscovering their sexual prowess. Without batting an eye she said that Louis Armstrong plays there in the main ballroom every other Saturday and the lecture series features Deep Throat and Rumi.

Well that was that. I knew now that she had one oar in the water. Rumi has been dead for 900 years and as for Louis, well he is now playing with the angels. Our conversation ended when the battered bus clunked to a stop in front of the Wrenwood Café. We said goodbye and I gave her the number of the hotel where I was staying in case she ever found her café.

At that point a funny-looking plump little man with white beard walked up and asked whether I needed any help and he offered to purchase a beverage for me inside the smoky saloon. The beverage of choice was a Gila monster, part tequila and part grape-fruit juice, nectar of the Gods he said. After draining our goblets, the funny little man with a dirty white beard who hadn’t bathed in a while asked me where I was staying. I said I didn’t know yet and asked him if he had any ideas.

Sure young man, The Pink Nectar Café has rooms and the music to be played tonight is tops, Billy Holiday will be singing. Come on along, Ill drive you out there. Its just beyond the back of beyond. And don’t worry about any bills, I know the owner you see. 

Around the time of the first oil shock in 1973, columnist Art Buchwald penned a satirical column about what life without cheap oil would be like in the 1990s. One day, a father and son go out for their first drive in weeks because fuel costs $8.50 a gallon. “I feel like a steak,” says the father to his son. And the boy asks, “Dad, what’s a steak?”

Such a scene is leaping from the pages of satire now that the phrase Peak Oil has entered the lexicon. In oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens’ words, that means that oil supply was for years greater than demand but now, “Demand is equivalent to supply, and you can’t get any higher supply than you’re getting right now. Right now means that the world’s oil producers are pumping 80 million barrels a day and demand has begun to exceed that.”

To many Americans, the approaching petroleum calamity remains invisible, but not to my pal John P. Like so many others, he rolled into Arizona from the Midwest a few decades ago bent on fleeing an assortment of ecological and environmental abuses in favor of adventure, clean air, cheap energy and abundant water.

“You might say that I was an environmental refugee,” the steely-eyed, onetime congressional candidate and former big-time river guide said as he sipped some simple black coffee on the outskirts of Sedona not far from his hideaway in Rim Rock.

“I always figured that I’d stay here until the managed-care guys came to take me away.”

But my pal has changed his mind. “See that price?” he said, pointing to a gas station sign advertising fuel for $2.50 a gallon. “There have been warnings galore, but we’ve to fix the energy levees, so to speak. That’s the last time you’ll see it that low; denial about our oil addiction trumps any 12-step program. We are out of here because here in the red rocks and in so many other places, inconvenient facts about energy and water are taboo; oil is headed for $100-a-barrel oil, just the least shock will do it: a tanker blown in the Persian Gulf, a refinery sabotaged.”

Something better?

So if there is no here for one of grand characters left in red rock rim country anymore, is there really a better there out there somewhere?

John P. is heading for Idaho with his partner, Sultry Susuun, for some low-cost Snake River electricity and a more sustainable lifestyle, more walking, less driving. Says he: “Idaho is the place to be when the Night of the Long Knives comes. Guess you could call us energy refugees.”

When the talking heads on TV prattle on about the meaning of Peak Oil, that is exactly what that term means: The cheap oil party is over, no more big fields are out there, economists of all stripes are beginning to agree. And that means $100-a-barrel oil, unemployment and the collapse of auto tourism.

Observes John P., it’s not just the demise of auto tourism; it’s the demise of suburbia in all its forms. The Verde Valley is, in effect, one large suburb, and Sedona, in particular is a classic rural suburb. All the Verde Valley’s so-called cities and towns are simply classic paradigms of modern suburbia.

When oil is above $100 a barrel, how will all these suburbanites get to and from their jobs, food supplies, medical needs, and – yee-gads – soccer games!

Some conservative oil men even dare to say that world production may have already peaked. Their rationale: Oil production in many once oil-rich nations is declining by 5 percent a year, double the rate a year ago. To say these worries are not widely shared by our elected officials is putting it mildly.

John has been paying attention to Pickens, who says that the “U.S. uses between 20 to 25 percent of all the oil a day in the world, and we have less than 5 percent of the world’s population. The big fields have been found. Probably the best thing to do is raise the price to kill the demand.”

Our petroleum future

And there is another reason to raise the price, too. To most Americans the facts about our petroleum future remain either invisible or plain boring. However, perhaps the attack on the enormous Abqaiq refinery facility that processes about 68 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil for export, 5 million barrels a day, should be regarded as a wake-up call.

The reason that it should is that for all the babble about conservation, U.S. vehicles drink up 9 million barrels a day mostly because when taking the cost of living into account, U.S. gasoline prices are cheaper than their 1981 levels. Any efforts by the past administrations from Nixon to Carter to raise prices through higher taxes have landed proponents on their career’s third rail.

To be fair, our president, whose energy policy ideas until recently offered yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems, momentarily stopped denying the nation’s plight and shared a fact first discovered by Richard Nixon 33 years ago: America is addicted to oil. Well said, even though his speech writer forgot to include the fact our principle source of oil imports is Canada, with whom relations are chilly.

What he didn’t say was anything about higher fuel efficiency, anything about a crash program to halt our nation’s being swamped by oil imports from friendly and unfriendly nations – 60 percent of our daily demand. What he didn’t say was how the nation must leave the Age of Petroleum behind because of a warming Mother Earth.

James Bishop Jr. lives in Sedona. He is an author and former energy editor for Newsweek.

You can do anything you want as long as you don’t call it what it is.
— John Bernardy R.I.P.

It is safe to say that there have been eras when the news has been better. Hour after hour, the Big Media bombard us innocents with salvos of disheartening developments. Sometimes it seems as if they sound and read all the same, especially those items about rumors that the globe is allegedly warming.

Consider this one because its so typical of frantic left-wing media ranting. You see the lefties expect us to believe that thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq says the Arctic is changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals that depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.

Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.

How could that be? It’s the damn press again, charged an elderly gentleman sipping some wine at Troia’s, normally not a hotbed of civic action or intellectual disputatiousness. There’s no science to support any of that crap they print day after expletive deleted day.

Not faraway at Judi’s, that stronghold of culinary delight where locals flock to hide from endless waves of goat-ropers, (and various office seekers that go bump in the night) an even more elderly chap pontificated while ordering still another Gila Monster (recipe is secret): The Press, rhymes with mess, power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages, pinkos all, except for Cronkite. Why don’t they write the good news about Iraq?

Moving along, next came another morning when the quiet was interrupted by a newspaper flopping like a fish on my front porch; perhaps some good news hoped this wandering idealist.

No chance.

Now we are expected to believe that Arizona’s nuclear plant is leaking tritium (don’t try it, even over ice) and that 60 % of the nations biggest factories and sewage plants have violated the Clean Water Act by spewing pollution into the nation’s rivers, lakes and bays.

When Congress passed the landmark Clean Water Act in 1972, it set the goal of making all U.S. waterways safe for fishing and swimming by 1983.Today, 39 percent of rivers, 46 percent of lakes, and 51 percent of estuaries have not met that goal.

When asked for a comment, an unindicted corporate topsider in D.C. snarled, You got nattering nabobs of negativism out there in Lu-Lu, Woo Woo land, too? All they want to write about back here is the debt, the deficit. Come the Rapture, it will all go away and we’ll all be in surplus when HE returns.

And I don’t think he meant Alan Greenspan, either.

Until then, however, left-wing reporters in D.C. don’t know where to start when it comes to writing about the national debt now $8 trillion and climbing or the enormous demands of Social Security and healthcare which are projected to be in the range (gulp) of between $30 and $40 trillion.

So they tell us that we are spending $300 billion a year to import oil; they tell is that the skirmish in Iraq now costs $8 billion a week; they tell us that the Big Oil companies are not drilling for big new fields because there aren’t any.

Why doesn’t the media just shut up and let the rest of us watch reruns of the Honeymooners and get fat and stupid? More than a century ago, Mark Twain summarized the issue succinctly: There are laws to protect the free of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.

Maybe Oscar Wilde put it even better when he said journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

Imagine that and he’d never been to Sedona.